[here's some readings I haven't gotten around to yet.. I'm linking so I can get rid of a few tabs on firefox]

Akeel Bilgrami - Ghandi, the Philosopher

Michel Foucault - The Archaeology of Knowledge

Bertrand Russell - The Ethics of War
at the Bertrand Russell Society

David Wright - A Primer on Poetic Line

Denise Levertov - On the Function of the Line

Ben Lee - Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka and the limits of open form

Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet

David Foster Wallace - Good People

Extract from the afterword to The Kiss in History

B.R. Myers - A Reader's Manifesto

To map a cough, he teamed up with Dr. Julian Tang, a virus expert from Singapore. A healthy student provided the cough. The expelled air, traveling at 18 miles per hour, mixed with cooler surrounding air and produced “temperature differences that bend light rays by different amounts,” Dr. Settles said.

-NYT

Raisin Brahms

Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.
_____

People just need a little help because they are so used to not loving. It's like scoring the clay to make another piece of clay stick to it.

-Miranda July, 'Ten True Things'

Memory Demands So Much

Memory demands so much,
it wants every fiber
told and retold.
It gives and gives
but for a price, making you
risk drudgery, lapse
into document, treacheries
of glaring noon and a slow march.
Leaf never before
seen or envisioned, flying spider
of rose-red autumn, playing
a lone current of undecided wind,
lift me with you, take me
off this ground of memory that clings
to my feet like thick clay,
exacting gratitude for gifts and gifts.
Take me flying before
you vanish, leaf, before
I have time to remember you,
intent instead on being
in the midst of that flight,
of those unforeseeable words.

-Denise Levertov

Within the last few decades, in countries like Britain or the United States, the literary intelligentsia has grown large enough to constitute a world in itself. One important result of this is that the opinions which a writer feels frightened of expressing are not those which are disapproved of by society as a whole. To a great extent, what is still loosely thought of as heterodoxy has become orthodoxy. It is nonsense to pretend, for instance, that at this date there is something daring and original in proclaiming yourself an anarchist, an atheist, a pacifist, etc. The daring thing, or at any rate the unfashionable thing, is to believe in God or to approve of the capitalist system. In 1895, when Oscar Wilde was jailed, it must have needed very considerable moral courage to defend homosexuality. Today it would need no courage at all: today the equivalent action would be, perhaps, to defend antisemitism. But this example that I have chosen immediately reminds one of something else—namely, that one cannot judge the value of an opinion simply by the amount of courage that is required in holding it.

-George Orwell

Perhaps we don’t need critique but rather fantasy, not as a means of escape but as a mode of freedom, a way of activating thought. I kept imagining Sze’s installation literally drilling down through the floor, through the walls, through the ceiling, until the building itself collapsed, and then continuing on across the empty lot to the next building. And all the while everything would be perfectly placed, as though part of a Japanese tea ceremony; even the apocalypse would be carefully color coordinated.

-Daniel Baird, on Sarah Sze's Proportion to the Groove, 2005

[I think the installation was named after this poem:]

That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.

-Emily Dickinson

When a piece possesses a strong presence in a space, it becomes like a phantom limb: when it is gone, you miss it. It haunts the space; you expect to see it when you return. That's what makes a work successful as a strange metric: I think of making art that will be remembered as an inhabitant even after (or especially after) it has vanished.

-Sarah Sze

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Had any adult with the power to fulfill my desires taken me seriously and asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I did not want to have anything to own, or to possess any object. I wanted rather to feel something on Christmas day. The real question would have been, "Dear Claudia, what experience would you like on Christmas?" I could have spoken up, "I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama's kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone." The lowness of the stool made for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama's kitchen, the smell of the lilacs, the sound of the music, and, since it would be good to have all of my senses engaged, the taste of a peach, perhaps, afterward.

-Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the colour of your dreams.

While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up with black and white sets, often dream in monchrome - even now.

-'Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams '

[via seed]

We are like you; the thought pressed into his mind. We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again. We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams. How were we to know? We could live with you in peace. Believe us, believe us, believe us.

-Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

In 1913, Maisel explained, an Oregon state psychiatric institution began to cremate the remains of its unclaimed patients. Their ashes were then stored inside individual copper canisters and moved into a small room, where they were stacked onto pine shelves... Over time, however, the canisters have begun to react chemically with the human ashes held inside them; this has thus created mold-like mineral outgrowths on the exterior surfaces of these otherwise gleaming cylinders.

-bldg blog

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.
_______

A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.

