When Game of Thrones meets Monty Python and The Holy Grail

Because everything’s better with a little Monty Python. Curtains!

http://imgur.com/gallery/moga9

Bust out the tequila, mescaline and ether, it’s Hunter S Thompson’s birthday. Quotes from the font of Gonzo wisdom

“Sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whiskey and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind but falling in love and not getting arrested.” 

Head over to The Electric Typewriter for a fine collection of HST penned articles

http://tetw.org/Hunter_S._Thompson

“The best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism”

“You won’t find reasonable men at the tops of tall mountains”

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.”

“If I’d written the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”

“Remember this, folks – I am a Hillbilly, and I don’t always Bet the same way I talk. Good advice is one thing, but smart gambling is quite another.”

“The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug-collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.”

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

“Buy the ticket, take the ride”

“Faster, Faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.”

“There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It’s a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.”

“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

“You better take care of me Lord, if you don’t you’re gonna have me on your hands.”

“Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting ‘Holy shit…what a ride!”

“Some may never live, but the crazy never die.”

Celebrate the wisdom of R Buckminster Fuller, on his birthday

Celebrate George Orwell’s birthday with his cutting, sardonic wit

If his ideas weren’t proven prescient, we’d call him a paranoid cynic.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

“People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”

“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

“Myths which are believed in tend to become true.”

“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”

“Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.”

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

“In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”

“We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.”

“We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.”

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

“Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.”

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”

“He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.”

“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.”

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

and always remember, “Big Brother is watching you”

quotes poached from Brainyquote

Happy birthday to two legends of horror, Vincent Price and Christopher Lee!

Two men, who through an obscene amount of work, helped to define fright and terror.

Mel Brooks defense of David Lynch’s, The Elephant Man

I didn’t even know that Brooks was a producer of The Elephant Man, much less his pithy fuck you to the studio execs/enemies of artistic freedom. Yet another reason to love Mel Brooks.

Happy birthday to the King of Bad Taste, The Pope of Trash, John Waters

“Some call me director, producer, filmmaker. I prefer to call myself pube-king.”

“Irony ruined everything. I wish my movies could have played at drive-ins, but they never did, because of irony. Even the best exploitation movies were never meant to be `so bad they were good`. They were not made for the intelligentsia. They were made to be violent for real, or to be sexy for real. But now everybody has irony. Even horror films now are ironic. Everybody`s in on the joke now. Everybody`s hip. Nobody takes anything at face value anymore.”

“Good bad taste is celebrating something without thinking you’re better than it… Bad bad taste is condescending, making fun of others.”

“The angry man that made Pink Flamingos is not the 63-year-old man today that has a really lovely life. I don’t have a lot to be angry about. I think this quote I’ve said more than any other quote in the world but, ‘A 20 year old angry man is sexy. A 63-year-old angry man is an asshole.’”

Happy birthday to Bette Davis, Queen of The Burn

Seriously, get out the aloe.
“Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it’s because I’m not a bitch. Maybe that’s why Joan Crawford always plays ladies.”
http://flavorwire.com/512679/20-of-the-bitchiest-bette-davis-quotes

Celebrate the wit and wisdom of Flannery O’Connor on her birthday

Because sometimes a good book is hard to find

The following quotes are predominantly from The Habit Of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, and the essays and lectures compiled in Mystery And Manners. These are quotes from O’Connor herself, and not her characters, therefore there will be no wisdom dispensed from Hazel Motes.

On writing and art

“I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.”

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.”

“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.”

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”

“I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.”

“Try arranging [your novel] backwards and see what you see. I thought this stunt up from my art classes, where we always turn the picture upside down, on its two sides, to see what lines need to be added. A lot of excess stuff will drop off this way.”

“It might be dangerous for you to have too much time to write. I mean if you took off a year and had nothing else to do but write and weren’t used to doing it all the time then you might get discouraged.” I heartily agree with this. I sometimes speak to people who imagine that they need to quit their jobs before they can start writing. I started writing while I had a full-time job (twice).”

On religion and spirituality

“When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.”

“What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”

“…the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.”

“One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.”

On Education

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

“Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.”

“I have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.”

“The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.”

On the south
“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

Misc

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

“There won’t be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.”

It’s Carson McCullers Birthday

“The Heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire! To find some lasting comfort in the arms of another’s fire…driven by a desperate hunger to the arms of a neon light, the heart is a lonely hunter when there’s no sign of love in sight!”

Her collection of shorts The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories, in pdf form

Click to access carson_mccullers_-_the_ballad_of_the_sad_cafe_and_other_stories.pdf

I’ve never seen this 1968 adaptation of her most famous novel, but the critical response is overwhelmingly positive, and the cast, quality, so I’m looking forward to it.

Her social commentary is just as pertinent today, as ever, and her musings on love, loneliness and the human condition are forever relevant.

“For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question “Who am I?” recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: “Since I do not understand ‘Who I am,’ I only know what I am not.” The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war. ”
― Carson McCullers, The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings

“We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle – the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“ But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else. Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it. If she passed the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared that she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things. Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“He could not understand the wild quiver of his heart, nor the following sense of recklessness and grace that lingered after she was gone.”

“Any form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art form is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. The creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, ‘I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive.”

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are gone, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.”

Bukowski’s lonely tribute