The Mooresie

Love And Rockets’ Hernandez brothers on 30 years in comics

[Quote from Xaime:]

I know how she grew up emotionally—what her ups and downs were, basically, even if I don’t know the exact details. Like I said, every once in awhile, I do have to go back, but overall, it’s just this is my friend Maggie and I know she had a hard time at a time of her life and I know how she is going to react to a modern-day situation. Because I’ve known her, and I know she’s experienced in some ways because of what she’s learned in the past and stuff she’s never learned in the past. Some people learn, some people never learn and they’re sometimes the same person. So that’s basically how I do handle it. It’s not as hard as you’d think, but every once in a while, I go, “What did I do? Oh, OK. So I have to fix this.”

[So much love.]

A well-formatted translation

Mario Benedetti

Wislawa Szymborska, 1923-2012

Bunch of poems quoted on Metafilter, this one resonated with me the most.

True Love

True love. Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way – in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn’t this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn’t it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.
Couldn’t they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends’ sake?
Listen to them laughing – its an insult.
The language they use – deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines –
it’s obviously a plot behind the human race’s back!

It’s hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who’d want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life’s highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there’s no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Little Big Numbers
OR: Alec – How to be an Artist, and why some stories are just too fucking massive not to be told

As a writer of some of the best autobiographical fiction around, Campbell’s talent for using the right story at the right time has been carefully honed over the years, so it’s no surprise that account of the story of Big Numbers adds to the totality of How to be an Artist. The factors that prevented the series’ completion have just the right mixture of the predictable and the arbitrary, the personal and the financial, to bring Campbell’s narrative home, and you find yourself truly appreciating the depth of Campbell’s craft when you figure this out.

On a third, even more careful reading, however, you realised that How to be an Artist doesn’t just contain the story of the unmaking of Big Numbers, but that it actually is Big Numbers. Or at least, it’s Campbell’s version of it – let’s call it Little Big Numbers, for silliness’s sake.

ALEC: The Years Have Pants has my highest recommendation. At the very least, it’s very thick and will prop open the stoutest of doors.

To Live (or Life After the Deluge)

For as Watanabe said in the film when asked why he wasn’t angry at being stymied and turned down over and over again by the politicians and bureaucrats who preferred the status quo of doing nothing rather than taking action to help others:

I can’t afford to hate anyone. I don’t have that kind of time.