“writing”

• 382: emotional dettachment
  
• 481: “awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future” (personal favorite)
  
• 888: “the desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it”
  
• 3: the desire to want to dial the the Penfield mood organ (interestingly, this emotion has a very low number, suggesting it’s a basic, heavily-relied-upon one)
  
• 594: “pleased acknowledgment of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters”
  

• unknown 1: “a creative and fresh attitude toward his job”
  
• unknown 2: “ecstatic sexual bliss”
  
• unknown 3: “despair”
  
• unknown 4: “businesslike professional attitude”
  
• unknown 5: “self-accusatory depression”
  

The Penfield mood organ is a wonderfully original invention but what’s even most admirable is the masterful introduction to it Philip Dick pulls off: those 1,300 words are dense and microcapsuled enough to be able to stand alone as a great short story.

I’m absolutely fascinated reading Daniel H. Pink’s A Whole New Mind (I’ve just read over half of it) and this is a droll ultra-short story (mini-saga he calls them) I found there:

The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.

You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”

I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.

En ficcion, el primer paso para crear destruccion digna de ese nombre es describir algo tan bello que duela destruirlo. Si quieres un divorcio realmente tragico y amargo, muestra primero lo feliz e idilico que fue el noviazgo. Para que que duela la caida, vuela alto. No duele el vacio, duele el recuerdo de lo que alguna vez hubo, la superposicion.

Es por eso que creo que el prefijo “des” (y su equivalente en otros diomas) es la forma suprema del lenguaje para expresar destruccion. Sad no lastima, no puede, lo mismo que unhappy, que insinua felicidad solo para arrebatarla. Existe algo mas triste que el desamor, la desesperanza, el desencanto, la desilusion, el desamparo?

I have got to read Nietzsche one of these days.