Monkey Puzzle Press

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day;
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown;
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain,
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today.

And then one day, you find ten years got behind you.
No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun.

Run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking.
Racing around to come up behind you again.

The sun is the same in the relative way, but you’re older,
Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time.
Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines.

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the [American] way.
The time is gone. The song is over.
Thought I’d something more to say.

- Roger Waters -

Another amazing book, or should I say manifesto, from our modern-day Thoreau. An investigation into American industrial civilization and education, and the repercussions thereof. Of the many highlights I could share, here are a few:

“Here is what I do know: I hate industrial civilization, for what it does to the planet, for what it does to communities, for what it does to individual nonhumans (both wild and domesticated), and for what it does to individual humans (both wild and domesticated). I hate the wage economy, because it causes – forces is probably more accurate – people to sell their lives doing things they do not love, and because it rewards people for harming each other and destroying their landbases. I hate industrial schooling because it commits one of the only unforgivable sins there is: it leads people away from themselves, training them to be workers and convincing them it’s in their best interest to be ever more loyal slaves, rowing the galley that is industrial civilization ever more fervently – enthusiastically, orgiastically – to hell, compelling them to take everything and everyone they encounter down with them. And I participate in the process. I help make school a little more palatable, a little more fun, as students are trained to do their part in the ongoing destruction of the planet, as they enter the final phases of trading away their birthright as the free and happy humans they were born to be for their roles as cogs in the giant industrial machine, or worse, as overseers of the giant factory/enslavement camp we once recognized as a living earth. Doesn’t that make me, in essence, a collaborator? Hell, drop the in essence.”
- Derrick Jensen -

“Mathematics, science, economics, history, religion, are all just as deeply and necessarily political. To believe they’re not – to believe, for example, that science (or mathematics, economics, history, religion, and so forth: choose your poison) describes the world as it is, rather than acting as a filter that removes all information that does not fit the model and colors the information that remains – is in itself to take a position, one that is all the more powerful and dangerous because it is invisible to the one who holds it.”
- Derrick Jensen -

Here are some more inspiring quotes from the book:

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
- Helen Keller -

“Modern schools and universities push students into habits of depersonalized learning, alienation from nature and sexuality, obedience to hierarchy, fear of authority, self-objectification, and chilling competitiveness. These character traits are the essence of the twisted personality-type of modern industrialism. They are precisely the character traits needed to maintain a social system that is utterly out of touch with nature, sexuality, and real human needs”
- Arthur Evans -

“It’s ironic. Radicals dream midnight police raids, or sit around over coffee and talk with glittering eyes about Repression – about those internment camps that are waiting empty.  And all the time Miss Jones does her quiet thing with the kids in third grade. People like to chat about the fascist threat or the communist threat. But their visions of repression are for the most part romantic and self indulgent: massacres, machine guns drowning out La Marseillaise. And in the meantime someone stops another tenth grader for a hall-pass check and notices that his t-shirt doesn’t have a pocket on it. In the meantime the Bank of America hands out another round of high school achievement awards. In the meantime I grade another set of quizzes. God knows the real massacres continue. But the machine gun isn’t really what is to be feared most in our civilized Western world. It just isn’t needed all that much. The kids leave Miss Jones’ class. And they go on to junior high and high school and college. And most of them will never need to be put in an internment camp. Because they’re already there. Do you think I’m overstating it? That’s what’s so frightening: we have the illusion that we’re free. In school we learn to be good little Americans – or Frenchmen – or Russians. We learn how to take the crap that’s going to be shoveled on us all our lives. In school the state wraps up people’s minds so tight that it can afford to leave their bodies alone. Repression? You want to see victims of repression? Come look at most of the students at San Diego State College, where I work. They want to be told what to do. They don’t know how to be free. They’ve given their will to this institution just as they’ll continue to give their will to the institutions that engulf them in the future.”
- Jerry Farber -

“The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that the way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.”
- Jules Henry -

“School is indeed a training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare fear of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.”
- Jules Henry -

“‘What are ten or fifteen years?’ asked the Mother Superior serenely. ‘Think of eternity.’ I made no answer. I knew that eternity is each minute that passes.”
- Nikos Kazantzakis -

Props to these guys for giving a platform for street musicians and indigenous peoples around the world to showcase the talent we ignore while we continue rushing headlong through our lives.

Aloha Everyone -

We just got the Monkey Puzzle Press side of the website up and running! Bookmark us and stay tuned for updates and new developments – Fotographs of Bones by Adam Perry and Some Exits by Travis Cebula are now available for pre-order!

Holoholo,
Nate Jordon