Parody Life Quotes

Poems On Time The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth. Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

You see, writers traveling to Southeast Asia visit indigenous communities. No writing quest will be complete without some cross-cultural comparisons. This exercise is a decisive moment in every author’s life. Equate it to a photographer meeting his first old man with a wrinkled face or the old lady with heavy earrings dangling from her earlobes.

The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance.

One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid.

The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of medieval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood.

I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv.

Is not parody the eternal lot of man?

If there is anything of which I am certain in life it is that I shall never exchange the liberty of my exile for the vile parody of home.

Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life. My theory is a sort of parody on the maxim of "Get money, my son, honestly if you can; but get money." My precept is, "Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but, at any rate, do something.

Life is Beautiful? Beyond all the vicissitudes that are presented to us on this short path within this wild planet, we can say that life is beautiful. No one can ever deny that experiencing the whirlwind of emotions inside this body is a marvel, we grow with these life experiences, we strengthen ourselves and stimulate our feelings every day, in this race where the goal is imminent death sometimes we are winners and many other times we lose and the darkness surprises us and our heart is disconnected from this reality halfway and connects us to the server of the matrix once more, debugging and updating our database, erasing all those experiences within this caracara of flesh and blood, waiting to return to earth again. "Life is beautiful gentlemen" is cruel and has unfair behavior about people who looked like a bundle of light and left this platform for no apparent reason, but its nature is not similar to our consciousness and feelings, she has a script for each of us because it was programmed that way, the architects of the game of life they know perfectly well that you must experiment with all the feelings, all the emotions and evolve to go to the next levels. You can't take a quantum leap and get through the game on your own. inventing a heaven and a hell in order to transcend, that comes from our fears of our imagination not knowing what life has in store for us after life is a dilemma "rather said" the best kept secret of those who control us day by day. We are born, we grow up, we are indoctrinated in the classrooms and in the jobs, we pay our taxes, we reproduce, we enjoy the material goods that it offers us the system the marketing of disinformation, Then we get old, get sick and die. I don't like this story! It looks like a parody of Noam Chomsky, Let's go back to the beautiful description of beautiful life, it sounds better! Let's find meaning in all the nonsense that life offers us, 'Cause one way or another we're doomed to imagine that everything will be fine until the end of matter. It is almost always like that. Sometimes life becomes a real nightmare. A heartbreaking horror that we find impossible to overcome. As we grow up, we learn to know the dark side of life. The terrors that lurk in the shadows, the dangers lurking around every corner. We realize that reality is much harsher and ruthless than we ever imagined. And in those moments, when life becomes a real hell, we can do nothing but cling to our own existence, summon all our might and fight with all our might so as not to be dragged into the abyss. But sometimes, even fighting with all our might is not enough. Sometimes fate is cruel and takes away everything we care about, leaving us with nothing but pain and hopelessness. And in that moment, when all seems lost, we realize the terrible truth: life is a death trap, a macabre game in which we are doomed to lose. And so, as we sink deeper and deeper into the abyss, while the shadows envelop us and terror paralyzes us, we remember the words that once seemed to us so hopeful: life is beautiful. A cruel and heartless lie, that leads us directly to the tragic end that death always awaits us.

They reflect the age in cynicism which cannot comprehend the death of possibilities, fatuous sophisticated indulgence in the parody of the miraculous, decadence whose last refuge is self-ridicule, a mannered helplessness. You saw them; you've known them all your life. You reflect your age differently. You reflect its broken heart.

The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how banal". To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows

There is little we can point to in our lives as deserving anything but God's wrath. Our best moments have been mostly grotesque parodies. Our best loves have been almost always blurred with selfishness and deceit. But there is something to which we can point. Not anything that we ever did or were, but something that was done for us by another. Not our own lives, but the life of one who died in our behalf and yet is still alive. This is our only glory and our only hope. And the sound that it makes is the sound of excitement and gladness and laughter that floats through the night air from a great banquet.

Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it. I think some of it is that there is so much pressure to be that person that you become it, maybe, to a certain point you can bear. It's impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.

Clark. Promise me you won’t spend the rest of your life stuck around this bloody parody of a place mat.” “Promise you? Why?” I tried to make my voice light. “Where are you going?” “I just…can’t bear the thought of you staying around here forever.” He swallowed. “You’re too bright. Too interesting.

The journey has been a parody of my life recently: rushing, waiting, wandering, feeling lost and losing sleep, wondering if I'm getting anywhere.

Open, the eyes of the dead are a travesty, a parody, make a fool of the deceased. Open, the eyes of the dead perform that most indecent subtraction, show the person without his life.

Love is private and primitive and a bit on the funky and frightening side. I think of the Luna card in the Tarot deck: some strange, huge crustacean, its armor glistening and its pinchers wiggling, clatters out of a pool while wild dogs howl at a bulging moon. Underneath the hearts and flowers, love is loony like that. Attempts to housebreak it, to refine it, to dress the crabs up like doves and make them sing soprano always result in thin blood. You end up with a parody.

And aye, beside her stalks her amarous knight! Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn, And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn, His hindward charms glean an unearthly white, Ah! thus thro' broken clouds at night's high Noon Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon!

He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed — and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life.

He saw the true face of the 20th century and chose to become a reflection, a parody of it. No one else saw the joke, that's why he was lonely. Heard a joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says "But, doctor...I am Pagliacci." Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.

Human. Happiness. Death. Everything becomes one pale memory in the flow of time. Spirit - always want the impossible and feel pain. Memory - an attempt to find entirety in the endless parody called human life. Freedom, policy, power, sex, violence, destruction, war. All extremes of ego are unconscious rebellion against death and loneliness. When you realize, the meaning is lost. I just want to believe: when I die, I will flying like a bird... or like dream...

It’s printed in the Earthman’s brainwave patterns,” continued Marvin, “but I don’t suppose you’ll be very interested in knowing that.” “You mean,” said Arthur, “you mean you can see into my mind?” “Yes,” said Marvin. Arthur stared in astonishment. “And…?” he said. “It amazes me how you can manage to live in anything that small.” “Ah,” said Arthur, “abuse.” “Yes,” confirmed Marvin. “Ah, ignore him,” said Zaphod, “he’s only making it up.” “Making it up?” said Marvin, swiveling his head in a parody of astonishment. “Why should I want to make anything up? Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feelings for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses ... for in him also Christ 'vere latitat' - the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

The question isn't who will be with me in life, rather how will I create the ending I am proud of?

Terrible times. I managed to come through But I never healed. My whole life has been Just one long cruel parody.

