rap--old school and middle school but no rat-a-tat-tat-tat. I dig baroque music and Bach and especially Mozart, Wu-tang clan, Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions. I enjoy every kind of music and feel sorry for anyone who hears something they don't like. The more you enjoy, the more you enjoy!
Movies
Movies are for distracting people so I can think in peace
Quotes
"Well, as soon as you get away from actual poetic forms, rhyme, meter, etc., there is no line between prose and poetry. From my way of thinking, many poets are simply lazy prose writers." --William S Burroughs
"We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising..." Sir Isaac Newton, Principia
"Quiet fruitfulness. The born aristocrats of the spirit are not overeager; their creations blossom and fall from the trees on a quiet autumn evening, being neither rashly desired, not hastened on, nor supplanted by new things. The wish to create incessantly is vulgar, betraying jealousy, envy, and ambition. If one is something, one does not actually need to do anything--and nevertheless does a great deal. There is a type higher than the “productive” man."
----Nietzsche, 210, Human, All Too Human
Television
My own poetic outhouse at
http://linkralston-link.blogspot.com/
Books
."And a third kind of possession and madness comes from the Muses. This takes hold upon a gentle and pure soul, arouses it and inspires it to songs and other poetry, and thus by adorning countless deeds of the ancients educates later generations. But he who without the divine madness comes to the doors of the Muses, confident that he will be a good poet by art, meets with no success, and the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madmen." [Plato, Phaedrus 245a]///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Simonton, 1999, Oxford Press: “Moreover, among the various types of creative activities, illustrious scientist appeared more stable than did distinguished artists and authors. To offer specifics, whereas only 28% of the notables in the natural sciences experienced some sort of mental disorder, psychological problems plagues 60% of the composers, 73% of the visual artists, 74% of playwrights, 77% of fiction writers, and 87% of the poets. The last figure seems to endorse Thomas Macaulay’s comment: ‘Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.’ It is interesting to note that Ludwig has more recently shown how parallel differentials hold with specific creative domains, depending on whether the emphasis is on logic, objectivity, and formalism or on intuition, subjectivity, and emotionalism. In painting, for example, only 22% of painters practicing a formal style exhibited some form of mental disorder, whereas this incidence rate increased to 52% for those painting in a symbolic style and to 75% for painters who expressed themselves in an emotive style. According to Ludwig, the data display the fractal characteristic of ‘self-similarity’. The same pattern that separates leaders from creators, and then divides scientific creators from artistic creators, also permeates down various levels of resolution, culminating in the stylistic contrasts within a single creative domain, such as in painting…
....First, although creative geniuses seem to exhibit above-average psychopathological symptoms, these levels are seldom so high as to translate into total mental and emotional deterioration. Indeed, if they do suffer from such extreme degrees of disturbances, their creative careers terminate, whether by suicide or complete intellectual or emotional incapacitation. Consequently, creative individuals tend to exhibit symptoms midway between those of the normal and abnormal personality. Dryden captured the fine distinction when he composed the often quoted lines ‘Great Wits are sure to Madness near ally’d, / And thin Partitions do their Bounds divide.’
