Lawrence Block

She had an inch-long scar on her sharp chin, and he let himself imagine giving her some new scars.  Breaking some bones.  Driving the heel of his hand into her temple, right next to the eye socket.  If you did it just right, you got the eye to pop out.  If you did it wrong, well, there was nothing to stop you from trying again, was there?

(Oh, my.  That's not a pleasant thing to contemplate, is it?  From his story "Scenarios," which is included in the 2010 crime anthology, The Dark End of the Street.)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura ["a certain nonchalance"].  Their idea of the sabbatical is to work six days and rest for one; my idea of the sabbatical is to work for (part of) a day and rest for six.

From his 2010 book, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms.  Taleb is fluent in English, French, and Arabic; can converse in Spanish and Italian; and can read classical texts in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and ancient Hebrew.  The author Malcolm Gladwell is a great admirer of Taleb.

A black swan

 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.

From his 2010 book, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms.  Procrustes was the mythical Greek host who made his guests fit his bed by either chopping off their feet (if they were too tall to fit the bed) or stretching them on a rack (if they were too short).  Theseus turned the tables on Procrustes by making him fit his bed by chopping off his head.  

Taleb believes we humans squeeze life and the world into reductive categories and prepackaged narratives -- we make the man fit the bed rather than making the bed fit the man.

Theseus turns the tables on Procrustes

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working.

Amen to that, brother!  From his 2010 book, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms.  Taleb is a Lebanese-born philosopher, writer, and practitioner of mathematical finance.  He is best known for his 2007 book about unpredictable events, The Black Swan, which warned of the fragility of the global financial structure.  This is the first of three consecutive posts featuring his aphorisms.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Kanye West

I met this MILF at the All-Star getting action

A cougar with more rings than Phil Jackson

Told her beauty is why God invented eyeballs

And her booty is why God invented my balls

It's June, and the NBA is still playing basketball.  These lines are from the verse Kanye contributed to "Start It Up," the 2010 Lloyd Banks single that also featured Swizz Beatz and Fabolous.  Phil Jackson has 11 championship rings as a coach and two more as a player, but it looks like that's all he's going to get.

Langston Hughes

I woke up this mornin'

'Bout half past three

All the womens in town

Was gathered round me

Sweet gals was a-moanin',

"Sylvester's gonna die!"

And a hundred pretty mamas

Bowed their heads to cry.

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902.  Both his parents were of mixed racial origins -- he also had Native American ancestors, and a Jewish great-grandfather.  "Sylvester's Dying Bed" was written in 1931.  Some scholars believe Hughes was gay, but his primary biographer believes he was asexual.   

David Foster Wallace

Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals.  This one particular boy's goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his body.

His arms to his shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were child's play.  After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf.  The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him.  He was six.

From his bizarre but fascinating short story, "Backbone," which appeared in the March 7, 2011, issue of the New Yorker.  Wallace was 46 when he committed suicide in 2008 by hanging himself.  He had long suffered from depression.  He tried to wean himself from his primary medication when he suffered severe side effects, but his depression returned, and the medication was no longer effective when he started taking it again.

David Foster Wallace