Teach me to care and not to care.
“A man usually has no idea what is being said about him. The entire town may be slandering him, but if he has no friends he will never hear of it.”
-Balzac
“If a friend tell thee a fault, imagine always that he telleth thee not the whole.”
-Thomas Fuller
A brother offended is not easily won; a brother easily offended is never won.
“Good evening, everyone. We’re so glad you’re here. I’d like to ask everyone to take this opportunity to silence your phones. If your phone goes off during the performance/service, we ask you make a $20 donation to our cause. You’ll find boxes near the exits where you can leave your donation. Thanks, and enjoy the show.”
The latest episode of Proverbial is committed to the only real proverb which concerns Christmas.
Giuseppe Giusti’s Banda Rossa 20-year vinegar
Frederic Malle’s Noir Epices
jjjjound x Reebok Classic Nylon White (Size 13)
Esteban’s Amber Japanese style incense
A bronze gong, perhaps this one or even this one
Nishane discovery set, Serge Lutens discovery set
D.S. & Durga car fresheners
For most of the year, I was ready to call Blackberry the best film of the year (and you really ought to see it), but no, it’s The Holdovers. A truly lovely film that heavily recalls the early work of Tobias Wolff, Peter Bogdanovich, and maybe a little bit of JD Salinger.
There’s not a store on earth which has any incentive to actually stage their biggest sales on Black Friday or Cyber Monday anymore.
“My suspicion, then, is that as mankind gains more and more control over nature, we will need Christmas to begin earlier and earlier. If we are impatient, we are impatient to escape the atheistic world of time in which modernity has trapped us.
“So,” sneers the grinch, “you’d prefer Christmas to begin in January? Is that what you’re shilling for now?” Well, in a manner of speaking, yes. Absolutely.”
-from There’s A Good Reason The Christmas Season Keeps Getting Longer, my latest for CiRCE
“Americans have so many things that a certain kind of book has lately proliferated which is expressly designed to make readers want to get rid of their things, and to feel good about it. Simplicity and minimalism are hot ticket non-items this year. Of course, minimalism is really just another kind of thing you buy. We purchase food dehydrators as the accoutrements of diets which will help us lose weight so we can feel chic in our black mock-turtleneck sweaters… and then we purchase books telling us to simplify, to get rid of our food dehydrators, and we tell ourselves that such simplicity is part of a new, sleek, more European image we are adopting, which will, incidentally, need to be accessorized with a black mock-turtleneck sweater. Americans do not actually know this is European, but it seems European, for every American keeps a somewhat Romantic notion that somewhere in Sweden, or Austria, or Belgium, or perhaps Tokyo, there is a certain kind of sleek, sophisticated way of life which comes from wearing black, drinking white wine, having no children, and knowing who Mark Rothko is. Even ugly, stupid people in Austria know who Mark Rothko is. Austrian people are Criterion Collection human beings.”
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.