Making it up?" said Marvin, swivelling his head in a parody of astonishment, "Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

Without conscious thought I stepped behind the altar, raised my arms, and began the celebration of the Eucharist. There was no sense of parody or melodrama in this act, no symbolism or hidden intention; it was merely the automatic reaction of a priest who had said Mass almost daily for more than forty-six years of his life and who now faced the prospect of never again participating in the reassuring ritual of that celebration. It

Blood that was warm has now run cold bled every day have hearts become old Telling I am the story of my past and of the ghosts at which it is aghast Life as a child was a wonderful rhapsody Free from the fetters of rational prosody Naively making brute reality a parody Revelling in a soul filled with life's melody Poverty struck and child became destitute wailing and whimpering like a wretched prostitute Of pleasure and pain does a society constitute for Man is not for God to substitute Life is a parody of paradoxical Irony Fate rules not without a touch of Tyranny While the rich belch on their goblets of honey the wretched etch on the tablets of agony

Eternity is quite distinct from perpetuity, from mere endless continuance in time. Perpetuity is only the attainment of an endless series of moments, each lost as soon as it is attained. Eternity is the actual and timeless fruition of illimitable life.112 Time, even endless time, is only an image, almost a parody, of that plenitude; a hopeless attempt to compensate for the transitoriness of its ‘presents’ by infinitely multiplying them. That

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.

Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life. My theory is a sort of parody on the maxim of "Get money, my son, honestly if you can; but get money." My precept is, "Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but, at any rate, do something

In a satirical piece, she parodied the indignities of the job interview: “i am twenty-three [actually twenty-five], just out of college, authority on all books and a great writer, can type, cook, play a rather emotional game of chess, and have a republican father which is no fault of mine.

Russian bolshevism, replacing eastern Christendom by the grim religiosity of Marx, produced a caricature of the evangelical counsels with many a diabolical aspect. There is a good deal of “communism” in monasteries and convents, yet this is based upon a voluntary renunciation of perfect human rights. On account of our free will we can make supreme sacrifices which ennobles our very existence. Bolshevism on the other hand forces us brutally into a parody of monastic life amidst fellow monks and fellow nuns who hate their habit and sigh under the ferocious tyranny of their pseudo-abbot. This evil distortion of an otherwise Christian ideal is more satanic than wanton, a thoroughly pagan and diabolic opposition to Christian existence. This explains also the reason why the Vatican has found stronger words against “altruistic” bolshevism than against egoistic capitalism

Working Class Hero,” a ruthless Dylan parody that also works as a scathing smack-down of the luckless Scouser mystique, has the same bitter, stony-faced irony of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” or “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” It walks a frightening line, and too many people still hear it literally.

The things sane societies loved, it hated. The things sane societies hated, it loved; the things sane societies tried to do, it tried to avoid; the things sane societies tried to avoid, it did with relish. It pursued chaos and hated order, it worshipped ugliness and loathed beauty. If sane people wished to dress as neatly and well as they could, these people were persuaded to dress as hideously and grotesquely as possible; if sane people wanted music to be melodious, these people (whether we are speaking of their "popular" or their "serious" music) were cozened into believing they liked raucous and tuneless noise. If women had been feminine, if home life had been secure, if children had been innocent, if men had been gallant, if art had been beautiful, if love had been romantic, then all these things must be stood on their heads. Of course, life was not always like that. Of course things had often fallen short of their ideals, or even of their minimal norms; but at least most people tried to do things properly and at least the surrounding civilisation encouraged them to try. Never before had the deliberate aim been an inverted parody of all that should be. Everywhere, in every area of life, a single principle reigned: inversion; the worship of chaos; the creed of the madhouse.

Had Stella been named anything else, and/or had we lived in any other city besides New Orleans, my desperate call would have been just my desperate call. In that alternate universe the neighbors might have peeked from behind the curtains but they wouldn't have laughed or, worse, joined in. But you simply cannot shout the name Stella while standing under a window in New Orleans and hope for anything like an authentic or even mildly earnest moment. Literature had beaten me to this moment, had staked its flag here first, and there was nothing I could do outside in that soupy, rain-drenched alleyway that could rise above sad parody. Perhaps if she'd been named Beatrice, or Katarzyna-maybe then my life would have turned out differently. Maybe then my voice would have roused her to the window, maybe then I could have told her that I was sorry, that I could be a better man, that I couldn't promise I knew everything it meant but I loved her. Instead I stared up at that black window, shutmouthed and impotent, blinking and reblinking my eyes to flush out the rainwater. "Stella," I whispered. The French have an expression: "Without literature life is hell." Yeah, well. Life with it bears its own set of flames.

Of all such reformers Mr. Sentiment is the most powerful. It is incredible the number of evil practices he has put down: it is to be feared he will soon lack subjects and that when he has made the working classes comfortable, and got bitter beer put into proper-sized pint bottles, there will be nothing further for him left to do. Mr. Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps not the less so that his good poor people are so very good; his hard rich people so very hard; and the genuinely honest so very honest. Namby-pamby in these days is not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper quarters. Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though possessed of every virtue; but a pattern peasant or an immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle as one of Mrs. Ratcliffe's heroines, and still be listened to. Perhaps, however, Mr. Sentiment's great attraction is in his second-rate characters. If his heroes and heroines walk upon stilts as heroes and heroines, I fear, ever must, their attendant satellites are as natural as though one met them in the street: they walk and talk like men and women, and live among our friends a rattling, lively life — yes, live, and will live till the names of their callings shall be forgotten in their own, and Buckett and Mrs. Gamp will be the only words left to us to signify detective police officer or a monthly nurse.

Henry Fielding, a highly successful satiric dramatist until the introduction of censorship in 1737, began his novel-writing career with Shamela, a pastiche of Pamela, which humorously attacked the hypocritical morality which that novel displayed. Joseph Andrews (1742) was also intended as a kind of parody of Richardson; but Fielding found that his novels were taking on a moral life of their own, and he developed his own highly personal narrative style - humorous and ironic, with an omniscient narrative presence controlling the lives and destinies of his characters. Fielding focuses more on male characters and manners than Richardson. In doing so, he creates a new kind of hero in his novels. Joseph Andrews is chaste, while Tom Jones in Tom Jones (1749) is quite the opposite. Tom is the model of the young foundling enjoying his freedom (to travel, to have relationships with women, to enjoy sensual experience) until his true origins are discovered. When he matures, he assumes his social responsibilities and marries the woman he has 'always' loved, who has, of course, like a mediaeval crusader's beloved, been waiting faithfully for him. Both of these heroes are types, representatives of their sex. There is a picaresque journey from innocence to experience, from freedom to responsibility. It is a rewriting of male roles to suit the society of the time. The hero no longer makes a crusade to the Holy Land, but the crusade is a personal one, with chivalry learned on the way, and adventure replacing self-sacrifice and battle.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

Is God really real?”This is a perennial question for the philosophy of religion. Fortunately, the Pythons have answers to it. Perhaps too many answers. If we asked Arthur, King of the Britons, he would certainly testify that God exists, speaks English, and can’t stand people groveling, averting their eyes, ceaselessly apologizing, and deeming themselves unworthy. Yet when we begin inquiring into Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, “there is some doubt” about whether God is really real, or, to put it more philosophically, there is doubt over whether God’s existence can be established through a valid argument. There is a long philosophical tradition of constructing rational arguments for the existence and attributes of God, and an equally long skeptical tradition of deconstructing those same arguments. The Pythons have been exemplary participants in the latter tradition, either through parody, or by echoing in a funnier and more succinct way the skeptical arguments of such philosophical predecessors as Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776).

