Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Resolutions 2015
Humiliate people who define success in any other way than honor. In the end realize that you are only as valuable as the risks you are taking for the sake of others.
The Moviegoer – quotes and extracts – 15
Being a creature of habit, as regular as a monk, and taking pleasure in the homeliest repetitions, I listen every night at ten to a program called This I Believe. Monks have their compline, I have This I Believe. On the program hundreds of the highest-minded people in our country, thoughtful and intelligent people, people with mature inquiring minds, state their personal credos. The two or three hundred I have heard so far were without exception admirable people. I doubt if any other country or any other time in history has produced such thoughtful and high-minded people, especially the women. And especially the South. I do believe the South has produced more high-minded women, women of universal sentiments, than any other section of the country except possibly New England in the last century. Of my six living aunts, five are women of the loftiest theosophical panBrahman sentiments. The sixth is still a Presbyterian.
If I had to name a single trait that all these people shared, it is their niceness. Their lives are triumphs of niceness. They like everyone with the warmest and most generous feelings. And as for themselves: it would be impossible for even a dour person not to like them.
Tonight’s subject is a playwright who transmits this very quality of niceness in his plays. He begins:
I believe in people. I believe in tolerance and understanding between people. I believe in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual—
Everyone on This I Believe believes in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual. I have noticed, however, that the believers are far from unique themselves, are in fact alike as peas in a pod.
I believe in music. I believe in a child’s smile. I believe in love. I also believe in hate.
This is true. I have known a couple of these believers, humanists and lady psychologists who come to my aunt’s house. On This I Believe they like everyone. But when it comes down to this or that particular person, I have noticed that they usually hate his guts.
I did not always enjoy This I Believe. While I was living at my aunt’s house, I was overtaken by a fit of perversity. But instead of writing a letter to an editor, as was my custom, I recorded a tape which I submitted to Mr Edward R. Murrow. “Here are the beliefs of John Bickerson Bolling, a moviegoer living in New Orleans,” it began, and ended, “I believe in a good kick in the ass. This—I believe.” I soon regretted it, however, as what my grandfather would have called “a smart-alecky stunt” and I was relieved when the tape was returned. I have listened faithfully to This I Believe ever since.
I believe in freedom, the sacredness of the individual and the brotherhood of man—
concludes the playwright.
I believe in believing. This—I believe.
In Search Of A Science Of Consciousness
Alva Noë discusses Evan Thompson’s Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and consciousness in neuroscience, meditation, and philosophy.
Eat Good, Stay Healthy and Don’t Worry About Being Rich
H/T to the keeper of the flame Ricky Riccardi
Photo by John Loengard, summer of 1965. Here’s Louis in Ebony’s “The Reluctant Millionaire” profile from 1964:
“Making money ain’t nothing exciting to me. I’ve been making my share of the dough ever since I was a teen-ager playing with Fate Marable on the riverboats. So even if I start making a million bucks a day it won’t make me try to be something different from what I feel in my heart and from what makes me happy in my way.”
“What’s money anyhow? You make it and you might eat a little better than the next cat. You might be able to buy a little better booze than some wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat, and when you die you’re just as graveyard dead as he is. So what’s the difference between me and some cat that’s making it at the Salvation Army Lodge? All I got was a little better roll of the dice.”
“Now you take my wife, Lucille. She’s got everything she thinks she wants. She buys all them clothes from Paris and Rome and places. But them minks she wraps her fine self up in don’t keep her no warmer than some old lady wrapped in gunny sacks and dirty rags.”
“And you take this neighborhood we live in. We’re right out here with the rest of the colored folk and the Puerto Ricans and Italians and the Hebrew cats. We don’t need to move out in the suburbs to some big mansion with lots of servants and yardmen and things. What for? What the hell I care about living in a ‘fashionable’ neighborhood? Ain’t nobody cutting off the lights and gas here ‘cause we didn’t pay the bills. The Frigidaire is full of food, what more do we need?”
The Moviegoer – quotes and extracts – 14
FOR SOME TIME NOW the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.
It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: “In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but—” or “Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However—” and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord. Wednesday as I stood speaking to Eddie Lovell, I felt my eye closing in a broad wink.
After the lunch conference I run into my cousin Nell Lovell on the steps of the library—where I go occasionally to read liberal and conservative periodicals. Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upside-down: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.
Down I plunk myself with a liberal weekly at one of the massive tables, read it from cover to cover, nodding to myself whenever the writer scores a point. Damn right, old son, I say, jerking my chair in approval. Pour it on them. Then up and over to the rack for a conservative monthly and down in a fresh cool chair to join the counter-attack. Oh ho, say I, and hold fast to the chair arm: that one did it: eviscerated! And then out and away into the sunlight, my neck prickling with satisfaction.
Nell Lovell, I was saying, spotted me and over she comes brandishing a book. It seems she has just finished reading a celebrated novel which, I understand, takes a somewhat gloomy and pessimistic view of things. She is angry.
“I don’t feel a bit gloomy!” she cries. “Now that Mark and Lance have grown up and flown the coop, I am having the time of my life. I’m taking philosophy courses in the morning and working nights at Le Petit Theatre. Eddie and I have re-examined our values and found them pretty darn enduring. To our utter amazement we discovered that we both have the same life-goal. Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“To make a contribution, however small, and leave the world just a little better off.”
“That’s very good,” I say somewhat uneasily and shift about on the library steps. I can talk to Nell as long as I don’t look at her. Looking into her eyes is an embarrassment.
“—we gave the television to the kids and last night we turned on the hi-fi and sat by the fire and read The Prophet aloud. I don’t find life gloomy!” she cries. “To me, books and people and things are endlessly fascinating. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes.” A rumble has commenced in my descending bowel, heralding a tremendous defecation.Nell goes on talking and there is nothing to do but shift around as best one can, take care not to fart, and watch her in a general sort of way: a forty-year-old woman with a good open American face and another forty years left in her; and eager, above all, eager, with that plaintive lost eagerness American college women get at a certain age. I get to thinking about her and old Eddie re-examining their values.
“Yes, true. Values. Very good. And then I can’t help wondering to myself: why does she talk as if she were dead? Another forty years to go and dead, dead, dead.
“How is Kate?” Nell asks.
I jump and think hard, trying to escape death. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know.”
“I am so devoted to her! What a grand person she is.”
“I am too. She is.”
“Come see us, Binx!”
“I will!”
We part laughing and dead.
R. G. Collingwood: A Research Companion
Joe Cocker (1944-2014)
The Louis Armstrong childhood arrest that no one knew about
H/T to Ricky Riccardi for this article.
In his 1954 autobiography, “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans,” Armstrong writes that when he was arrested in 1913, he “had no idea what a Waifs Home was” — even though he had been sent to the home just three years earlier.
“This is mind-blowing,” said Ricky Riccardi, archivist at the Louis Armstrong House and Museum in New York City’s borough of Queens and author of “What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years.”
“I’ve been spending half my life researching Armstrong, and this is a breakthrough.”
Neurons to Nirvana
Click poster for trailer:
A feature documentary about the resurgence of psychedelics as medicine. Psychedelics can be potent tools for getting to know who we are, who we can be. and for healing the trauma of a society that is addicted to greed and consumerism. This film dares to break the taboo surrounding psychedelic medicines, by examining and revealing their proven potential to heal and alleviate suffering on a global scale. Through interviews with the world’s foremost researchers, writers, psychologists and pioneers in psychedelic psychotherapy, the film explores the history and medicinal potential of five powerful psychedelic substances (LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA, Ayahuasca and Cannabis).
