James W. Blinn Quotes & Sayings

oil companies are nationalities. This plane oughta say EXXON on the side instead of U. S. Navy — James W. Blinn

The navy is like a socialist country. Efficiency isn't part of the jargon. — James W. Blinn

That's what they tell you noise is, random energy, chaotic energy . . . It's the stuff that's not data, that's not information, that's not REAL. A thing that's what it's NOT and not what it IS. Noise is chaos. But chaos is continuity. . . . There are stories in the noise. — James W. Blinn

Stories are a kind of theme park of mortality. Deadnyland. — James W. Blinn

I used to be a gibber-poet. . . . assemblages of appropriated text from cereal box side panels. I'd spell every third word backwards to foreground the slipping signification of say, riboflavin, dextrose, whatever - the arbitrariness of the act is what charges the work with politically subversive anti-hegemonic gender inspecificity. Once you implode the ingredients hierarchy you've eradicated the implicit privileging of the phallocentric socio-economic taxonomy. The whole banana to slip . . . into pro-metaphoric usage is so de-centered you can bet your boots they won't be recon-deconstructing Sugar-Frosted Flakes again till the cows some home to roost. — James W. Blinn

I'll be like in that movie, that one where all the people walk around recitin' the books they memorized after all the books were burned. Form a retreat, a cult of over-specialized cold warriors like me. Recite the blue pubs, the yellow pubs, the red pubs, the black pubs. Muttering men keeping the data alive. — James W. Blinn

everybody knows too much about everything to know anything. And somehow that turns into everyone thinking everything is probably the opposite of what it is, or maybe not the opposite, but something else anyway. Everything you always thought is always proved wrong so the only way to act is against whatever you think. — James W. Blinn

You see a lot of jargon junkies in the navy. Usually means they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. The rallying cry is If you can't dazzle 'em with genius, baffle 'em with bullshit. — James W. Blinn