Though J. B. S. Haldane never took a degree in science (he studied classics at Oxford), he became a brilliant scientist in his own right, mostly in Cambridge. The biologist Peter Medawar, who spent his life around mental Olympians, called him “the cleverest man I ever knew.” Huxley likewise parodied the younger Haldane in his novel Antic Hay, but also used his ideas on genetic manipulation of humans as the basis for the plot of Brave New World. Among many other achievements, Haldane played a central role in marrying Darwinian principles of evolution to the genetic work of Gregor Mendel to produce what is known to geneticists as the Modern Synthesis.

There was, of course, one other option. Two years earlier Macworld magazine columnist (and former Apple software evangelist) Guy Kawasaki had published a parody press release joking that Apple was buying NeXT and making Jobs its CEO. In the spoof Mike Markkula asked Jobs, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling UNIX with a sugarcoating, or change the world?” Jobs responded, “Because I’m now a father, I needed a steadier source of income.” The release noted that “because of his experience at Next, he is expected to bring a newfound sense of humility back to Apple.” It also quoted Bill Gates as saying there would now be more innovations from Jobs that Microsoft could copy. Everything in the press release was meant as a joke, of course. But reality has an odd habit of catching up with satire.

The Age of Affluence represents a daring experiment on the part of elites in maintaining their dominance not by starving and bludgeoning their opposition into submission, but by seducing it into compliance. […] totalitarianism is perfected because its techniques become progressively more subliminal. The distinctive feature of the regime of experts lies in the fact that, while possessing ample power to coerce, it prefers to charm conformity from us […] The prime strategy of the technocracy is to level life down to a standard of so-called living that technical expertise can cope with–and then, on that false and exclusive basis, to claim an intimidating omnicompetence over us by its monopoly of the experts. The business of investing and flourishing treacherous parodies of freedom, joy, and fulfillment becomes an indispensable form of social control under the technocracy.

On Sukkot, we’re told to construct a visibly fragile, temporary structure—one that offers little protection from the wind, rain, heat, and cold, but affords a clear view of the heavens. It is a house that “gives us no shelter…a parody of a house,” Rabbi Alan Lew observes, “it exposes the idea of a house as an illusion.” Sukkot seems to be telling us that being written in the Book of Life is an all-inclusive kind of deal. It is not “The Book of the Pleasant Things in Life” or “The Book of the Easy Things in Life.” It is “The Book of Life”—all of it. If you try to keep out all the rain, you’ll be unable to see any stars. If you refuse to bear the heat, you’ll never feel the sun on your skin. Either you get the whole package—pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow—or you get a numb, closed-off, sleepwalking existence that might seem safe and manageable, but isn’t much of a life. That kind of existence offers only the illusion of control, and it’s no way to live.

And the summer came, the New York summer, which is like no summer anywhere. The heat and the noise began their destruction of nerves and sanity and private lives and love affairs. The air was full of baseball scores and bad news and people, made more hostile by the heat. It was not possible in this city, as it had been for Eric in Paris, to take a long and peaceful walk at any hour of the day or night, dropping in for a drink at a bistro or flopping oneself down at a sidewalk cafe- the half-dozen grim parodies of sidewalk cafes to be found in New York were not made for flopping. It was a city without an oasis, run entirely, insofar, at least as human perception could tell, for money; and its citizens seemed to have lost any sense of their right to renew themselves. Whoever, in New York, attempted to cling to this right, lived in New York in exile- in exile from the life around him; and this, paradoxically, had the effect of placing him in perpetual danger of being forever banished from any sense of himself.

As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o'clock and time to get  up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o'clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulators that Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to achieve perfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the rest of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and then moved in his mind to the house he'd grown up in, and in the end didn't know one day from another until he died." Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," but there's more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great-grandpa. He died of misdirection.

The hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the century of Galileo. Where then there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there now is darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul. Obviously, this work cannot be wrought by turning back, or away, from what has been accomplished by the modern revolution; for the problem is nothing if not that of rendering the modern world spiritually significant—or rather (phrasing the same principle the other way round) nothing if not that of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life. Indeed, these conditions themselves are what have rendered the ancient formulae ineffective, misleading, and even pernicious. The community today is the planet, not the bounded nation; hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to coordinate the in-group now can only break it into factions. The national idea, with the flag as totem, is today an aggrandizer of the nursery ego, not the annihilator of an infantile situation. Its parody rituals of the parade ground serve the ends of Holdfast, the tyrant dragon, not the God in whom self-interest is annihilate. And the numerous saints of this anticult—namely the patriots whose ubiquitous photographs, draped with flags, serve as official icons—are precisely the local threshold guardians (our demon Sticky-hair) whom it is the first problem of the hero to surpass.

Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.

This makes a mockery of real science, and its consequences are invariably ridiculous. Quite a few otherwise intelligent men and women take it as an established principle that we can know as true only what can be verified by empirical methods of experimentation and observation. This is, for one thing, a notoriously self-refuting claim, inasmuch as it cannot itself be demonstrated to be true by any application of empirical method. More to the point, though, it is transparent nonsense: most of the things we know to be true, often quite indubitably, do not fall within the realm of what can be tested by empirical methods; they are by their nature episodic, experiential, local, personal, intuitive, or purely logical. The sciences concern certain facts as organized by certain theories, and certain theories as constrained by certain facts; they accumulate evidence and enucleate hypotheses within very strictly limited paradigms; but they do not provide proofs of where reality begins or ends, or of what the dimensions of truth are. They cannot even establish their own working premises—the real existence of the phenomenal world, the power of the human intellect accurately to reflect that reality, the perfect lawfulness of nature, its interpretability, its mathematical regularity, and so forth—and should not seek to do so, but should confine themselves to the truths to which their methods give them access. They should also recognize what the boundaries of the scientific rescript are. There are, in fact, truths of reason that are far surer than even the most amply supported findings of empirical science because such truths are not, as those findings must always be, susceptible of later theoretical revision; and then there are truths of mathematics that are subject to proof in the most proper sense and so are more irrefutable still. And there is no one single discourse of truth as such, no single path to the knowledge of reality, no single method that can exhaustively define what knowledge is, no useful answers whose range has not been limited in advance by the kind of questions that prompted them. The failure to realize this can lead only to delusions of the kind expressed in, for example, G. G. Simpson’s self-parodying assertion that all attempts to define the meaning of life or the nature of humanity made before 1859 are now entirely worthless, or in Peter Atkins’s ebulliently absurd claims that modern science can “deal with every aspect of existence” and that it has in fact “never encountered a barrier.” Not only do sentiments of this sort verge upon the deranged, they are nothing less than violent assaults upon the true dignity of science (which lies entirely in its severely self-limiting rigor).

