I love that the regularly referenced newspaper in A Pup Named Scooby-Doo is called The National Exaggerator 📺

Finished reading: The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Volume 1 by Eiji Otsuka 📚

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson 📚

My impression was that once you know the conceit of the story, the writing is a swamp to be slogged through to experience the original seed. I am glad I read it, if only to know the original in full—to be able to see the offshoots and deviations of later works. The warping of the ur narrative.

All that being said, I did like these lines:

The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my disposition;

I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.

To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations

it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught.

I have a few daily reads books—the kind that has a different entry for each day of the year with quotes, insights, thoughts, wisdom, etc.—that I’m reading through this year. Yesterday’s entries felt especially relevant to the current moment we find ourselves in.

from 365 Days of Meditations from Diogenes the Cynic and Aristippus the Cyrenaic by Frances Roseuvir 📚

When [Diogenes] saw a notice on the house of a profligate man, “To be sold.” “I knew,” said he, “that you who are so incessantly drunk, would soon vomit up your owner.”

from A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy 📚

From the first moment the members of a religious gathering said, “The Holy Spirit is among us,” when they claimed theirs the highest authority above all other authorities, when they accepted the results of their own meditation as more worthy than the divine spark that exists in every person (that is, the intellect and the conscience), from this time, a great lie originated, a lie which deceives the bodies and souls of many people, which has destroyed millions of human beings, and which continues its terrible work.

-Randall Thomas Davidson

from The Daily Laws by Robert Greene 📚

The tribe feels its very existence at stake by the presence of the enemy. There is little middle ground. Battles can be more intense and violent between tribes. The future of the human race will likely depend on our ability to transcend this tribalism and to see our fate as interconnected with everyone else’s. We are one species, all descendants of the same original humans, all brothers and sisters. Our differences are mostly an illusion. Imagining differences is part of the madness of groups. We must see ourselves as one large reality group and experience a deep sense of belonging to it.

We must come to the conclusion that the primary group we belong to is that of the human race. That is our inevitable future. Anything else is regressive and far too dangerous.

We are all different, we are all human.

Finished reading: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson 📚

Finished reading: Batman Noir: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb 📚

Finished reading: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James 📚

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson 📚

All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.

“If I am spared,” he always said to Constance, “I will write the book myself. If not, see that my notes are entrusted to some worthy cynic who will not be too concerned with the truth.”

“We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.”

almost as though in the house of her life there had always been a room kept for Cousin Charles.

that we had somehow lost ourselves and come back through the wrong gap in time, or the wrong door, or the wrong fairy tale.

and laughed, with the tears running down our cheeks and echoes of our laughter going up the ruined stairway to the sky.

Finished reading: Little Mermaid, In Passing by Angela Slatter in Grimdark #40 📓📚

To its inspiration material as Wicked to Wizard of Oz. With a dash of Shelley.

the price for something you want desperately, but should not have, is always red.

greedy as a mortal, coveting what I’ve not got whilst forgetting what I do have.

Anything you don’t value, don’t use, don’t exercise, will desert you.

I have become a concentration of prices paid, of deals done, of treasures left behind.

Never once do they think what the other might want. That love, if it were true, if it were right, would find its own way.

Finished reading: Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent by Scott Lynch in Grimdark #40 📓📚

Got turned on to Scott Lynch by @manton and now I anxiously await any new entry in the Gentleman Bastard canon.

Chains sighed the whole-body sigh of a man who freshly resolves not to murder five children every day of his life.

The men had no theory of strategy and played like children, with random enthusiasm, and as a result, their matches were strangely fascinating.

Finished reading: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson 📚 🎃

Finished Listening: The Crucible by Arthur Miller 📚🎧 🎃 🧙‍♀️

This version from L.A. Theatre Works starring Richard Dreyfuss and Stacy Keach is amazing.

Now I want to watch the Daniel Day-Lewis movie.

This is my kind of game show.

Eerie East Anglia by Edward Parnell

Few people can resist the temptation to try a little amateur research in a department quite outside their own, if only for the satisfaction of showing how successful they would have been had they only taken it up seriously.

Awake he remained, in any case, long enough to fancy (as I am afraid I often do myself under such conditions) that he was the victim of all manner of fatal disorders:

Its eyes made day of the road fifty yards ahead, and the romance of night was fairyland round us.

Those who turn the instruments of science upon nature will always be in danger of seeing more than they looked for.

She has that happiest of tricks—without which paradise will be dull indeed—the trick of surprise.

If people waited for the approval of relatives before marrying, the world would be depopulated in a generation.

None of us would ever fall in love in English. We would be safe from that.

Finished reading: Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü 📚

In the old days, you could see through the old wooden floorboards to the sea. Now there are the chandeliers, nylon curtains, formica tables, and concrete floors that speak of a debased culture.

In a few hours, a new day will begin. Everyone will live that day in their own way.

Finished reading: between satellites by Dave Read 📓

autumn bullets a duck without encryption

Finished reading: Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil 📚

Monsters don’t incarnate. They regress.

Finished reading: The Taco Stand at the Edge of the Woods by Katherine Montalto 📓

Finished reading: Outgrowth by Sonia Feldman 📝

When I’m working with the flowers, a window in my mind flings open. My thoughts, like springtime animals, bound through the aperture and into the gaping distance. Something like relief.

Finished reading: Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil 📚

Finished reading: Macbeth by William Shakespeare 📚

Finished reading: Orpheus in the Underpass by Gabriel Rosenstock 📚

no smell of earth
of grapes or honey…
stale piss

The history of haiku shows us that the genre becomes stale, irrelevant, uninspiring and repetitive when it becomes still. It must be on the move, as Basho, Issa and Santoka once were. They are still moving, those haiku masters, constantly and in an unpredictable fashion.

Finished reading: Says The Rose by Tiffany Shaw-Diaz 📚

pounding on the echo chamber door my no to your yes

into June’s hymn I recast your death

Finally watched Nosferatu 🍿

Finished reading: Leaves in the Wind by Foster Jewell 📚

Nearing the mountains –
yesterday, and still today…
tomorrow —

From vanishing world
a last coyote call.
The final silence.

Not the buzzard
so much as his shadow…
circling around me now…