Herzog nuggets with chipotle-fennel pesto

Just back from the Four Corners area & finally finished Herzog after a several-week hiatus.

Some good stuff (mind, the first three are excerpts from unsent letters written by a good, half-cracked man):

First: "Seeing you, your white turtle-necked shirt and dinner jacket, your Edwardian mustache, your damp lips, the back hair trained over your bald spot, your barren paunch, apish buttocks... I recognized with joy how much I abhorred you."

Next: "The historical process, putting clothes on our backs, shoes on the feet, meat in the mouth, does infinitely more for us by the indifferent method than anyone does by intention... And since these good commodities are the gifts of anonymous planning and labor, what intentional goodness can achieve (when the good are amateurs) becomes the question."

Particularly appropriate here: "There comes a time when every ridiculous son of Adam wishes to arise before the rest, with all his quirks and twitches and tics, all the glory of his self-adored ugliness, his grinning teeth, his sharp nose, his madly twisted reason, saying to the rest-- in an overflow of narcissism which he interprets as benevolence-- 'I am here to witness. I am come to be your exemplar.'"

Lastly: "A man could do worse than to love his monkey."