The society’s ‘look’ is a self-publicizing one. The American flag itself bears witness to this by its omnipresence, in fields and built-up areas, at service stations, and on graves in the cemeteries, not as a heroic sign, but as the trademark of a good brand. It is simply the label of the finest successful international enterprise, the US. This explains why the hyperrealists were able to paint it naively, without either irony or protest (Jim Dine in the sixties), in much the same way as Pop Art gleefully transposed the amazing banality of consumer goods on to its canvases. There is nothing here of the fierce parodying of the American anthem by Jimi Hendrix, merely the light irony and neutral humour of things that have become banal, the humour of the mobile home and the giant hamburger on the sixteen-foot long billboard, the pop and hyper humour so characteristic of the atmosphere of America, where things almost seem endowed with a certain indulgence towards their own banality. But they are indulgent towards their own craziness too. Looked at more generally, they do not lay claim to being extraordinary; they simply are extraordinary. They have that extravagance which makes up odd, everyday America. This oddness is not surrealistic (surrealism is an extravagance that is still aesthetic in nature and as such very European in inspiration); here, the extravagance has passed into things. Madness, which with us is subjective, has here become objective, and irony which is subjective with us has also turned into something objective. The fantasmagoria and excess which we locate in the mind and the mental faculties have passed into things themselves. Whatever the boredom, the hellish tedium of the everyday in the US or anywhere else, American banality will always be a thousand times more interesting than the European - and especially the French - variety. Perhaps because banality here is born of extreme distances, of the monotony of wide-open spaces and the radical absence of culture. It is a native flower here, asis the opposite extreme, that of speed and verticality, of an excess that verges on abandon, and indifference to values bordering on immorality, whereas French banality is a hangover from bourgeois everyday life, born out of a dying aristocratic culture and transmuted into petty-bourgeois mannerism as the bourgeoisie shrank away throughout the nineteenth century. This is the crux: it is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality, whereas the Americans have succeeded in preserving some humour in the material signs of manifest reality and wealth. This also explains why Europeans experience anything relating to statistics as tragic. They immediately read in them their individual failure and take refuge in a pained denunciation of the merely quantitative. The Americans, by contrast, see statistics as an optimistic stimulus, as representing the dimensions of their good fortune, their joyous membership of the majority. Theirs is the only country where quantity can be extolled without compunction.

I wanted to apologize.” His gaze lifted from her bosom. He remembered those breasts in his hands. “For what?” “For deceiving you as I did. I misunderstood the nature of our relationship and behaved like a spoiled little girl. It was a terrible mistake and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.” A terrible mistake? A mistake to be sure, but terrible? “There is nothing to forgive,” he replied with a tight smile. “We were both at fault.” “Yes,” she agreed with a smile of her own. “You are right. Can we be friends again?” “We never stopped.” At least that much was true. He might have played the fool, might have taken advantage of her, but he never ceased caring for her. He never would. Rose practically sighed in relief. Grey had to struggle to keep his eyes on her face. “Good. I’m so glad you feel that way. Because I do so want your approval when I find the man I’m going to marry.” Grey’s lips seized, stuck in a parody of good humor. “The choice is ultimately yours, Rose.” She waved a gloved hand. “Oh, I know that, but your opinion meant so much to Papa, and since he isn’t here to guide me, I would be so honored if you would accept that burden as well as the others you’ve so obligingly undertaken.” Help her pick a husband? Was this some kind of cruel joke? What next, did she want his blessing? She took both of his hands in hers. “I know this is rather premature, but next to Papa you have been the most important man in my life. I wonder…” She bit her top lip. “If you would consider acting in Papa’s stead and giving me away when the time comes?” He’d sling her over his shoulder and run her all the way to Gretna Green if it meant putting an end to this torture! “I would be honored.” He made the promise because he knew whomever she married wouldn’t allow him to keep it. No man in his right mind would want Grey at his wedding, let along handling his bride. Was it relief or consternation that lit her lovely face? “Oh, good. I was afraid perhaps you wouldn’t, given your fear of going out into society.” Grey scowled. Fear? Back to being a coward again was he? “Whatever gave you that notion?” She looked genuinely perplexed. “Well, the other day Kellan told me how awful your reputation had become before your attack. I assumed your shame over that to be why you avoid going out into public now.” “You assume wrong.” He'd never spoken to her with such a cold tone in all the years he'd known her. "I had no idea your opinion of me had sunk so low. And as one who has also been bandied about by gossips I would think you would know better than to believe everything you hear, no matter how much you might like the source." Now she appeared hurt. Doe-like eyes widened. "My opinion of you is as high as it ever was! I'm simply trying to say that I understand why you choose to hide-" "You think I'm hiding?" A vein in his temple throbbed. Innocent confusion met his gaze. "Aren't you?" "I avoid society because I despise it," he informed her tightly. "I would have thought you'd know that about me after all these years." She smiled sweetly. "I think my recent behavior has proven that I don't know you that well at all. After all, I obviously did not achieve my goal in seducing you, did I?" Christ Almighty. The girl knew how to turn his world arse over appetite. "There's no shame in being embarrassed, Grey. I know you regret the past, and I understand how difficult it would be for you to reenter society with that regret handing over you head." "Rose, I am not embarrassed, and I am not hiding. I shun society because I despise it. I hate the false kindness and the rules and the hypocrisy of it. Do you understand what I am saying? It is because of society that I have this." He pointed at the side of his face where the ragged scar ran.

No matter which part of our brains we use, there are two things we all have in common: Our need to travel successfully  through the maze of life, And the fact that 90% of our brains are water.

The feeling of loathing had as yet no permanence or strength in the dog’s soul. The newly awakened joy of life transformed every sensation into a great joke, into gaiety. Nimrod kept on barking, but the tone of it had changed imperceptibly, had become a parody of what it had been - an attempt to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills.

