The Handmaid's Tale

Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is usual. Even this is as usual, now.
We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in the ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Pirates are sexy

An interview worth reading.

I found this interview inspiring in a number of ways. I like that he came right out and said that what he was doing was illegal, and not morally sound (he did try to justify it, but I found some of those points compelling).

Maybe if the twinge of guilt is still there and the appreciation for the art itself remains intact, perhaps the means to acquire said art could be considered a secondary sin at best, er worst.

So kudos, The Real Caterpillar. Great handle!!

RE: list of favorite books and writers (machine color)

I'm leaving poets for another day

Herman Hesse

Mark Twain (his short stories most of all & The Diaries of Adam and Eve)

Albert Camus

Rousseau

Ayn Rand (We The Living & The Virtue of Selfishness more than Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead, those clunkers were more for the cool cats just trying to look cool, but well written nonetheless)

Foucault

Plato

Homer

Alasdair MacIntyre

T.H. White's The Once and Future King

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front

Frank McCourt, Tom Robbins, Truman Capote, James Joyce, George Orwell

Brian Friel, Bertolt Brecht, and Tony Kushner

Barbara Kingsolver, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Zora Neale Hurston

Agatha Christie, James Ellroy (only The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential)

Michel Crichton, Lewis Carroll, Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells

Lois Lowry, Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein, Theodor Seuss Geisel
yeah . . . that's a good start