The Cubists – “The Orchestra Breathes”
Mechanical Advantage

There’s something soft and effervescent about this song, like it’s reaching you through a layer of drugs and water.

Cornelius Gemma, lib. 2 de nat. mirac. cap. 4, related of a young maid, called Katherine Gualter, a cooper’s daughter, anno 1571, that had such strange passions and convulsions, three men could not sometimes hold her; she purged a live eel, which he saw, a foot and a half long, and touched himself; but the eel afterwards vanished; she vomited some twenty-four pounds of fulsome stuff of all colours, twice a day for fourteen days; and after that she voided great balls of hair, pieces of wood, pigeon’s dung, parchment, goose dung, coals; and after them two pound of pure blood, and then again colas and stones, of which some had inscriptions, bigger than a walnut, some of them pieces of glass, brass, etc., besides paroxysms of laughing, weeping and ecstasies, etc. Et hoc (inquit) cum horrore vidi, “this I saw with horror.” They could do no good on her by physic, but left her to the clergy.

Anatomy of Melancholy

Caslon Specimen, 1728

The more fool you,“ Gerard replied, "If you continue this madness, you’ll never amount to anything, and do nothing but moon and fritter away your time. Your life will wither like green grass in a hot furnace, and you’ll be your own murderer, without ever having known any pleasure.

Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles

How blind to beliefs should employers be?

Richard Dawkins: “My colleague takes the view that this [young-earth creationist] is entitled to a job as a professor of astronomy, because he keeps his private beliefs to himself while at work. I take the opposite view. I would object to employing him, on the grounds that his research papers, and his lectures to students, are filled with what he personally believes to be falsehoods. He is a fake, a fraud, a charlatan, drawing a salary for a job that could have gone to an honest astronomer. Moreover, I would regard his equanimity in holding two diametrically opposing views simultaneously in his head as a revealing indicator that there is something wrong with his head.”

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The Dismemberment Plan – “Crush”
Split EP w/ Juno

This deconstruction of the original pop song by Jennifer Paige is, in a way, a precursor to the slowed-down Bieber of memedom. Changing the instrumentation and tempo to let the melody breathe makes for a completely different song.

Revolt of the Elites

“The mark of superior people, in Ortega’s sense, is that they consider themselves inferior to what they may become. Self-improvement, for all that it smacks of the self-help shelf at Barnes & Noble, is also, in this way, the rallying cry of the only kind of elite worth having.
…
The resentful right, under the banner — hoisted alike by Beck, Huckabee, and Palin — of common sense, flatters deprivation as wisdom by implying to the uneducated that an education isn’t worth having. The violence this bigoted proposition has done to the talents and capacities of millions of people is incalculable, unforgivable.”

Here were grounds for abundance of savage elation. But there was also the deep-seated hatred of half a life of mutual and persistent aggression and revilings; and Handsome Charlie was capable of nursing a grudge, and enjoying a revenge with his whole heart.

Sheridan Le Fanu, Squire Toby’s Will