Andrei avoided the internet as well and this evasion only added to his gloom. He loved music, especially old songs, and he loved movies, of all sorts. If he had the patience, sometimes he would read. While most of the pages he turned bored him to sleep, certain books with certain lines disarranged him. Some literature brought him to his feet, laughing and howling in his room. When the book was right, it was bliss and he wept. His room hushed with serenity and indebtedness. When he turned to his computer, however, or took out his phone, he would inevitably come across a viral trend or video that took the art he loved and turned it into a joke. The internet, in Andrei’s desperate eyes, managed to make fun of everything serious. And if one did not laugh, they were not intelligent. The internet could not be slowed and no protest to criticize its exploitation of art could be made because recreations of art hid perfectly under the veneer of mockery and was thus, impenetrable. It was easy to use Chopin’s ‘Sonata No. 2’ for a quick laugh, to reduce the ‘Funeral March’ to background music. It was a sneaky way for a digital creator to be considered an artist—and parodying the classics made them appear cleverer than the original artist. Meanwhile, Andrei’s body had healed playing Chopin alone in his apartment. He would frailly replay movie moments, too, that he later found the world edited and ripped apart with its cheap teeth. And everyone ate the internet’s crumbs. This cruel derision was impossible to escape. But enough jokes, memes, and glam over someone’s precious source of life would eventually make a sensitive body numb. And Andrei was afraid of that. He needed his fountain of hope unblemished. For this reason, he escaped the internet’s claws and only surrendered to it for e-mails, navigation, and the weather.

We may as well face it: the whole level of spirituality among us is low. We have measured ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher plateaus in the things of the Spirit is all but gone. Large and influential sections of the world of fundamental Christianity have gone overboard for practices wholly unscriptural, altogether unjustifiable in the light of historic Christian truth and deeply damaging to the inner life of the individual Christian. They have imitated the world, sought popular favor, manufactured delights to substitute for the joy of the Lord and produced a cheap and synthetic power to substitute for the power of the Holy Ghost. The glowworm has taken the place of the bush that burned and scintillating personalities now answer to the fire that fell at Pentecost. The fact is that we are not today producing saints. We are making converts to an effete type of Christianity that bears little resemblance to that of the New Testament. The average so-called Bible Christian in our times is but a wretched parody on true sainthood. Yet we put millions of dollars behind movements to perpetuate this degenerate form of religion and attack the man who dares to challenge the wisdom of it. Clearly we must begin to produce better Christians. We must insist on New Testament sainthood for our converts, nothing less; and we must lead them into a state of heart purity, fiery love, separation from the world and poured-out devotion to the Person of Christ. Only in this way can the low level of spirituality be raised again to where it should be in the light of the Scriptures and of eternal values.

Somewhere or other, the painter Wyndham Lewis said that when alleged “objectivity” becomes a cult, parody becomes an irresistible urge. I would say, rather, that when inflexible Authority exists, the satirist and counterfeiter express two variations on, fundamentally, the same strategy for coping in such a world. The manufacturers/sellers of the “Guaranteed Drug-Free Urine” widely advertised these days exemplify the practical, as distinguished from artistic, mode of this insurrection.

Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party — an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed — and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life.

Still, both Rent and Spring Awakening ultimately use gay characters to bolster heteronormativity. Angel serves as the emotional touchstone of Rent, endlessly generous and hopeful, caring and sensitive. All mourn his death, which compels the other characters to look at their lives and choices. That Angel’s death enables the other characters to learn about themselves replicates a typical (tired) trope in which an Other (usually a person of color or a person with a disability) aids in the self-actualization of the principal character. Also, Collins and Angel have the most loving and healthy relationship, which the musical needs to eliminate so as not to valorize the gay male couple above all else. In addition, Joanne and Maureen sing a lively number, “Take Me or Leave Me,” but the musical doesn’t take their relationship seriously. Maureen is presented as a fickle, emotionally abusive, yet irresistible lover (Joanne and Mark’s duet, “The Tango Maureen”) and a less-than-accomplished artist (her “The Cow Jumped over the Moon” is a parody of performance art).15 In contrast, Mimi and Roger’s relationship lasts through the end of the musical, since Mimi comes back to life. This choice, one of the few that differs from Puccini’s La Bohème (which provides the primary situational basis for Rent), shows how beholden twentieth-century musicals—even tragedies—are to the convention of a heterosexually happy ending.

John Lennon once claimed that his band, The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Lennon’s life paralleled Christ’s - both came from nothing, became figureheads of worldwide cults and changed the world. They also had premature, painful and undeserved deaths at the hands of others who envied and craved their abilities, influence and popularity. In the late Sixties, Lennon even seemed to adopt a Christ-like image with his long hair, beard and the various robes he started wearing, perhaps as a sly visual parody of his previous remarks.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

A genre is reaching the end of its life when it resorts to self-parody.

It was all a parody. A shadow of what we’d done. Of what I wanted—yearned for—every night of my life, thereafter. I took others to my bed to erase the memory of what my husband did to me, but in my mind. In my heart. I never made love to anyone but you.” She ventured forward, reaching out for him. Feeling bare and raw and exceedingly vulnerable.

Or, rather, there is a duel between them: death toys with life, life toys with death. Which of the two succumbs? Stanislaw Lec reverses the terms here: it is not we who defend ourselves against death, it is death that defends itself against us: 'Death resists us, but it gives in in the end.' Nothing else so stunning as this has ever been said about death. Needless to say, this dual relationship has nothing to do with interactivity, which is a parody of it. There is nothing interactive in the antagonistic process of reversibility and becoming. The feminine and the masculine are not 'interactive': that is ridiculous. Life and the world are not interactive -life isn't a question-and-answer session or a video game. There is nothing interactive in words when they are articulated in language. Interactivity is a gigantic mythology, a mythology of integrated systems or of systems craving integration, a mythology in which otherness is lost in feedback, interlocution and interface - a kind of generalized echography.

Hannah Arendt indicated a partial answer in her book The Life of the Mind, in a chapter titled “Where Are We When We Think?”12 The title has a distinctly provocative slant, and outside the context mentioned here, it could seem like a parody. Yet, without ceremony, Arendt stressed the observation that it is impossible to define the place of thinking with information from everyday topology. She also refers to the Socratic absences: if Socrates is immersed in his thoughts and we “see him thinking,” obviously we cannot locate this at the place where we perceive him physically. But where else? It may seem natural to some of our contemporaries to claim that the philosopher’s thoughts are in his brain, the philosopher himself is in the lecture room, the lecture room is in the university, the university is in the city, and so on, right up to the biggest container of all, the universe.

Compassion without truth and justice is an ugly, spineless parody of love. Jesus gets angry at callousness, arrogance, and injustice. Some things ought not to be. Abuse should be corrected. Think back on a time when you have seen or experienced evil. Imagine Jesus angrily confronting that situation: “This ought not to be.” Justice satisfies. It restores sanity. It brings balance back to life. Some things are always wrong, sins against both God and other people. Deep down, we all know there is right and wrong, true and false.

