Willy Wonka quotes poetry

One of my favorite lines comes from a nineteenth century poet named O'Shaughnessy. The poem is an Ode from O'Shaughnessy's Music and Moonlight. In the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with Gene Wilder, Wonka quotes the first two lines.

 . , . , . , . , . , . , . , . , . , .

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems

We, in the ages lying,

In the buried past of the earth,

Built Nineveh with our sighing,

And Babel itself in our mirth;

And o'erthrew them with prophesying,

To the old of the new world's worth

One man with a dream, at pleasure,

Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

And three with a new song's measure,

Can trample a kingdom down

Great hail! we cry to the comers

From the dazzling unknown shore;

Bring us hither your sun and your summers;

And renew our world as of yore;

You shall teach us your song's new numbers,

And things that we dreamed not before:

Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,

And a singer who sings no more

The Curse of the Modern Age

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart. It is the curse of the modern age.

Nature, in her wisdom, had made us so that we could not look into our own eyes, at our own face. The only way to do so was to assume the properly humble position of stooping over to look at the reflection in a pond or stream. But now we have proven too clever for our own good. We live in the age of narcissism. Remember him? Narcissus? The cruel hero of Greek myth, renowned for his beauty, who upon falling in love with his own reflection in a pool of water could not tear himself away, and so he sat, stooped over looking at himself until he became the flower that to this day bears his name.

In all this there is deeper meaning for us who stare at the modern mirror. I'm not talking about the mirror in your bathroom, I'm talking about the mirror you are looking at right now. Turn off your monitor and you will see the face of the future of humanity. Our eyes looking out to an endless sea of ourselves, we transcend the shackles of our physical selves and become avatars in the new frontier; the undiscovered country.

Beautiful, but so tragic.

The man who invented the mirror poisoned the human heart.

So turn off your ipod, get off the phone, and for God's sake tear yourself away from this accursed mirror! This...what is around you and in you right now, this very instant that you read this word.

You are sitting right smack in the middle of the beatific vision. THIS IS IT! You are in it, but most importantly you are the eye that sees it. So just enjoy it.

But if you still are not convinced, maybe Howard Beale can.

TURN IT OFF!!!

Pleasure, Pain, Help, and Harm

The question: can that which does not feel pleasure or pain, be helped or harmed?

Can you harm a rock? No Socrates.

Can you harm the wind? Certainly not, Socrates.

Can you harm the green slime on the shady side of the rock? I don't think so.

Can you harm the fungi that grow out of the slime? Seems wierd to think that you could.

How is the term 'harm' related to 'violence'? Is 'to harm' the same as 'to do violence to'?


Harm -

O.E. hearm "hurt, evil, grief, pain, insult," from P.Gmc. *kharmaz (cf. O.N. harmr, O.Fris. herm, Ger. harm "grief, sorrow, harm"). The verb is from O.E. hearmian "to hurt," and ousted O.E. skeþþan "scathe" in all but a few senses.

Violence

late 13c., "physical force used to inflict injury or damage," from Anglo-Fr. and O.Fr. violence, from L. violentia "vehemence, impetuosity," from violentus "vehement, forcible," probably related to violare (see violate). Weakened sense of "improper treatment" is attested from 1590s. Violent is attested from mid-14c.1 In M.E. the word also was applied in reference to heat, sunlight, smoke, etc., with the sense "having some quality so strongly as to produce a powerful effect."


Violate

1432, "to break" (an oath, etc.), from L. violatus (see violation). Sense of "ravish" is first recorded c.1440.

Violation

1432, from L. violationem (nom. violatio) "an injury, irreverence," from violatus, pp. of violare "to violate, treat with violence, outrage, dishonor," perhaps related to vis "violence, strength."


Hubris

1884, from Gk. hybris "wanton violence, insolence, outrage," originally "presumption toward the gods," of unknown origin.

Bite your palm

I'm up late, reading aand writing, study study study. I'm so close to the end I can almost taste it, I just wanna take a big bite of the freedom and satisfaction of a job...done. But the closer I get the more I feel like a little boy trying to bite his palm. You pull the fingers back with your free hand, try and expose the flesh in the center of your hand, gnashing of teeeth, all biting in thin thin air. The teeth never do sink in. Even when something is as close as your palm, you still might not be able to get at it. We can't have everything we see.

