“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.” -André Breton.
“Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own.” -Charles Dickens
(Image is titled Eve Gets a Gene Altered Tomato by Davis and Davis, 1992.)
“I have named her Augustine.”
“Named a lunatic after a saint! Well, perhaps they are much the same. The idiot, the mystic…”
“She is not an idiot.”
She listens at the door, biting her fingernails. She needs to know what they want from her so that she can perform when asked. She has to know how mad she’s supposed to be. Satisfied, she goes back to her room where she dreams of blood and fire. Faces hidden behind shrouds. Dead men.
-Helen Kitson, from Charcot and the Saint.
Live Loathe laugh. No wordy highfalutin’ explanations needed for this tee yall. Here we have good ol’ fashioned proverbial words to live by. Passed down through generations of unsatisfied, pissed-off, cynics and stoics and realists and sarcastic nay-sayers its folksy wisdom is as relevant today as the day it was coined. Digitally hand-stitched by yours truly right here in the good ol’ N.Y. of A. this traditional faux-crochet design will bring a down-home charm to even the most critical, world-weary, annoyed, judgmental, hysterically vitriolic curmudgeon. Hooray.
See all your options for this tee here or see all the Nonist’s offerings here. See below for a closer look at the design…
Above we see a control image (a) and the same image drawn by a patent suffering from hemispacial neglect (b), a condition in which awareness of an entire side of space is lost.
Though it can affect both hemispheres and can manifest as unawareness of sounds, smells, tactile stimuli, and even memories, dreams and hallucinations, the most common form is left-sided “visual neglect,” as seen in the cat example above, in which sufferers are rendered blind to everything appearing to their left. Fascinating. Also of note is the extremely odd way in which those suffering this most common form of the condition perceive ordinary television screens… see below.
Quote: One summer’s day in the mid-1860’s, a young French boy named Joseph Pujol had a frightening experience at the seashore. Swimming out alone, he held his breath and dove underwater. Suddenly an icy cold feeling penetrated his gut. Frightened, he ran ashore, but then received a second shock when he noticed seawater streaming from his anus. The experience so disturbed the lad that his mother took him to a doctor to allay his fears. The doctor complied.
The boy didn’t know it at the time, but this unsettling rectal experience at the beach not only indicated no illness, but it also foretold of a gift that would later make him the toast of Paris and one of the most popular and successful performers of his generation. —Paul Spinrad, from The RE/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids.
So began the ascendance of the most celebrated and beloved of flatulists known to grace a stage at the turn of the twentieth century- Le Pétomane! Translation: “The Fart Maniac” or simply, “The Fartiste.”
To the reader who recently wrote in to ask what “educational gift” I might recommend for his teenage nephew I hereby suggest this beloved classic- The Avenging Unicorn Playset by Accoutrements Outfitters of Popular Culture. Comes complete with 4 magical horns and 3 figures to impale. “Yes, that pleases me.” Magical Unicorn Mayonnaise not included.
Hello all,
Just a note to let you know that the lady and I are off to a tropical paradise vacation tomorrow and I’ll be largely incommunicado. Though both my nature and complexion are utterly unsuited for such a trip I plan to do much lazy ocean-side drinking and reading, and expect I’ll survive to blog another day.I should return to action around Saturday of next week… perhaps.
In the meantime I am setting the Nonist proper to display random posts from the archives, so you might want to check in there as there’s sure to be something on display you missed.
Lastly I thought I’d also mention that I lost all my email contacts and archives when my machine died recently so if you are a pal, an associate, an acquaintance, an enemy, a well meaning stranger, or a skeleton in my closet feel free to just .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) so I can repopulate my address book. Returning home to something other than spam would be nice. If on the other hand you were hoping against hope to never hear from me again… Congrats!
So long everyone.
J
Whilst looking over some traffic statistics for thenonist.com I had an interesting realization. It seems that in the time that I’ve been using my current statistical analysis tools, a span of roughly 2 years, The Nonist has welcomed at least 1 visitor from all but 8 countries on planet Earth.
Now, The Nonist has existed in one form or another since 2003 so I could take solace in the thought that in those 3 dark years of missing statistical data The Nonist may have received visitors from one or all 8 of those countries. I could then take comfort in this fact. I could smile and allow myself to feel as though this were some sort of tangible evidence that I had accomplished something with this endeavor. And I could skip joyfully through a field of dandelions, or have a tea-party with some teddy bears, or go rainbow hunting. But I wont. This site is not called The Optimist after all…
Sometimes one might walk down the street, breathing the air, hearing the sounds, looking around, and get the sense that the youth of America are shaking-off their apathy, finding their social conscience, and embracing the idea of active involvement so succinctly summed up by Martin Luther King Jr. when he said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Other times… not so much.
You know, no matter how looney and wrong-minded much of religiosity may strike me, no matter how I may cringe and jerk away from it like smelling salts, I can say one thing for certain, it is not for a lack of really nifty charts. A fellow by the name of Clarence Larkin helped see to that. Pictured above is Antichrist in the Time of the Gentiles, taken from his 1919 guide to The Book of Revelation, a grand tour of the Apocalypse of St. John. Sure, they don’t chart any actual, you know… data, but they sure look cool dag nabbit!