As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o'clock and time to get  up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o'clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulatorsthat Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to ahieveperfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as  anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the test of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and 5hen moved in his mind to the house he'd grown up in, and in the end didn't know one day from another until he died." Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," but there's more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great- grandpa. He died of misdirection. " /

Through the mediating work of four cultural formations—carnival, tasting, contact zones, and edgework (or risky play)—the chapter explores how the articulation of market play provides a tool for leveraging and for holding an audience; works to redefine markets as pleasurable, exploratory, nontrading spaces; and provides a playful structure through which neoliberal market relations can be parodied and critiqued.

The primary rule of the ring—to defend oneself at all times—is both a parody and a distillation of life.

Nashe, the city’s most feared and fearless satirist, once compared the closing stanza of Harvey’s latest poem to a fart after a bowel movement. Nashe also transformed Shakespeare’s exalted Venus and Adonis into a porn parody about one man’s epic attempt to bring a London prostitute to orgasm using a dildo. Constantly offending authorities, forever on the run, Nashe jumped pen name to pen name: Cutbert Curry-knave to Pierce Penniless to Adam Evesdropper to Jocundary Merry-brains. A pamphlet got him tossed into Newgate Prison, a satiric play forced him to flee London. A friend and collaborator of Shakespeare’s, Nashe died likely of the plague around 1601, two years after the queen thought it prudent to set his life’s work ablaze in a great bonfire of lost lewd literature.

While on faculty at a writer’s conference recently, I attended a talk by another teacher who claimed that the magical incantation abracadabra, made familiar by cartoons and magician parodies, means, at root, “what is spoken is what becomes.” While this is certainly a happy thought

Your expenses grow to match your income. As the decades pass and you realize that no, you’re not going to save the world, the money becomes a more and more important part of the justification. And when you have kids, you’re stuck; it’s much easier to deprive yourself of money (and what it buys) than to deprive your children of money. More important, you internalize the rationalizations for the work you are doing. It’s easier to think that underwriting new debt offerings really is saving the world than to think that you are underwriting new debt offerings, because of the money, instead of saving the world. And this goes for many walks of life. It’s easier for college professors to think that, by training the next generation of young minds (or, even more improbably, writing papers on esoteric subjects), they are changing the world than to think that they are teaching and researching instead of changing the world. Sure, there are self-parodying, economically delusional, psychotherapy-needing, despicable people on Wall Street . . . but there are also a lot of people who went there because it was easy and stayed because they decided they couldn’t afford not to and talked themselves into it. A college student asked me at a book talk what I thought about undergraduates who go work on Wall Street. And individually, I have nothing against them, although I do think they should do their best to keep their expenses down so they will be able to switch careers later. But as a system, it’s a bad thing that a small handful of highly profitable firms are able to invest those profits into skimming off some of the top students at American universities—universities that, even if nominally private, are partially funded by taxpayer money in the form of research grants and federal subsidies for student loans—and absorbing them into the banking-consulting-lawyering Borg.7

Confronting the power of Egypt’s magicians and priests with the power of the Almighty, making a parody of the authority of Pharaoh by means of the authority of the Lord of the cosmos, miraculously, Moses leads God’s people out of slavery and into a new life. And

Los Angeles—the dream-making capital of the world—serves as the backdrop for a number of the stories I recount. Some readers who cut their teeth in the urban centers of Europe or on the East Coast of America may prefer to dismiss what happens in Los Angeles as from a place apart, the aberrations of a migrant’s city within a migrant land. Such sentiments are understandable. Awash in the solar energy of a subtropical paradise, Los Angelinos engage life in the moment. The pace is fast, the music loud, and money is on display. Part of me, too, would prefer to dismiss such an existence as a mythmaker’s parody. But the place is real. In its immediacy and in its magnification of the familiar, Los Angeles creates its own reality and in so doing offers a “fast-forward” simulation of our collective future as a migrant culture. As Americans we must now decide whether such a future is of our choice, and whether it is sustainable. In the pages that follow, it is my goal to help inform that choice. Will we learn as a people to constructively channel the opportunities and individual enticements of the Fast New World toward an equitable social order, as Adam Smith had envisioned, or will the material demand for economic growth continue to erode the microcultures and intimate social bonds that are the hallmark of our humanity and the keys to health and personal happiness? Have the goals of America’s original social experiment been hijacked by its commercial success, threatening the delicate dance between individual desire and social responsibility, or will the nation in its migrant wisdom effectively apply its market and military dominance to remain a “beacon of hope,” enhancing the well-being of all the world’s peoples? This is a critical time in America, a time for careful thought and diligent action, for we have discovered in our commercial success that in an open society the real enemy is the self-interest that begins with a healthy appetite for life and mushrooms into manic excess during affluent times. Americans are again in the vanguard of human experience, and the world is watching. It is again a time for choosing.

See Amazon's bio on don loedding and a review of his first book of short stories"The Search For the Bearded Clam" and read inside "Global Warming:The Iceman Cometh".

1948: The Best Years of Our Lives. The characters in the film have retained a candour towards - and naive faith in - their feelings which we no longer possess. Our feelings, which we delightfully term emotions in order to salvage the fiction of an emotional life, are not affects any more, merely a psychological affectation, having lost all credence in our eyes. Or, alternatively, they are conversion emotions, betraying the melodrama going on in the body rather than the nuances of the soul. We do not even have this candour in our relations to our dreams, where we grapple with their interpretation, their splitting, their ironic reflexes. But the worst thing is that not just life, but cinema too, seems to have lost all simplicity since that period. But the worst thing is that not just life, but cinema too, seems to have lost all simplicity since that period. It knows only how to parody itself affectedly, and has veered towards psychodrama or visual melodrama. Retrospectively, these were then, also, the 'Best Years' of cinema.

When someone opposes you, it is very tempting to oversimplify, parody, or distort his or her position. This is a counterproductive game, designed both to harm the dissenter and to unjustly raise your personal status. By contrast, if you are called upon to summarise someone's position so that the speaking person agrees with that summary, you may have to state the argument even more clearly and succinctly than the speaker has even yet managed. If you first give the devil his due, looking at his arguments from his perspective, you can (1) find the value in them, and learn something in the process, or (2) hone your position against them (if you still believe they are wrong) and strengthen your arguments further against challenge. This will make you much stronger. Then you will no longer have to misrepresent your opponent's position (and may well have bridged at least part of the gap between the two of you). You will also be much better at withstanding your own doubt.

Verliefdheid rust op het roekeloze besluit verliefd te worden. Met zijn besluit had Simon de kwelling over zichzelf afgeroepen. De kwelling was masochistisch en theatraal. Het was gezocht ongeluk, zelfgeschapen wanhoop, ijdele parodie. Allemaal waar. Maar wat het ook mocht zijn, de kwelling werd er niet minder om.