I'm going to stop now, stop writing this. I'm going to try again. I can almost taste it. So close...

The Blog of Doubt

I doubt, therefore nothing.

You know, I walk around a lot in this city. And a lot of the time things come to me on these walks. Sometimes I'm walking to the coffee shop downtown and suddenly I am struck with the perception of a pattern, an order in things that I was hitherto blind to. I'm not talking about transcendent universal truths here or anything as grandiose as all that. Just ideas, sometime big sometimes small. Like how the integration of centralized computer control in heavy traffic areas would not only speed everything up, it would take the wheel and the gas pedal away from YOU! or me for that matter, or that dick with the big truck. Let's face it, people are terrible drivers. I am, you are, he is and she is too. Bus drivers suck, truck drivers suck, minivan drivers suck, little cars suck, cube van drivers suck; YOU ALL SUCK!! WE ALL SUCK AT DRIVING!!!!!!

so for christsake, we've got to save ourselves from ourselves. We have the technology, we can make it better. You can still have your damn car, your trusty mule, but you have to have a device installed on it to drive in busy areas.

Anyway that's the kind of crap I start thinking about. Have you ever seen the movie 'Network'? Peter Finch plays a TV newscaster who becomes the mad prophet of the airwaves. its good, really good. Trust me. Finch has this monologue that keeps haunting me. He walks into the studio and sits down at the new desk in front of the camera, on the air in 3...2...1...

I don't have to tell you things are bad, everybody knows things are bad.

Watch it here.

and here.

and here too.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that is unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

-Wittgenstein

Sleepless...

It is late. Too late. much, much too late. 

my perfect time.

Us night owls are an odd bunch. I think my night owl nature might stem from my deeply ingrained tendency to procrastinate. I put off going to bed at night, and I put off getting up in the morning. Invariably this causes sleep deprivation, which, if pushed, can yield a somewhat hallucinatory state.

For an insomniac, everything is a hallucination. Nothing's quite real. There's something about the rhythm of sleeping, waking, sleeping, and waking, that gives one a sense of the linearity of TIME. When you don't sleep, the rhythm is lost. And soon, all sense of meaning of TIME is lost. The ancients thought in terms of cycles. The sun rises and sets. So does the moon. The tides go in and out. The seasons repeat in sequence.

Man sleeps. Wakes. Then sleeps again, then wakes again.

The state of mind, or rather the state of 'perception', induced by the onset of prolonged insomnia is similar to that induced by opiates. The hard edges of the world are softened. Everything...recedes. An uneasy euphoria settles like a grey mist, enveloping the world, blurring what once appeared to be clear cut boundaries between self and other, form and emptiness. The mind...slows.

The world becomes a dream where nothing is real and nothing matters, insofar as everything is real and everything matters. Paradoxes are commonplace and taken for granted. Contradiction infuses everything...no problems.

Then the second wind blows in. The body's desperate attempt to stay alive, to keep functioning by opening the adrenaline floodgates. 

But in TIME, The body declares war on the opiate. And at last,

we succumb.

and drift back into the ancient rhythm of movement between worlds. The world behind closed eyes, behind thought, behind perception. And then,

WAKE

Simplicity

A collection of links, a series of associations.

An ode to simplicity.

The art of good writing: simplicity, clarity, elegance " and stop. - Michael Williams, Review

Simplicity - William Zinsser

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell

On Political Speech Writing - Phil Collins, BBC Arts and Ideas PodCast

This is one of the cardinal virtues of good writing. Simplicity. If you must speak, speak plainly.

The Magician's Son

This is the first story the Internet ever told me. I was 13 years old. That means I've been tooting around a copy in one format or another for 13 years. I've managed to save it all this time. It's not available online anymore, search for it and you don't find anything. Not a trace. I never met the author. Even the web server that hosted the original site is long gone. 13 years is a long time in internet years. It fascinates me that this is, in a sense, an internet 'relic'. I wonder if the internet is still around in 100 years if there will be 'digital archiologists' uncovering old data from the out time. I like to think of the story as an artifact, long since disappeared from the vast information sea, except tha I saved a copy. I loved this story, i still do. I hope you like it too. It's about MAGIC



The Magician's Son

A long time ago there lived a Great Magician. The Magician had a wonderful power that made absolutely everything full of love and beautiful to look upon. There was no such thing as pain or unhappiness in the Great Magician's realm.

