Out of Context, Issue 4

"The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings his own pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy."

Joyce, James. Scylla and Charybdis, Ulysses.

Out of Context, Issue 3 (or Who's Afraid of Comparative Advantage?)

"There are two technologies for producing automobiles in America. One is to manufacture them in Detroit, and the other is to grow them in Iowa. Everybody knows about the first technology; let me tell you about the second. First you plant seeds, which are the raw materials from which automobiles are constructed. You wait a few months until wheat appears. Then you harvest the wheat, load it onto ships, and sail the ships westward into the Pacific Ocean. After a few months, the ships reappear with Toyotas on them."

Landsburg, S. (1993). The Armchair Economist. As cited by Bryan Caplan in The 4 Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters, reasononline, October 2007.

Out of Context, Issue 2

"I recall this one kid, I condition to shit on sight of me. Then I wash his ass and screw him. It was real tasty. And he was a lovely fella too. And sometimes a subject will burst into boyish tears because he can't keep from ejaculate when you screw him."

from Benway, Naked Lunch. William Burroughs, 1959.

Out of Context: A New Series

Young Castle called me "Scoop." "Good morning, Scoop. What's new in the word game?"
"I might ask the same of you," I replied.
"I'm thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?"
"Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the policemen or firemen walking out."
"Or the college prfessors."
"Or the college professors," I agreed. I shook my head. "No, I don't think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed."
"I just can't help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems. . . "
"And how proud would you be when people started dying like flys?" I demanded.
"They'd die like mad dogs, I think--snarling and snapping at each other and biting their own tails."
I turned to Castle the elder. "Sir, how does a man die when he's deprived of the consolations of literature?"
"In one of two ways," he said, "petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system."
"Neither one very pleasant, I expect," I suggested.
"No," said Castle the elder. "For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing."

from A Medical Opinion on the Effects of a Writer's Strike, Cat's Cradle. Kurt Vonnegut, 1963.