[Are we happy? I am God, I have created this parody]

A CLASSIC WAITS for me, it contains all, nothing is lacking, Yet all were lacking if taste were lacking, or if the endorsement of the right man were lacking. O clublife, and the pleasures of membership, O volumes for sheer fascination unrivalled. Into an armchair endlessly rocking, Walter J. Black my president, I, freely invited, cordially welcomed to membership, My arm around John Kieran, Pearl S. Buck, My taste in books guarded by the spirits of William Lyon Phelps, Hendrik Willem Van Loon, (From your memories, sad brothers, from the fitful risings and callings I heard), I to the classics devoted, brother of rough mechanics, beauty-parlor technicians, spot welders, radio-program directors (It is not necessary to have a higher education to appreciate these books), I, connoisseur of good reading, friend of connoisseurs of good reading everywhere, I, not obligated to take any specific number of books, free to reject any volume, perfectly free to reject Montaigne, Erasmus, Milton, I, in perfect health except for a slight cold, pressed for time, having only a few more years to live, Now celebrate this opportunity. Come, I will make the club indissoluble, I will read the most splendid books the sun ever shone upon, I will start divine magnetic groups, With the love of comrades, With the life-long love of distinguished committees. I strike up for an Old Book. Long the best-read figure in America, my dues paid, sitter in armchairs everywhere, wanderer in populous cities, weeping with Hecuba and with the late William Lyon Phelps, Free to cancel my membership whenever I wish, Turbulent, fleshy, sensible, Never tiring of clublife, Always ready to read another masterpiece provided it has the approval of my president, Walter J. Black, Me imperturbe, standing at ease among writers, Rais'd by a perfect mother and now belonging to a perfect book club, Bearded, sunburnt, gray-neck'd, astigmatic, Loving the masters and the masters only (I am mad for them to be in contact with me), My arm around Pearl S. Buck, only American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, I celebrate this opportunity. And I will not read a book nor the least part of a book but has the approval of the Committee, For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which they hinted at, All is useless without readability. By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms (89¢ for the Regular Edition or $1.39 for the DeLuxe Edition, plus a few cents postage). I will make inseparable readers with their arms around each other's necks, By the love of classics, By the manly love of classics.

True, there’s nothing as great as “A Day in the Life,” but “2000 Light Years From Home” isn’t far behind, while “Citadel,” “2000 Man,” or “The Lantern” can hang with anything else on Pepper. The psychedelic Stones peaked with the August 1967 double-sided single of “Dandelion” and “We Love You,” an “All You Need Is Love” parody with backing vocals from John and Paul. The Stones filmed a video for “We Love You” as a commentary on their drug trials, set in a Victorian courtroom. Mick plays Oscar Wilde, in the dock for crimes of love; Marianne Faithfull plays his boy toy Lord Alfred Douglas. And as the judge—Keith, of course, complete with wig, robe, and gavel.

YOU WILL PAY WITH YOUR LIFE!

Brooklyn, like the West Village, again makes me think of gentrification's ability to erase collective memory. I cannot imagine what people who aren't from New York think when they move to Brooklyn. Do they know they're moving into neighborhoods where just ten years ago you wouldn't have seen a white person at any time of day? Do they know that every apartment listed on Craigslist as 'newly renovated' was once inhabited by someone else who likely made a life there before the ground under their feet became too valuable? It's hard not to feel guilt living here, and I wonder if other gentrifiers feel the same way. I represent the domino effect. I was priced out of Manhattan, but I know my existence in this borough comes at the cost of the erasure of others' cultures and senses of home. I know the woman with the Gucci bag in the West Village elicits the same kind of angst within me as my presence does for a native Brooklynite. I try to stay away from the hippest joints and I try to support long-established businesses, but I often fail at doing these things, and I know that even when I'm successful at trekking this increasingly narrow path, I've only done so much. Brooklyn, like the West Village, is irrevocably changed, and I know I'm part of that. The question is, how do I stop it when the process is so much larger than me and has already progressed so far? Mass displacement means that there are fewer and fewer people coming to Brooklyn now know only that it's hip and expensive and has good brunch. As Sarah Schulman writes, gentrifiers 'look in the mirror and think it's a window, believing that corporate support for and inflation of their story is in fact a neutral and accurate picture of the world.' It's a circular logic that dictates Brooklyn is Brooklyn because it's Brooklyn - the brand mimicked by hipsters all over the world and mocked in hundreds of tired late-night parodies. What gentrifier sees Brooklyn not as it is but as the consequence of a powerful and violent system?

The abuse doesn’t take away the proper use. Magic is, in fact, a parody of the truly human vocation. Image-bearing humans, obedient to the Creator, are meant to exercise delegated authority in the world in order that life can flourish.

One of the linguists reported that although he did not identify words, he felt that one prayer had been structured in much the same way a modern poem is structured. "Modern poetry depends upon sound as much as upon verbal meaning to get across its message," he said. "In this one prayer, I felt that although I didn't understand the literal sense of her words, I did catch the emotional content of what she was saying. It was a hymn of love. Beautiful." It was interesting, too, that although no language known to these men was recorded, they had frequently identified language patterns on the tapes. The "shape" of real language, the variety of sound combinations, infrequency of repetition and so forth, is virtually impossible, so they said, to reproduce by deliberate effort. Remembering Dina Donohue's parody of tongues-speaking, I had slipped onto the tapes two instances of pure made-up gibberish, one by our son, Scott, and one by Tib. They had tried to sound as much as possible like the tongues on the rest of the tape, but the linguists spotted the deception immediately. "That's not language," one man said. "That's just noise.

Literary Genre In current trends within critical scholarship, Jonah is commonly labeled as parody or satire. The former typically lampoons a piece of literature, while the latter targets people (specific or stereotyped categories) or events, as Jonah does. Satire can be either an enactment or a written composition in which vice, folly or incompetence is held up for ridicule. The closer to reality a satire can be, the more effective it is. By definition it targets real people and tries to use the mannerisms and words that they use. Satire exaggerates reality, but by its nature is based on reality. Satire and parody are both known in the ancient world and the Bible. The examples of parody in the ancient Near East also target entities that are considered to be historical and from which historical information may be deduced. In the realm of related satire, the Babylonian “Dialogue of Pessimism” targets a wide variety of cultural institutions. The satire in the book of Jonah targets Jonah personally as a ludicrous example of how a prophet might behave. ◆ Key Concepts • Much of the significance of the book depends on understanding that the Ninevite response is superficial, yet God responds anyway. • Jonah is put in Nineveh’s shoes in order for the book to make its point about God’s compassion being undeserved. • Jonah is not a missionary; he is a prophet. • Jonah’s message is of judgment, not instruction or hope.