At the Magician's side walked his son, whom he loved dearly. The boy was very beautiful and loved his father with all his heart. The Magician and his son did everything together, and there was nothing that they hid from one another. The son was in every way his father's equal -- except, of course, that he was the son and his father the father.

One day a strange and fascinating idea came to the mind of the Magician's son. He decided to make a special and wonderful gift for his father. It would be a surprise, and unlike any gift ever before given. To make the gift he would, of course, have to use his father's power, since his father's power was the only power there was anywhere. They'd always shared this power fully - yet for the making of his special gift, the boy thought he'd "borrow" a tiny corner of it, without his father's knowledge. This way the gift could be a surprise.

And so the gift was made - made in no more time than it took to think the thought of making it, which was no time at all since there was no such thing as time in those days.

And the gift? What exactly was this special thing the Great Magician's son made for him? Well, it was a feeling actually, a feeling the boy took upon himself to experience in his father's presence. The feeling was one of sadness, of hurt, of not having enough.

This was certainly a strange sort of gift for a loving son to give his father! No one had ever experienced such a feeling before, nor even heard of it. It was a thing entirely new - which I suppose was part of its appeal. But there was more to it than that. The boy had the idea that if his father saw him suffering, he would feel badly too, and want to comfort him with a special kind of love; he thought that if his father saw him in need of something, he would do his best to give it to him. In a way, this was indeed a wonderful idea for a gift. It was meant as a sort of game, you see. The boy would pretend he was hurting and in need and so on, and his father would go along with the make-believe and give him what he wanted.

But there turned out to be a serious problem with this gift. The problem was that the boy really wasn't hurting or in need. He was perfectly happy and had all there was to have. To make the gift be believable at all, he had to hide this truth from himself and really believe he was hurting and unhappy. This is where his father's power came in. For a stripped-down version of this power enabled him to see whatever he wanted to see and believe it real.

Well, this seemed sensible enough, but there was still a serious problem. For his father's power had never been intended to deny what really was and replace it with something else. Misused in this fashion, it simply plunged the boy into a magical dream. And although the dream allowed him to believe he was suffering and in need, it did nothing to change the reality of the world and his own actual happiness. He could go around all he liked believing he was miserable, but who else was going to believe it? Who else could even know about it, since the whole thing was just a dream? How could a dream be shared?

Still, the Great Magician was no fool. The moment his son's strange gift was offered, he knew something odd was going on. He could not see within the dream and know what was happening there, but he knew that something was and that it was making his son think himself unhappy. And though he would never think of forcing his son to wake up and quit believing his childish fantasies, he was hardly powerless. So what he did was this: At the very moment his son's gift was offered, he sent into the dream his love, a memory of himself and the world as they really were.

Instantly the son awoke, as was his father's intention.

Yet, in a tiny portion of the boy's mind, the dream lingered on. Although the decision to put aside the dream had been made, a fascination with it yet remained and had to run its course. Because within the dream itself the Magician's gift of love had not been accepted. Rather it had been seen as an insult, an illusion, a thing to be totally denied. For at the core of the dream was the boy's desire to please his father with a very special gift; and his father had not even acknowledged the gift, as far as he could tell - much less shown any appreciation for it. The fact that the Magician was unable to see any part of the gift, it being wholly a dream, never even occurred to the boy. How could the unreality of a dream be perceived from inside the dream itself?

So the son, seeing no sign of appreciation from his father, tried all the harder to shove the gift down his throat. He made the dream more and more solid and violent in an effort to have it be seen and accepted. This, of course, only made matters worse. Feeling himself betrayed by his father's denial of the wonderful gift, he became filled with anger and resentment. The Great Magician seemed now to haunt his son's dream as a cruel and terrible enemy, threatening awful punishment for his rebellion.

Trapped in the fabric of his own dream, the boy was terrified. Yet though he blamed his father for his fear, he feared even more to attack the Great Magician directly - though deep inside, in some obscure corner of his mind, he believed this to be exactly what he had already done by stealing his father's magic and falling into a dream. And deeper still, even more obscure and hidden, was the terrifying belief that he had somehow actually killed the Great Magician's real son and replaced him with a vile and evil impostor -- himself.