Second, creative geniuses tend to possess other cognitive and emotional resources that help to channel and contain any potential psychopathology. Besides superior intelligence, eminent creators will possess considerable ’ego-strength’ and other traits of personal fortitude and self-discipline. These moderating attributes enable creators to exploit the strange ideas that fill their heads without allowing those ideas to take over the organization of their personality. Such traits allow a person to engage in the full range of behaviors required for creative accomplishment. Albert Rothenberg has provided excellent examples in his psychiatric studies of the creative process in both schizophrenic and authentic poets. Unlike true poets, schizophrenic poets refuse to revise their initial drafts, revealing an inability to adopt a more objective perspective on their work. They are all inspiration without verification, variation without selection…
…At the low end of this dimension are those people who are socialized, conventional, and conformist but also empathetic and altruistic. Such low scorers are not only normal, but perfectly well adjusted for life in human society. At the high end of this dimension are those who are impulsive, egocentric, antisocial, impersonal, hostile and aggressive, at times to a criminal degree, and who, at the higher extremities, display tendencies toward psychopathic, affective, and schizophrenic disorders. According to Eysenck, although high scores are associated with appearance of pronounced psychopathology, moderately high scores are also linked with the manifestation of exceptional creativity. A considerable amount of psychometric research, in fact, supports this assertion….Eysenck began by recognizing the creator’s need for an exceptional reservoir of remote associations that will provide a rich source of divergent responses. He then reviewed an impressive number of empirical studies showing that psychoticism positively correlates with performance on word association tests as well as on various measures of divergent thinking. Individuals scoring higher on psychoticism do indeed seem more capable of producing a large quantity of unusual ideas…People with just the right amount of psychoticism would be prone to have all sorts of seemingly irrelevant ideas pop into their heads almost randomly, and without control. Even if not meaningful in themselves, this chaotic influx of ideas can prime new chains of associations that lead to insights otherwise missed…However, it is not too far-fetched to conjecture that mental disorder maybe the unfortunate consequence of inheriting too much proclivity for proteanism…Rather the creative genius may reside at the delicate neutral point between the highly fit protean intellect and the sadly unfit pathological mind. Perhaps only the greatest creators can stand at the very pivot between success and failure.”
Heroes
Link 's Details
Status:
Married
Here for:
Networking
Hometown:
hell, TX
Body type:
6' 0" / Average
Ethnicity:
Other
Religion:
Other
Zodiac Sign:
Scorpio
Smoke / Drink:
No / No
Children:
Someday
Education:
College graduate
Income:
Less than $30,000
Link 's Schools
Tascosa H S
Amarillo, TX
Graduated: N/A
Student status: Alumni
1988 to 1992
Link in your extended network Posted at 5:34 AM Mar 7, 2008 view more
About me: Hi I’m Ryan, my friends call me Ralston, my really good friends call me Link. No one calls me Link. They call me Jew-boy, philistine, doe boy jr., ry-ry, ry-guy, linky-loo, linky-stinky, the missing link, Ryan the scientist, the scientist, the Ryantist, the chief Ryantologist, and the Non Doctor. What kind of name is it that you have to earn? Nicknames mostly, but in rare cases one must earn their own names, or middle names. No one calls me Link.
Only books and talk of them, and word-throwing, please me. I will be a bad teller so long as I am nauseated by everything else. Browbeaten and pistol-whipped, my stark reality consists of force-feeding a number-cruncher already tattooed or nuanced on its filmy dermis by the previous entry; the dry-heaving of words from under the upper-lip of consciousness; pissing time off the foreskin of being, with countless recollections of uncircumcised pride; waiting out the unseasoned hibernation of insanity, like a time bomb or a government bond...
Very consciously--I have to wrench it from my mind--do I recall that 'L' follows 'K' (J-K-L being the only sequence on the keyboard) or that five and eight make thirteen. This is every time. My only successful jobs were abecedarian in every sense, and I say successful because I wasn't fired over the alphabet. I used to be a tardy librarian, a data tape librarian who totaled the company car, and at the bookstore, a talkative and defiant loafer. It turns out the only thing I'm good at I'm not that good at--wondering if 'V' precedes 'W' and having a blindspot for 'G' that could not possibly have 'F' as an antecedant, as tho by virtue of a hiccup. Now I am a night auditor in a hotel with a painful goulash of room numbers and names, either of which perfectly fine as go-by's for pigeonholing assholes of the same feather, but whose mutual use would seem to defy some unspoken universal law against organizational bigamy. There's no two ways about it: one gets rubbed. Cain's sacrifice was as bloody as Abel's, and the same gold that made the calf also made the covenant: one must die, and the other devoutly worshiped. And this is no light decision: to reckon with by letters or by numbers. The poop of it is the decision has already been made by the computer, and that the automatic doors yield as swiftly for an old woman as the pit bull wandering into the lobby. The stink of it is that the owners now want me at both of their hotels, the hovel being catalogued by room numbers, and the castle by last names. I'm flummoxed enough to quite and run away again, and they're desperate enough to call me back all over. The subways in Chicago, on the other hand, were arranged by color
whats up handsome. long time no talk. hows your boy??
my latest piece/
Dreams. Dreams induce me. Seduce me. My spirit is taken by the dark and surreal and beautiful and seraphic-winged in ethereal heaven and bleeding and burning stygian vortex images that haunt me and have been doing so since early childhood.
