http://sarahbrown.name/

AMERICA IS THE GREATEST NATION IN THE WORLD!

Sat, 05 May 2012 13:00:42 -0700

Healthcare: 37
Maternal Mortality: 39
Women Holding Elected Office: 81
Women in Legislative Positions: 68

Here’s where we are #1:

GDP

SPENDING!

We spend more money per capital for maternity care than any other country.

We spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined.

IMPRISONMENT

We imprison more of our population than anywhere else on the world.

Blake Masters: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 4 Notes Essay

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 18:11:46 -0700

Blake Masters: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 4 Notes Essay:

blakemasters:

Here are my class notes, typed in essay form, from Class 4 of CS183: Startup. Errors, omissions, and/or poor phrasing are my own. Credit for good substance and wording is Peter’s entirely.

CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—April 11—The Last Mover Advantage

I. Escaping Competition

The…

Lowell, Lowell, Lowell, Lowell / Corn is the thing he does so well / Philip Larkin

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:38:00 -0700

Lowell, Lowell, Lowell, Lowell /
Corn is the thing he does so well /

Philip Larkin

Evelyn Waugh, Work Suspended (1941, self-published edition)

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:13:00 -0700

“…In youth we had pruned our aesthetic emotions hard back so that in man cases the had reverted to briar stock; we none of us wrote or read poetry or if we did it was of a kind which left unsatisfied those wistful half-romantic half aesthetic peculiarly British longings which in the past used to find expression in so man slim lambskin volumes. When the poetic mood was on us we turned to buildings and gave them the place which our fathers accorded Nature – to almost any building but particularly those in the classical tradition.

Whatever secretly we thought about our own work we professed in public to regard it as drudgery and our triumphs as successful impostures on the world at large. To speak otherwise would be to suggest that we were concerned with anyone else’s interest but our own…To write of someone loved of oneself loving above all of oneself being loved – how can these things be done with propriety? How can the be done at all.

Love that delights in weakness seeks out and fills the empty places and completes itself inits work of completion. Love which has its own life its hours of sleep and waking its health and sickness growth death and immortality its ignorance and knowledge experiment and master.

The algebra of fiction must reduce its problems to symbols if they are to be solvable at all. Iam shy of a book commended to me on the grounds that the characters are alive. There’s no place in literature for a live man solid and active…The alternative classical expedient isto take the whole man and reduce him to a manageable abstraction.

Set up our picture plain fix our point of vision make our figure 20 foot high or the size of a thumbnail he will be life-size on our canvas; hang our picture in the darkest corner our heaven will still be its one source of light. Beyond these limits lie the only trouser buttons and crepe hair with which futurists used to adorn their paintings. It is anyway in the classical way I have striven to write.

I had always been a one corpse man eschewing the blood transfusions which most of my rivals resorted to revitalise their flagging stories; moreover I eschewed anything that was remotely sordid or salacious… My corpses invariably were male solitary of high position unworldly and bloodless. I abhorred blunt instruments and features battered beyond recognition.

GV in ‘Death in the Dukeries’ was decapitated but only it will be remembered after he had been dead for some time through other causes. No character of mine ever writhed or vomited. On the other hand while avoiding blood I was tolerable free with the thunder. I despised a purely functional novel as I despised contemporary architecture; the girders and struts of the plot require adornment and concealment; I relish the masked buttresses false domes superfluous columns all the subterfuges of literary architecture and the plaster and gilt of its decoration.

A tenth of my writing or more went on stage effects: sudden eddies of cold air would strike my curtains and now and then when the sequence of emotions I planned for my readers required a moment of revulsion and terror I would kill an animal in atrocious circumstances…….The delicate fibres of a story suffer when it is chopped up into instalments…My ambition was to eradicate moneye as much as I could from my life and todo so required planning…

To produce something saleable in large quantities to the public which had absolutely nothing of myself in it; to sell something for which the kind of people I liked and respected would have a use…Their writing was painful – because I have an unhappy combination of being lazy and fastidious…indispensable austerity [where I write]…I was asleep by half-past-nine. In those circumstances the book progressed well. Family love and independence don’t go together… my father made me an allowance of 30 shilling a week for the first 3 years I was in London and he never forgave me never……..

I had not then learned to appreciate the massive defences of what people call the ‘borderline of sanity’ and I was at moments afraid he was going out of his mind…an element of persecution mania…”

Promoting at random instead of by merit results in a better company because it avoids the Peter Principle.

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 18:49:40 -0700

Promoting at random instead of by merit results in a better company because it avoids the Peter Principle.

Why I am Not Happy

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 09:04:00 -0800

Honestly, I’m not sure whether I’m happy or not. I never think about it. I do think about things I care about, and happiness is pretty low on that list.