This was not a thought anyone would choose to look upon, however; so the boy buried his fear and guilt beneath a wall of rage. And he vented this rage by peopling his dream with others like himself, and conjuring up a world of things to have and want and fight over. From the figures of his dream he stole what he wanted, to meet the imagined needs unmet by his father. With some he joined in temporary friendship, with others he joined in battle. And through it all he imagined himself as special and different from all the rest. And he blamed them for the misery and guilt he now felt, saying that they in their greed were the cause, and not he. And more and more there dwelt, deep within his heart, a terrible feeling of aloneness; for he believed that all who existed were his enemy.

Such was the dream of the Great Magician's son. And horrible as it was, the boy cherished it passionately, claiming it a thing of beauty and wonder. For the world he had made was his world and not his father's, and in his mind it was a good one. True, it was a world filled with failure, cruelty, suffering and betrayal. But it also contained loftier things, like victory and all-consuming passions. And there was pleasure and gentleness, and love of a very special kind. These wonderful things could not be found in his father's world, but only in his own. His was a fine world, and a far more interesting one. He, the son, was as good a magician as his father ever was! For had he not made this wonderful world all on his own?

Well, no, not actually, since it was his father's borrowed power he had used to make it with.

All right, maybe he'd conveniently forgotten about that. But still, the original purpose of the world - the experience of pain and loss and imperfection - was his and his alone. The Great Magician could never have conceived of such things, much less brought them into being. The dream was his, and there was no way he was going to give it up! And anyway, the Magician hated him and would punish him terribly if he ever tried to go back. And the hatred was mutual, of course. For his wonderful gift - now twisted and altered beyond recognition, even by himself - remained unacknowledged, unappreciated, unloved. So screw the Old Man. Who needed him anyway?

Yet into this dream, at the very moment of its inception, the Great Magician had placed his own wonderful gift: the memory of love, and of the only world that could ever be real. And the gift had been instantly accepted, the decision to return home made. Yet because of his pride, his fear, his anger, his pain, the boy had to go about this return in his own special way. In the instant of its birth, the entire dream had been played out in every detail, like a complex design in a great tapestry. In that one instant, every step of his return was taken, its place unchangeable in the overall pattern.

But even though the boy's decision to set aside the dream had been made, and indeed the entire path to his awakening been walked through to the very end, still was he free to decide when he would recognize that this was so. He was free to replay the dream as often as he liked, savoring it, pondering it, hating it, loving it, pretending he didn't already know what was going to happen next. He invented a new and wondrous device to embody this reluctance to recognize the acceptance of his own decision to awaken. The device pushed away the inevitable moment of reconciliation and kept it separate from the reality of now; it put distance between the steps of his chosen path, making the way seem long and difficult. It was now easy to pretend the path lost or forgotten, or one not in agreement with his own true desire. He called this new invention "time", and calls it that to this day. For yes, the boy is dreaming still.

Yet is this reluctance, this unwillingness, balanced in his mind. It is balanced by the certainty of his eventual wakening, by the anticipation of the moment when he makes the final decision to renounce the dream and all its effects forever. The anticipation of this moment, a moment which has already occurred beyond time and apart from it, is the source of all the joy and peace he experiences while yet within the dream. For the dream itself contains neither peace nor joy, but only sensation, the thrill of victory, and the satisfaction of desire. Peace and joy must come from outside the dream -- from, in fact, the sure knowledge of the dream's final passing.

And so the son dreams on. . . .

Love and Money

If you walk down the street in downtown Calgary you can almost smell the money. This is boom town; black suits and white cowboy hats, big trucks and long limosines, cell phones and starbucks, laptops and leather shoes. A young proffesional type walking swiftly, talking on his blackberry, stepping over a bum who looks up at him as he passes without a glance or a second thought, dirty rough hands half raise a partly crumbled Tim Horton's cup.

At the bus stop, no suits. Courderoy dreadlocks eyes glance at me from behind oversized headphones. A young woman sits in the bus shelter, one hand on a baby carriage, watching a couple across the street walking close, hand in hand. 

On the bus, crowded, elderly lady sits with bag on seat next to her. Middle aged man with leather jacket standing next to me, glancing furtively at her. She notice's, but doesn't let it show, doesn't move or look or smile or say hello. Middle aged man with leather jacket next to me gets off the bus. The elderly lady looks at my shoes, she doesn't move.

