Meanwhile, In Mongolia of the Day: Footage of a nomadic Mongolian family erecting a temporary home known as a “ger” or “yurt” in just over an hour set to Mongolian throat music.
Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills to bed when she was thirty-six,
and Marlon Brando’s daughter
hung in the Tahitian bedroom of her mother’s house,
while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head.
Sometimes
you can look at the clouds or the trees
and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.
The performance artist Kathy Change set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves out of the music industry forever.
I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped
from an apartment window into the world
and then out of it.
Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead roles, leaped from the “H” in the HOLLYWOOD sign
when everything looked black and white
and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932.
Ernest Hemingway put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho
while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree
and overdosed on phenobarbital.
My brother opened thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body
until it wasn’t his body anymore.
I like the way geese sound above the river.
I like the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.
Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter
brought her roses when she was still alive,
and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite in his own mouth
though it took six hours for him to die, 1887.
Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned
and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf.
If you are traveling, you should always bring a book to read, especially on a train.
Andrew Martinez the nude activist, died in prison, naked, a bag around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.
Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues
after drawing a hot bath,
in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.
Larry Walters became famous
for flying in a sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled weather balloons.
He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet and then he landed.
He was a man who flew.
He shot himself in the heart.
In the morning I get out of bed, I brush my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
want to be good to myself.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was an enormously influential French philosopher who wrote, among other things, historical analyses of psychiatry, medicine, the prison system, and the function of sexuality in social organizations. He spent some time during the last years of his life at UC Berkeley, delivering several lectures in English. And happily they were recorded for posterity:
These last lectures are also available on YouTube (in audio format):
One of Foucault’s more controversial and memorable books was Discipline and Punish(1977), which traced the transition from the 18th century use of public torture and execution to–less than 50 years later–the prevalence of much more subtle uses of power, with a focus on incarceration, rehabilitation, prevention, and surveillance. Here he is in 1983 commenting on that book (thanks for the link to Seth Paskin). The Partially Examined Life podcast recently discussed the book with Katharine McIntyre, doctoral candidate at Columbia. Foucault’s image of the panopticon well captures modern privacy concerns in the electronic age.
