Anarchy For Gilligan’s Island, Kafka, & The UK

Best Experienced With: Sex Pistols; Anarchy in The UK

(please right click the link below to open up the suggested music for this evening’s get together in a new browser window)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQkActP-isE&feature=related

Johnny Lydon ( aka J. Rotten of Sex Pistols fame) and Public Image Limited finished up their reunion tour this week in New York City. The final episode of Lost is next week. The anarchists are still running amok in Greece and will become even more silly when Greece declares bankruptcy in the next few weeks. Coincidence?

There is no such thing as coincidence. Let’s pull all three of those sentences together, put them in a different context, and wrap them in a big ball of Franz Kafka quotes, Gilligan’s Island characters and Sex Pistols music. Plus, let’s start and end our time together with two of my favorite calculus comics. That’s a good Saturday evening right there. A big old murdering smoke monster would have made Gilligan’s Island far more palatable back in the day. Shall we begin?

“All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers is contained in the dog”

“”Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible,” she said, “but that alone doesn’t make it true”

“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”

“I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.”

“In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.”

“Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”