So much opportunity, so much fear. So much for these lines that glance and skew...

Books that have changed the way I write

Five great books

Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, by Ken Kessey

Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller

The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Not that you give a shit, but these books are all works of sublime beauty. And if there were any justice in the world, you and everyone else would have read them already by now. But hey, maybe that's part of their magic. Nobody cares. (Or maybe you do care and maybe you have read them, in which case I'm a horse's ass)

No generation wants to make a world where Van Gogh's fate is repeated. We just can't help it.

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician. Talent and success interest me but moderately. The great class, they who affect our imagination, the men and women who could not make their hands meet around their objects, the rapt, the lost, the fools of ideas - they suggest what they cannot execute. They speak to the ages, and are heard from afar. -RWE

You tired old blog. We thought you were the future, but we didn't know facebook was waiting to eat you alive.

Motivation has elluded me. If ever I had a muse, it has deserted me these past weeks. I mean, I had an idea, sort of. But then, as the idea grew, it changed. It morphed from this train of thought to that train of thought, from one angle to another and then another. Before long I just got frustrated with the whole damn thing. And now I have a deadline staring me in the face.

But maybe it's not so bad. Deadlines can do wonderful things. Of course sometimes they do vicious things.

So here's the deal. I'm writing an essay about what it's like to play music and make absolutely no money at it; or worse, make a couple bucks at it. When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I'm a musician. My JOB is cooking for a deli, and being a student takes up most of my time. But I think of myself as a musician. The thing is, I never make any money at it, so a little  part of me feels like really I don't count as a musician so I should stop telling people that it's what I do. I mean, I don't do it for a living. If anything, music eats up my living. I spend all this time playing in a band and busking out on the streets or down in the subways. I was busking just recently and this guy told me to get a job. I couldn't fucking believe it. I have a job. It's a shitty job to be sure, kitchen work's like that. But the way he said it it felt like he was telling me to shut the fuck up cause no one wants to hear it; go get a job so we don't have to listen to you anymore. 

In busking, like everything, there's good stuff and then there's crap. I like to think that I'm usually in the former group, but you know, sometimes I wonder.

Ah screw it.

Just watch Trudeau

37 years ago today, Then Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau handled one of the best PM interviews ever caught on tape. Think what you will of the man or his politics, you have to admit: the man had balls.

You can watch this famous interview Here.

feed your head some Canadian History, youtube style. (well, CBC style in this case).

Taking the 'personal' out of computers.

Old RMS himself, aka St. IGNUcious of the Free Software Movement.


You may be interested in Richard Stallman's article on the future of the so-called 'personal' computer. Careful who you allow to take over control of the industries you don't think about all that often but upon which you almost certainly rely. This is especially significant to students, as Microsoft products continue to gain a stronghold (or maybe a stranglehold) in Education. Check it out. maybe it'll make you think twice about how great MS Office 2007 is.

Can you trust your computer???????

The anger and the fury

I'm reading again. Melville, The Whale. Moby Dick. I picked it up again this afternoon. It was lying on top of a pile of books in our half-moved-into new apartment, it's old green cover faded with the dust that has worked its way in. My father used to read this very book to me as a child, this very copy I now hold in my hands. I flip open to near the end, the last few chapters, and before I know it over three hours have passed and I'm still sitting on the floor reading, completely enveloped. I'm supposed to be getting work done, homework. But here I am, reading this old tome from my childhood and not tackling the mountain of text assigned to me. But I can't stop, it's the part near the very end where they are in final pursuit. The suspense, though I've read this story a thousand times before, is palpable, thick. Addictive.

Revenge, a madness not to be considered lightly...

I turn the page and a passage leaps out of the story and grabs me. Intertextual signifigance presses my conscious sub/un/conscious awareness of meaning in a postmodern vice grip. The words squeeeeeze. I read:

"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, where visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." --Chapter 41

Memories of music flow from the past...
We may chase down our enemies, even bring them to their knees.
We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace.

As I close the book the voice in my head that is at once me and not me asks me:
What would Captian Picard do? WWCPD?





for a klondike bar?




oh the madness of the times, everything a tribute to the schitzophrenic thouroughly unwittingly wittingly postmodern...yet altogether, Human......condition.