Fragments

1Schoolmaster: Suppose x is the number of sheep in this problem.

Pupil: But, Sir, suppose x is not the number of sheep.

(I asked Professor Wittgenstein if this is not a profound philosophical joke, and he said it was.)

2as long as it’s new,
as long as it’s new,
as long as it flashes and fucking bleeps in forty different colours.

3no matter how many books you read, there is something in this world that you never ever ever ever ever fucking understand.

4These fragments you have shelved (shored).

“Slut!” “Bitch!” Truth and Calliope

5The term “cybernetics” is derived from the Greek κυβερνήτης, or steersman.

6“this is a truly disappointing end, but I am accepting it with a sense of urgency,” Anno said in a press release.

7Hey, my boy, it’s you and us knife missiles now.

8Nabokov… that clumsy imitator of Joyce.

9Work hard and be scary.

10Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.

11Paranoia is just reality on a finer scale.

12the Gothic flatline: a plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive.

13Baudrillard observes somewhere that computers don’t really remember because they lack the ability to forget.

14cast into matter, alone in the universe.

15Not so, madam, he thinks. If need be, I can separate you from history.

16As he walks away he thinks, that’s a conversation I shouldn’t have had.

17Possibly it’s something women do: spend time imagining what it’s like to be each other.

18“Yueh! Yueh! Yueh!” goes the refrain. “A million deaths were not enough for Yueh!”

19three-dimensional sunburn.

20Anger cannot be dishonest.

21The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

22The girls had cocaine, and the music was loud. It was total happiness. And both of them had ten long, red fingernails with an endless supply of beautiful white powder … The feds spent a million bucks trying to figure out whether, when those fingernails passed under my nose, did I inhale or exhale, and I ain’t telling.

23The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space. There is no other reason than this why “the hand I touch and see coincides spatially with the hand I immediately feel.”

24Listen. You listen to me. You see that city over there? THAT’S where I’m supposed to be. Not down here with the dogs, and the garbage, and the fucking last month’s newspapers blowing back and forth. I’ve had it with them, I’ve had it with you, I’ve had it with ALL THIS — I want ROOM SERVICE! I want the club sandwich, I want the cold Mexican beer, I want a $10,000-a-night hooker! I want my shirts laundered… like they do… at the Imperial Hotel… in Tokyo.

25Riemann’s dark geometry. His christawful symbols she had called them.

26Aura is a quality integral to an artwork that cannot be communicated through mechanical reproduction techniques — such as photography.

27Let Ahab beware of Ahab.

28To all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.

29Actually, “Dr. Internet” is the name of the monsters’ creator.

30In order to determine whether or not I really wanted to die, I went up to the rooftop of this building (the GAINAX building) and stuck my foot out, waiting to lose my balance and fall forward. I did it to personally determine [whether I wanted to live or die], [thinking,] if I really want to die, I should die here, and if I don’t want to die, I’ll step back. Well, it didn’t lead to my death, and so I’m here.

31For example, I wonder if a person over the age of twenty who likes robot anime is really happy. He could find greater happiness elsewhere. Regrettably, I have my doubts about his happiness.

32べつに　することもないし
悲しいこともなかったので
ひとりでにこにこしていた

33Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

34There are no answers, only choices.

35Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or be on television.

36[1:22] oh good lord
[1:23] it’s like noam chomsky, gustav klimpt and hans rosling had a nightmare baby

37Coherence is mutilation. I want disorder.

38After all, to any rational mind, the greater part of the history of ideas is a history of freaks.

39There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

40Time is the longest distance between two places.

41There is the film one conceives, there is a film one writes, and then there’s the film one shoots. But none of those things actually exist. There’s only the film you edit: that’s the only thing that actually exists, and a lot of times people want them all to exist together, and they can’t. Editing does what it wants, and the more you fight it the more trouble you’ll have.

42This is how I was led, without even realizing and as if at play, to overturn the most fundamental notion of all for the geometer: that of space (and that of “variety”), namely the conception of the “place” where geometrical things live.

43The mathematical developments of the past few decades have indicated an even more intimate symbiosis between continuous and discontinuous structures than we may have imagined existed as recently as during the first half of the century.

44One of the most striking features which distinguishes the euclidian (or newtonian) model of space-time from Einstein’s first model (known as “special relativity”) is that the global topological shape of space-time remains indeterminate, rather than being imperatively prescribed by the very nature of the model. The question of determining which global shape describes our physical reality appears to me (as a mathematician) as one of cosmology’s most fascinating questions.

45I spent a certain amount of time on game theory. There’s something seductive about it. Von Neumann got caught up in it. Maybe that’s not the right term. But I think I finally began to see that it promised explanations it wasn’t capable of supplying. It really is game theory. It’s not something else. Conway or no Conway. Everything that you start out with is a tool, but your hope is that it actually comprises a theory.

46You have found a place to stand where you can look back at the world from nowhere.

47the colors shift, trade tones
everybody’s trying for something better anymore.

48beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

49I’m all primary process.

50Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light.

51The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep but blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.