the furthest point in the US you can get away from McDonalds is 107 miles, in South Dakota

I think it’s, in a sense, laughable to say that any poetry is impersonal, because the motive is terribly personal. And if you wind up writing about a cup, there is some personal reason that you’re writing about that, and some personal way that you’re approaching its dimension, or color, or placement in the universe. We can’t hide ourselves. That’s the truth. No poetry, however apparently impersonal, allows us to hide. And if you have hidden, you’ve really failed. I mean, it means that you’ve been opaque. It means that you have perhaps written something that’s already been written. Because, then your words would be hidden directly behind somebody else’s words. They wouldn’t exist independently. There’s no hiding.

-Kay Ryan

On love, on grief, on every human thing,
Time sprinkles Lethe's water with his wing.

.................................................—Walter Savage Landor

[Pinsky discusses]

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

-W. Benjamin, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History”

LOS ANGELES—Executives at Paramount Pictures announced Monday that production had finally wrapped on The Brothers Karamazov, a new film adaptation that concludes at the precise moment most readers give up on the classic Russian novel.

-relevant to my life right now

a graphical representation of the score of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony (No. 5, allegro). Each color respresents one music instrument.

Pablo Picasso painting

[via]

"I am talking to a couple of car companies about being the voice of their GPS system... I probably shouldn't do it because which ever way I go I always end up at one place Lonely Avenue."

-Bob Dylan who is so cool!

the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking... what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close