oldhomehaibane

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I'm a college student in West Virginia.

12/22/09 ATTENTION EVERYBODY. I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY. SOMETHING OF VITAL IMPORTANCE TO NO ONE BUT MYSELF. YOU SEE, I AM ON A QUEST. A QUEST FOR GOOD RAP MUSIC.

You may have noticed that I am listening to an awful lot of hip-hop/rap tracks lately. This is rather unusual for me, as you can see from my Top 50. This is because I have just begun to explore a genre of music that I have heretofore completely neglected and at times even (undeservedly) scorned, and as such I have made a pledge to myself that for the next four to six months, every album I buy or download will be a hip-hop/rap album, and all of the music that I listen to will be the same. I am using All Music Guide and Rate Your Music to find albums that look promising, but recommendations from the people on here would also be welcome. In addition to listening to the music, I will also be doing some research on the origins and development of hip hop from a number of books I've added to my wishlist on Amazon.

HOLY SHIT DONUTS IS A GOOD ALBUM YOU GUYS

Favorite Books-In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, Ulysses by James Joyce, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, The Epic of Gilgamesh

Favorite Movies-Tokyo Story, Spirit of the Beehive, Bicycle Thieves, The Seventh Seal, Late Spring, Ugetsu, Dr. Strangelove, Solaris, Woman in the Dunes, Ikiru

Favorite Shows-Haibane Renmei, Kino's Journey, Mushishi, Planetes, Emma: A Victorian Romance, Aria, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Azumanga Daioh, Boogiepop Phantom, Star Trek: The Original Series, The Twilight Zone, Gurren Lagann

Favorite Games-Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Earthbound, Mother 3, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, Baldur's Gate, Darklands, Cave Story, Civ III

I got sick of what I had written after this point, so I decided to remove it until such a time as I find something to replace it with. Maybe there will be more favorite lists or narcissistic and arrogant ramblings about how I'm the epitome of cool for listening almost exclusively to pre-1950s music and how the music of the early twentieth century is objectively better than everything that came after it. Everybody loves those, right? Right? Okay, well, that's probably all you're going to get.

lol hey guys i like music



IT'S PROUST TIME! TIME FOR PROUST!

"A person does not...stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourselves (like a garden at which we gaze through a railing with all its borders spread out before us), but is a shadow which we can never penetrate, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon words and sometimes actions, neither of which can give us anything but inadequate and as it proves contradictory information--a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love."
-Marcel Proust, Guermantes Way, In Search of Lost Time

"In spite of all that may be said about survival after the destruction of the brain, I observe that each alteration of the brain is a partial death. We possess all our memories, but not the faculty of recalling them...What, then, is a memory which we do not recall? Or, indeed, let us go further. We do not recall our memories of the last thirty years; but we are wholly steeped in them; why then stop short at thirty years, why not extend this previous life back to before our birth? If I do not know a whole section of the memories that are behind me, if they are invisible to me, if I do not have the faculty of calling them to me, how do I know whether in that mass that is unknown to me there may not be some that extend back much further than my human existence? If I can have in me and round me so many memories which I do not remember, this oblivion (a de facto oblivion, at least, since I have not the faculty of seeing anything) may extend over a life which I have lived in the body of another man, even on another planet. A common oblivion obliterates everything. But what, in that case, is the meaning of that immortality of the soul the reality of which the Norwegian philosopher affirmed? The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it."
-Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, In Search of Lost Time

FUCK YEAH, PROUST!

"People never cease to change place in relation to ourselves. In the imperceptible but eternal march of the world, we regard them as motionless, in a moment of vision too brief for us to perceive the motion that is sweeping them on. But we have only to select in our memory two pictures taken of them at different moments, close enough together however for them not to have altered in themselves--perceptibly, that is to say--and the difference between the two pictures is a measure of the displacement that they have undergone in relation to us."
-Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, In Search of Lost Time

"It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play not with a woman of the outside world but with a doll inside our brain-the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess-whom the arbitrary power of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the Balbec of my dreams had been from the real Balbec; an artificial creation which by degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real woman to resemble."
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

HOLY SHIT, IT'S PROUST!

"No matter which of my friends of the little band I thought of, how could the last face that she had shown me not have been the only one that I could recall, since, of our memories with respect to a person, the mind eliminates everything that does not concur with the immediate purpose of our daily relations (even, and especially, if those relations are impregnated with an element of love which, ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come)? It allows the chain of spent days to slip away, holding on only to the very end of it, often of a quite different metal from the links that have vanished in the night, and in the journey which we make through life, counts as real only the place in which we are at the present."
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

PROUST, MOTHERFUCKER!

"We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves. "
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

"The things about which we most often jest are generally, on the contrary, the things that worry us but that we do not wish to appear to be worried by, with perhaps a secret hope of the further advantage that the person to whom we are talking, hearing us treat the matter as a joke, will conclude that it is not true."
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

OH, PROUST! YOUR GENTLE WORDS OF WISDOM ARE ENOUGH TO MAKE ME SWOON!

"The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying."
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

"Neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength--we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second."
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

SERIOUSLY, YOU'RE TURNING ME ON HERE.

"Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance."
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

I AM BECOMING AROUSED.

"Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth."
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

"We ought never to bear a grudge against people, ought never to judge them by some memory of an unkind action, for we do not know all the good that, at other moments, their hearts may have sincerely desired and realized. And thus, even simply from the point of view of prediction, one is mistaken. For doubtless the evil aspect which we have noted once and for all will recur; but the heart is richer than that, has many other aspects which will recur also in the same person and which we refuse to acknowledge because of his earlier bad behavior..."
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

"It is as difficult to present a fixed image of a character as of societies and passions. For a character alters no less than they do, and if one tries to take a snapshot of what is relatively immutable in it, one finds it presenting a succession of different aspects (implying that it is incapable of keeping still but keeps moving) to the disconcerted lens."
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

"'There is no man,' [Elstir] began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded....We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.'"
-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time


*grunting and sounds of labored breathing culminated by a prolonged, moaning exclamation signifying ecstatic relief*