But in all that carved and sculptured splendour of the history of England, its wars, its wealth, and its religion, its princes and prelates, and its imperial conquests, there were only two memorials that touched the heart. One was the chantry of William of Wykeham, saved from Cromwell's destroyers by the drawn sword of a Wykehamist captain, a Cromwellian, who stood upon the chantry steps and, against all comers, defended the tomb of the Founder. And the other was the little old lady of College Street, who commanded no armies and attacked no religions, who was burnt at no stake and married no prince, whose life added no faintest ripple to the waves and storms of England, and no fragment of a line to its recorded history; who is, alone among mortals, loved by all and hated by none, and who is, alone among the Great, imitated by none and parodied by none. English of the English, heart of English heart, bone of English bone, kindliest and gayest and gentlest, her memorial is not so wide as a church door nor so high as Albert's, but it is in Alfred's town, in Wykeham's cathedral, near Arthur's Table, and it will serve.

What makes Chinatown so uniquely disturbing as an American metaphor is that it is so unlike the whiteness of Ahab’s whale or the greenness of Gatsby’s light. However illusory, these are totems of aspiration, of possibility. Futility and fate, by contrast, are concepts that defy the capitalist’s dream of agency and advancement, the (graying) Protestant work ethic that assured pre-Watergate Americans that life was linear, not cyclical, and the game wasn’t rigged against them. It is no wonder, then, that Towne’s metaphor should borrow its desolation from Polanski, a European. “The American has not yet assimilated psychologically the disappearance of his own geographical frontier,” wrote the philosopher William Barrett in 1962. “His spiritual horizon is still the limitless play of human possibilities, and as yet he has not lived through the crucial experience of human finitude.” A decade after this writing, that spiritual horizon reached its finitude in Vietnam and Watergate, and symbolically in Los Angeles, the geographic end of America. As Towne foresaw, the only place left to go was up—up to The Sting, to “Happy Days,” Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, to “a mix of nostalgia and parody,” Kael wrote, the mass denial of the terrible truths Gittes was powerless to undo.

At the very least literature should not preen itself on mocking us and picking at our wounds, as modern writers in our days do ad nauseam. All they can write is satire, irony, parody (including self-parody), vicious sarcasm, all steeped in malice.

Imitation is flattery, and parody is backhanded flattery.

I'm parodying a powerful quote from Rob Hill Sr. A quote that, in the crazy ass world of right now, sho'nuff screams to me; because my goal, too, was to build a life I don't need a vacation from. Through tears, I'm scratching this one off my bucket list.

[T]here is a dangerous re-evaluation and exploitation of the work of Guénon as the inspirer of a "traditionalist" or "spiritualist" reaction to the modern world. They are often nothing other than attempts to manipulate the universal doctrine in order to legitimize certain thinking or power trends that are only interested in the government of this world, and which have no sense of the sacred. These readers of Guénon seem to get lost in fruitless analytic speculation about the crisis of the modern world or about a hypothetical militant revolt against it. So they make the mistake of always looking for evil outside themselves, creating a justification for being better than other people simply because they have read the work of Guénon and because the rest of the world is in chaos. They confuse their contempt for the chaos in the world with their contempt for the world itself, and their contempt for individuality with their contempt for humanity. They forget that humanity and the world are the fruit of God's creation and that, in any phase of a cosmic cycle, the life of every man is necessarily subject to the battle between the forces of good and evil. It is therefore to overcome those illusions of the soul that are a product of that imagination that is so typical of modern man who, not wanting to make the necessary changes to raise himself up spiritually by learning to control his instincts and stifling his own individuality, by a biased interpretation of tradition, tries to drag down the level of the world by disapproving of the decline of modern man in order to congratulate himself on his own supposed superiority. These people, rather than constructively delving into traditional teaching, only drag out arguments from tradition in order to oppose today's aberrations, and inevitably end up being trapped and fall into a form of dualism between good and evil, incapable of understanding the providential nature of the world that will remain like this as long as God allows it to continue to exist to be used for good. The next steps taken by these incurable idealists are usually to build a sand castle or an ivory tower lived in by a group of people romantically banded together by elective affinities or by an unstoppable missionary spirit aimed at forming a traditional society. Both cases are only a parody of the spiritual responsibility of every person on earth who lives in the world with the sincere aspiration to a genuine intellectual elevation, with a balanced awareness of a dimension of the Creation that is both universal and eschatological. On the one hand, we have people trapped like prisoners in a fantasy about the other world who often become theorists about the detachment from this world and, on the other hand, there are the militants of the illusions of this world who create confusion about the reality of the other world. Prisoners and theorists, fantasies, illusions and confusions, are all expressions of how far we are from an authentic traditional and spiritual perspective. But, above all, we must recognize that in some of these poor readers, there is a chronic inability to distinguish and bring together this world and the other world, without confusing them, and therefore cannot really understand the teachings of Shaykh 'Abd al -Wahid Yahya René Guénon and apply them to their lives.

But why, in 1975, should Dylan return to what, in such a year, passes for activism? Because he's having trouble coming up with meaningful subject matter closer to home, that's why: either that or whatever is going on in his personal life is so painful and fucked up he is afraid or unwilling to confront it in his art. And, again, one is not sure that one can honestly blame him. When Blood on the Tracks was released, I felt as ambivalent about it as it was about its subject matter, and I remained that way. After initially dismissing it on one hearing as a sprawling, absurdly pretentious mess whose key was the ridiculously spiteful 'Idiot Wind,' I found myself drawn back to it repeatedly by a current that I was not at all convinced was entirely wholesome; I would get drunk and throw it on, finding profound aphorisms alternating with oblique poetry, belching outbursts of muddled enthusiasm: 'Goddamn, he's still got it!' Then I would sober up and it would sound, once again, dull, overlong, energyless, the aphorisms trite and obvious, the poetry a garbled parody of the old Dylan.

We sat there in the kitchen and I started to pick away at these chords.… “It is the evening of the day.” I might have written that. “I sit and watch the children play,” I certainly wouldn’t have come up with that. We had two lines and an interesting chord sequence, and then something else took over somewhere in this process. I don’t want to say mystical, but you can’t put your finger on it. Once you’ve got that idea, the rest of it will come. It’s like you’ve planted a seed, then you water it a bit and suddenly it sticks up out of the ground and goes, hey, look at me. The mood is made somewhere in the song. Regret, lost love. Maybe one of us had just busted up with a girlfriend. If you can find the trigger that kicks off the idea, the rest of it is easy. It’s just hitting the first spark. Where that comes from, God knows. With “As Tears Go By,” we weren’t trying to write a commercial pop song. It was just what came out. I knew what Andrew wanted: don’t come out with a blues, don’t do some parody or copy, come out with something of your own. A good pop song is not really that easy to write. It was a shock, this fresh world of writing our own material, this discovery that I had a gift I had no idea existed. It was Blake-like, a revelation, an epiphany. “As Tears Go By” was first recorded and made into a hit by Marianne Faithfull. That was only weeks away.