I know it is the most modern of feelings to value happiness above all else, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.

Here is a list of things I value more than happiness (roughly in order):

1. Truth
2. Honesty
3. Freedom
4. Good manners
5. Being interesting/Funny
6. Kindness
7. Efficiency/Elegance
8. Beauty (in the world, around me)
9. Power (defined as the ability to change the world into something that’s more how you want it to be)
10. Diligence
11. Generosity
12. Creativity
13. Doing what you say you’ll do
14. Pleasure

Probably happiness is #15. But if any of the above made me unhappy, I’d still prefer to engage in them than be happy.

"So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind is..."

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:21:48 -0800

“So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.”

- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"[b]asic melancholy; sullen glooms and black studies; atrocious temper; protracted vegetable comas;..."

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:42:58 -0800

“[b]asic melancholy; sullen glooms and black studies; atrocious temper; protracted vegetable comas; silences and disappearances; terror of death, heights, strokes, mice; shyness and gaucheness; pompous, platitudinary, repetitive periods of bottom-raking boredom and boorishness; soulburn, heartdoubt; headspin; my all-embracing ignorance; my still only half-squashed and forgotten bourgeois petty values; all my excrutiating whimsicality; all my sloth; all my eye!”

- The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas

"Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:34:50 -0800

"Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

"Imagination is the voice of daring. If there’s anything God-like about God, it is that he..."

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:27:54 -0800

“Imagination is the voice of daring. If there’s anything God-like about God, it is that he dared to imagine everything.”

- Henry Miller

Grit

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:08:04 -0800

Grit

Photo

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:07:34 -0800

"O Divine Poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this song of the various-minded man who,..."

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 14:44:00 -0800

“O Divine Poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this song of the various-minded man who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy, was made to stray grieviously about the coasts of men, the sport of their customes, good and bad, while his heart, through all the sea-faring, ached with an agony to redeem himself and bring his company safe home. Vain hope—for them. The fools! Their own witlessness cast them aside. To destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun, wherefore the Sun-god blotted out the day of their return. Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O Muse…”

- The Odyssey, T.E. Lawrence translation

"I tell Raj, you think I’m not helping the poor in India. Go take a look at what’s being..."

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 06:25:00 -0700

“I tell Raj, you think I’m not helping the poor in India. Go take a look at what’s being built there. Watch how the economy is developing. See the opportunity. Who do you think did that, artists and Peace Corp volunteers? Not a chance. It was those of us staying up at 3 AM in our cubicles so we could conference-call Bangalore. That’s who.”

- Lightning People

Old art! Oh sketches for paintings done digitally when that seemed innovative! Oh girl I was in...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:36:00 -0700

Old art! Oh sketches for paintings done digitally when that seemed innovative! Oh girl I was in college! Oh girl I still am today! Oh the 90’s, the Panopticon, Foucault, and the Dostoevsky scholar I lived with in Cambridge!

Topiaries grazing on the eye-rays of order.This is a mocking...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:31:00 -0700

Topiaries grazing on the eye-rays of order.This is a mocking picture, as it suggests that animals-as-plants are a good analog for spaces acting as preserves for fun or nature. What’s missing, and what is thereby pointed at, is the wild. Preserving wildlife (gorillas in zoos, humans in theme parks) is a contradictory enterprise.

A place as much as a picture, this image at once conveys the sensation of stopping for a view and being the object of such a view. The lines of perspective, bending inward and overhead, sink you into your coordinates while they emphasize the grid of lookers-on. It’s a panopticon with shrubbery.

Everything at its zenith.This picture aims to catch, or maybe...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:29:09 -0700

Everything at its zenith.This picture aims to catch, or maybe define, a moment which is at once an instant (the instant before everything’s done for) and total, timeless. The timelessness it espouses is not that of a religion’s eternity but of apocalypse: here is the feeling that knocks the world out cold.

The blankness of her underwear is the erotic opponent to the...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:27:11 -0700

The blankness of her underwear is the erotic opponent to the clinging encroaching ribbons and fussilades of bourgeois decor, whose ‘pretty’ tendrils reach out for every empty space, quiet time, and naked form. This picture asks what we are wearing, inside, outside, everywhere; and it asks: does what we’ve put on compare to the suggestiveness of what has no branding or pattern but only a good fit.

"So I shall attempt, contrary to my normal method, to write a story with a beginning, a middle, and a..."

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 08:36:05 -0700

“So I shall attempt, contrary to my normal method, to write a story with a beginning, a middle, and a ‘grand finale’ followed by silence and falling rain.”

- Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

I wear my fur coat as a bathrobe too.

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:58:00 -0700

I wear my fur coat as a bathrobe too.