-Bertrand Russell

What you call God is very much what I call infinity. I do feel something in common in all the great things -- something which I should not think of quite as you do, tho' it is very mysterious & I really don't know what to think of it -- but I feel it is the most important thing in the world & really the one thing that matters profoundly. It is to me as yet a mystery -- I don't understand it. I think it has many manifestations -- love is the one that seems to me the deepest & that I feel most when I am very deeply moved. But truth is the one I have mainly served, & truth is the only one I always feel the divinity of ...
_______

I must, I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet, a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the fearful passionless force of nonhuman things ... I want to stand for life and thought -- thought as adventure, clear thought because of the intrinsic delight of it, along with the other delights of life. Against worldliness, which consists in doing everything for the sake of something else, like marrying for money instead of love. The essence of life is doing things for their own sakes ... I want to stand at the rim of the world, and peer into the darkness beyond, and see a little more than others have seen of the strange shapes of mystery that inhabit that unknown night ... I want to bring back into the world of men some little bit of new wisdom. There is a little wisdom in the world; Heraclitus, Spinoza, and a saying here and there. I want to add to it, even if only ever so little.

-Bertrand Russell, quoted here

The secret to the gig is to amuse yourself. I have to, really, as most paper topics are deadly boring. Once, I was asked to summarize in three pages the causes of the First World War (page one), the major battles and technological innovations of the war (page two), and to explain the aftermath of the war, including how it led to the Second World War (page three). Then there was this assignment for a composition class: six pages on why "apples [the fruit] are the best." You have to make your own fun. In business papers, I'd often cite Marxist sources. When given an open topic assignment on ethics, I'd write on the ethics of buying term papers, and even include the broker's Web site as a source. My own novels and short stories were the topic of many papers — several DUMB CLIENTS rate me as their favorite author and they've never even read me, or anyone else. Whenever papers needed to refer to a client's own life experiences, I'd give the student various sexual hang-ups.

-The Term Paper Artist
The lucrative industry behind higher ed's failings.
By Nick Mamatas

[via everyone ever]

-PostSecret

Jack Kerouac - Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

In the end, one wonders whether Literary Darwinism isn’t, at its core, the result of a deep-seated (and misplaced) fear common to those who use phrases like “our moral compass,” the sorts who worry about this or that position leading to “anarchy.” Gottschall writes, “Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, [literature professors] should embrace science's spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.”

But Mr. Gottschall, literature is already a place where real understanding of the human experience can be found. I’m sorry that the insights to be found are not tidy enough for you. But we’re an untidy species. There are surely biological causes for that untidiness but locating them doesn’t do anything to clean up the mess. If you want to get closer to that mess, if you really want to face the immense clutter of the human-all-too-human, literature is a good thing to acquaint yourself with. If not, well … there are so very many professions.

-Unnatural Selection
Or, How I could have told you why people like Emma.
By Morgan Meis

[via 3quarksdaily]

-yes, that's cardboard

-Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art

-Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art

-here

-The amazing book-staircase
[via FFFFound!]

-The always wonderful Marc Johns

Inside Obama's Emails

-The Big Picture

The Liar

What I thought was love
in me, I find a thousand instances
as fear. (Of the tree’s shadow
winding around the chair, a distant music
of frozen birds rattling
in the cold.
Where ever I go to claim
my flesh, there are entrances
of spirit. And even its comforts
are hideous uses I strain
to understand.
Though I am a man
who is loud
on the birth
of his ways. Publicly redefining
each change in my soul, as if I had predicted
them,
and profited, biblically, even tho
their chanting weight,
erased familiarity
from my face.
A question I think,
an answer; whatever sits
counting the minutes
till you die.
When they say, “It is Roi
who is dead?” I wonder
who will they mean?


-LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka
[sorry for the non-existent line indents... blogger doesn't like poetry]

Bumper stickers and fridge magnets remind us that Life Is Not a Rehearsal. We encourage one another towards the secular modern heaven of self-fulfillment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, the material goods, the ownership of property, the foreign holidays, the acquisition of savings, the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn't it -- doesn't it? This is our chosen myth... But if life is viewed as a rehearsal, or a preparation, or an anteroom, or whichever metaphor we choose, but at any rate as something contingent, something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious.

-Julian Barnes, Nothing To Be Frightened Of
[Reviewed by Garrison Keillor]

Darwin at Home in Ten Minutes

[via kottke]

I was an old man by the time I took that walk to the Public Library in San Francisco, because the years between birth and twenty are the years in which the soul travels farthest and swiftest.

-William Saroyan, The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

I think I have always had a feeling that if I was given some opportunity to do the thing I was most interested in doing, everything else would somehow take care of itself.

-Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person