are you dreaming, Frederick?

"We're smugglers of authenticity and emotion. We wrap it carefully and place it in armored trucks. We unload when and where the reader least expects it."
--Chris Bachelder, "On a Difficult Sentence in Gatsby"


"We do not know what the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the image of a dragon that is congenial to man's imagination...It is, one might say, a necessary monster."
--Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, pg. xii


"I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so incapable of thought, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."
--Howard W. Campbell Jr, Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, pg. 160


" 'For eons of evolutionary time, our DNA has been whispering into the ears of our cells that we are, each one of us, the most precious things in the universe and that any action that entails the slightest risk to us may have consequences of universal importance. 'Be careful, get comfortable, don't make any waves,' whispers the DNA. Conversely, the yearning for freedom, the risky belief that there is nothing to lose and nothing to gain, is also in our DNA. But it's of much more recent evolutionary origin, according to me. It has arisen during the past couple of million years, during the rapid increase in brain size and intellectual capacity associated with our becoming human. But the desire for security, the will to survive, is of much greater antiquity. For the present, the conflicting yearnings in the DNA generate a basic paradox that in turn generates the character--nothing if not contradictory--of man. To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How's that for a paradox? But since the genetic bent for freedom is comparatively recent, it may represent an evolutionary trend. We may yet outgrow our overriding obsession to survive. That's why I encourage everyone to take chances, to court danger, to welcome anxiety, to flaunt insecurity, to rock every boat and always cut against the grain. By pushing it, goosing it along whenever possible, we may speed up the process, the process by which the need for playfulness and liberty becomes stronger than the need for comfort and security. Then that paradox that the, er, Chink sees holding the show together may lose its equilibrium. What then, Mr. Chink, what then?' Dr. Robbins scratched his mustache with the stem of his Bulova, thereby simultaneously satisfying itch and winding watch. With time the central problem facing mankind, such efficiency had to be admired."
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, pgs. 205-206


" 'Those cowgirls are always bitching because the only radio station in the area plays nothing but polkas, but I say you can dance to anything if you really feel like dancing.' To prove it, he got up and danced to the news.

"When the music commenced again with 'The Lawrence Welk Is a Hero of the Republic Polka,' the Chink lifted Sissy by her shoulders and guided her onto his pock-marked dance floor. 'But I don't know how to polka,' she protested.

" 'Neither do I,' said the Chink. 'Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.' "
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, pg. 217


"Bonk! went the clockworks, and then it went poing! and unlike the chimes of a regular clock, which announce, on schedule, the passing--linear and purposeful--of another hour on the inexorable march toward death, the clockworks chime came stumbling out of left field, hopping in one tennis shoe, unconcerned as to whether it was late or early, admitting to neither end nor beginning, blissfully oblivious to any notion of progression or development, winking, waving, and finally turning back upon itself and lying quiet, having issued a breathless, giddy signal in lieu of steady tick-and-tock, a signal that, decoded, said: 'Take note, dear person, of your immediate position, become for a second exactly identical of yourself, glimpse yourself removed from the fatuous habits of progress as well as from the tragic implications of destiny, and, instead, see that you are an eternal creature fixed against the wide grin of the horizon; and having experienced, thus, what it is like to be attuned to the infinite universe, return to the temporal world lightly and glad-hearted, knowing that all the art and science of the twentieth century cannot prevent this clock from striking again, and in no precisioned Swiss-made mechanisms can the reality of this kind of time be surpassed. Poing!' "
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, pg. 236


"On the right wall had been written:

"I BELIEVE IN EVERYTHING; NOTHING IS SACRED.

"And on the left wall:

"I BELIEVE IN NOTHING; EVERYTHING IS SACRED."
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, pg. 238


" 'Growing up is a trap,' snapped Dr. Robbins. 'When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat. If Sissy is immature, it means she's still growing; if she's still growing, it means she's still alive.' "
--Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, pg. 240


" 'You think I'm insane?' said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him.

" 'You're still in touch. I guess that's the test.'

" 'Barely--barely.'

" 'A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany.'

" 'Finnerty shook his head. 'He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.' He nodded. 'Big, undreamed-of things--the people on the edge see them first.' "
--Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano


"Not the Moon"
What idiocy could transform the moon, that old sea-overgrown
skull seen from above, to a goddess of mercy?

You fish for the silver-light, there on the quiet lake, so clear
to see; you plunge your hands into the water and come up empty.

Don't ask questions of stones. They will rightly ignore you,
they have shoulders but no mouths, their conversation is elsewhere.

Expect nothing else from the perfect white birdbones, picked clean
in the sedge in the cup of muskeg; you are none of their business.

Fresh milk in a glass on a plastic tray, a choice of breakfast
foods; we sit at the table, discussing the theories of tragedy.

The plump pink-faced men in the metal chairs at the edge of the golf course
adding things up, sunning themselves, adding things up.

The corpse, washed and dressed, beloved meat pumped full of chemicals
and burned, if turned back into money could feed two hundred.

Voluptuousness of the newspaper; scratching your back on the bad news;
furious anger in spring sunshine, a plate of fruit on the table.

Ask of the apple, crisp heart, ask the pear or the suave banana
which necks got sucked, whose flesh got stewed, so we could love them.

The slug, a muscular jelly, slippery and luminous, dirty
eggwhite unrolling its ribbon of mucous--this too is delicious.

The oily slick, rainbow-colored, spread on the sewage
flats in the back field is beautiful also

as is the man's hand cut off at the wrist and nailed to a treetrunk,
mute and imploring, as if asking for alms, or held up in warning.

Who knows what it tells you? It does not say, beg, Have mercy,
it is too late for that. Perhaps only, I too was here once, where you are.

The star-like flower by the path, by the ferns, in the rain-
forest, whose name I did not know, and the war in the jungle--

the war in the jungle, blood on the crushed ferns, whose names I do not
know, and the star-like flower grew out of the same earth

whose name I do not know. Whose name for itself I do not know.
Or much else, except that the moon is no goddess of mercy

but shines on us each damp warm night of her full rising
as if she were, and that is why we keep asking

the wrong questions, he said, of the wrong things. The questions of things.
Ask the spider what is the name of God, she will tell you: God is a spider.

Let the other moons pray to the moon. O Goddess of Mercy,
you who are not the moon, or anything we can see clearly,

we need to know each other's names and what we are asking.
Do not be any thing. Be the light we see by.
--Margaret Atwood


"Hold ourselves together with our arms around the stereo for hours
While it sings to itself or whatever it does,
When it sings to itself of its long-lost loves
I'm getting tired, I'm forgetting why"
--The National, "Apartment Story"


"That's the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn't it? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience."
--Wally Lamb


"I love words. Next to vomit and maybe teeth, they are the most frequent thing to come out of my mouth."
--Ennis Chrisolm, Wigfield by Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, and Stephen Colbert