Thank you! I hope you will see my works for real someday.
Running Shows: @ "Inside Home interiors", viale Michelangiolo 5,
Firenze, ITALY. Open mon 15-19 tues-fri 9-19 Upcoming show: Solo show at Mopia (Dienerstrasse 16/18
CH-8004, Zurich, Switzerland) from 16 october till 12 November.
My ETSY shop. Here I'll put a small selection of my artworks for sale
at a VERY discounted price. Sometimes because I'm feeling generous,
sometimes because I urgently need money, sometimes because my studio is
too full.
Breaking the ancestral line, population identical. Without the LINK I would feel lost. But, knowing you are breathing there, dancing around diapers, potty training, the wife (that you adore), the job, the universe of Ralston, gives me all the encouragement I need to power through another cube of dark matter, anti space, all I need to split myself along the grit of the continuum, such as it is. Los Angeles is a time warp, a dream sucker, an ass kicker--sweet home; time breaks into a coded, digital scream. In the LINK I find a smile, I can land without a thud. Thank you for that!
Hope all is well with y'all. Hugs and kisses to all you beautiful souls! oxoxoxox
Buttons are not my friends. The buttons that are really keys, but not the kind that open doors, keys like buttons that send the messages through space but are not waves, or particles, or stamps, or things that flash and glow, are not really my friends--they fool me. Sometimes I hit the wrong button and I send my text somewhere that it doesn't belong, and then my shirt gets confused and thinks that it might be a message. Buttons we push when we think they are keys, but not the kind of keys that I push when I play the piano, or flex my understanding of things. Not the kind of keys that jingle or open jail cells or pirate trunks filled with booty and maybe buttons that are really gold coins that might be spent to buy real buttons or real keys. Buttons are not my friends when I push the wrong one and send my comments to "Scott" to my dearest friend and brother "Link." I laugh at my uselessness and misunderstanding of technology and buttons; the only thing I don't need keys to, or to button up, is my authenticity and deep love for my inspired and inspiring Link, who is real key to an unknown universe in a facinating glow of folded time.
I lost myself in a blue wave of becoming, and only after I had become I struggled through another wave of ersatz red, found myself shattered, but organized into small, squishy pieces. What's my problem that I cannot conform to the subtext of an ambigous reality which celebrates the price of tube socks over the salty tears of a dirty child?? I can't exactly say. Enertia is not always indicative of dysfunction; sometimes it's just the shock of it all. The shock of it all gathering into a flat rock being thrown against a round sky.
My dear Link, I find such a comfort in your eyes--rods and cones that reflect more than what an image simply is, but also why it has become. In that hurricane of your blink, I take asylum from these storms. I hope all is well, wife, kids, agony, et al. The week's spread out like humus, lets toss the seeds and sink the eight ball in its loamy crush!
I hope you're finding your way through the decoded zone of Western culture and finding answers to the problem of its profound dislocation as it runs up against its own implication in the structures of the racisim and imperialism that it seeks to decipher. There's plenty of strange in them thar hills where you be.
I am floating in the oblique dimension in which a desire for the same, for identity or self-identity, for resemblance and unity, appears as one more illusion, one more image or fiction arresting desire in its miraculted simulacrum; I am delighted to find you here, too:)
Sorry if I have a TWISTED sense of humor. This is an obnoxious attempt to get more blog subscribers. Basically just taking a break from writing my novel. Hope it interests you.
Online Now!
