i collect things

2010-02-17T15:48:00.001-06:00

I am offically switching my collections to Tumblr because it is easier than having a Blogspot address and pretending it's a Tumblr.

this is the link in large letters.

2010-02-16T10:30:00.000-06:00

marc johns

2009-12-31T14:18:00.001-06:00

Alma: Pixar can be creepy

2009-12-30T21:08:00.001-06:00

Alma from Rodrigo Blaas on Vimeo.

[via]

2009-12-30T21:06:00.000-06:00

Tetris + Mario Bros. = Tuper Tario Tros.

2009-12-14T21:28:00.003-06:00

to Charlotte,
dearest companion of twenty years - without whom,
nothing

[a cute dedication in this book. teehee.]

Swept Up Whole

2009-12-12T16:22:00.001-06:00

You aren't swept up whole,
however it feels. You're
atomized. The wind passes.
You recongeal. It's
a surprise.

-Kay Ryan, from Elephant Rocks

2009-12-02T22:11:00.000-06:00

[via]

2009-11-19T15:15:00.000-06:00

exploding dog

2009-11-01T11:51:00.001-06:00

Leonard, I hate you forever for posting this.

2009-10-27T19:56:00.003-05:00

It's just a man failing to reappear.

Your experience! - Actors! I'm talking about death - and you've never experienced that. And you cannot act it. You die a thousand casual deaths - with none of that intensity which squeezes out life... and no blood runs cold anywhere. Because even as you die you know that you will come back in a different hat. But no one gets up after death - there is no applause - there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's - death -

...not for us, not like that. Death is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound...

-from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard

2009-10-26T19:10:00.001-05:00

Once a baby lizard loved me so completely,
he moved into my apartment and died of hunger.

-Matthew Dickman

2009-10-23T18:03:00.004-05:00

when you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is particularly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality toward him, even when I feel that I ought to.

-George Orwell

2009-10-22T22:27:00.004-05:00

a softer world

[I keep re-remembering the last question. Going through the 'a softer world' archives is one of my Most Favorite Things]

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

2009-10-22T17:30:00.003-05:00

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous,

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We made a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

-Wallace Stevens

[the final two lines kill my soul (for laughter and beauty)]

2009-10-22T00:06:00.001-05:00

The artist's work is homeless in the deepest sense

-Barth

2009-10-14T22:09:00.000-05:00

As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

-Robinson Jeffers

2009-10-08T00:23:00.000-05:00

blog title: Surviving INFP

hmph.

2009-10-08T00:01:00.005-05:00

Possible Career Paths for the INFP:

Writers

Counselors / Social Workers

Teachers / Professors

Psychologists

Psychiatrists

Musicians

Clergy / Religious Workers

[each of these I have seriously considered at some point]

2009-10-07T23:53:00.000-05:00

INFPs do not like to deal with hard facts and logic. Their focus on their feelings and the Human Condition makes it difficult for them to deal with impersonal judgment. They don't understand or believe in the validity of impersonal judgment, which makes them naturally rather ineffective at using it. Most INFPs will avoid impersonal analysis, although some have developed this ability and are able to be quite logical. Under stress, it's not uncommon for INFPs to mis-use hard logic in the heat of anger, throwing out fact after (often inaccurate) fact in an emotional outburst.

[here]

How Google street view really works

2009-10-05T20:21:00.003-05:00

[via ayjay]

2009-10-04T14:45:00.000-05:00

Children's Bedtime Stories by Gordon Dioxide

2009-10-04T13:02:00.002-05:00

A lot of time you confuse the personality with the piece of work. Ultimately it doesn't do anybody any favours - it negates the work as well. What can happen essentially if you're an artist like Rothko and you chose to kill yourself, that colours the work forever more, which is totally not the point and it destroys the work. There's a Rothko room in the Tate Gallery in London, when kids go in there they go, "Wow, this is great!" and all they see is the colour and the joy of the paintings. And all the adults see is this poor sod that killed himself.

-Thom Yorke

Lines on Retirement, After Reading 'Lear'

2009-10-04T12:57:00.001-05:00

for Richard Pacholski


Avoid storms. And retirement parties.
You can’t trust the sweetnesses your friends will
offer, when they really want your office,
which they’ll redecorate. Beware the still
untested pension plan. Keep your keys. Ask
for more troops than you think you’ll need. Listen
more to fools and less to colleagues. Love your
youngest child the most, regardless. Back to
storms: dress warm, take a friend, don’t eat the grass,
don’t stand near tall trees, and keep the yelling
down—the winds won’t listen, and no one will
see you in the dark. It’s too hard to hear
you over all the thunder. But you’re not
Lear, except that we can’t stop you from what
you’ve planned to do. In the end, no one leaves
the stage in character—we never see
the feather, the mirror held to our lips.
So don’t wait for skies to crack with sun. Feel
the storm’s sweet sting invade you to the skin,
the strange, sore comforts of the wind. Embrace
your children’s ragged praise and that of friends.
Go ahead, take it off, take it all off.
Run naked into tempests. Weave flowers
into your hair. Bellow at cataracts.
If you dare, scream at the gods. Babble as
if you thought words could save. Drink rain like cold
beer. So much better than making theories.
We’d all come with you, laughing, if we could.

-David Wright

2009-10-04T12:51:00.001-05:00

I don’t mean to make any comparisons, except that there are cliffs of fall in all of us, right? Is that Hopkins, cliffs of fall? I think it is. Beautiful phrase. I think we have our own precipices inside, and whatever we do to skirt them, or postpone them, they come. We arrive at the edge periodically. So we carry it all around in us, everybody – it’s not easy to live. It’s not easy for any of us to live.

-Kay Ryan

2009-10-03T15:43:00.004-05:00

To live in the world of creation—to get into it and stay in it—to frequent it and haunt it—to think intensely and fruitfully—to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation—this is the only thing.

-Henry James

[quoted]

2009-09-28T20:55:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-24T18:34:00.001-05:00

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

2009-09-21T18:04:00.001-05:00

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

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

[Pinsky discusses]

2009-09-16T22:10:00.002-05:00

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”

2009-09-14T17:39:00.001-05:00

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

2009-09-07T11:51:00.000-05:00

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

2009-09-03T19:16:00.001-05:00

Pablo Picasso painting

[via]

2009-09-02T21:29:00.002-05:00

"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!

2009-09-01T20:24:00.002-05:00

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

2009-08-24T23:14:00.004-05:00

-The Nine Eyes of Google Street View

2009-08-24T20:00:00.003-05:00

-The David Foster Wallace Audio Project

I speak to fewer people

2009-08-20T23:11:00.003-05:00

I have been in touch lately with my inner self,
the fruit picker who lived all those years in a motel.
I shaded my story so it proved everything I did was
by intention. After each love affair, each participant
received a little gift. I mean someone always said:
You didn’t really love her. I speak to fewer people
than ever. No matter what it looks like—I say this
every chance I get—something divine is going on.
And wonder: Is it? I’d like to lose a little weight.
Just the same, the marriage had its good points.
I still can’t tell you what I am known for. I’m easily
shamed. On my walks I hope to meet someone interesting,
someone I have been headed toward all my life,
or simply someone without too much guile, a friendly
person with a little intelligence. Maybe we will
walk along together, talking about romance or trucks.

-Charlie Smith, from Word Comix (Norton, 2009)

[via belz, see also "Los Dos Rancheros"]

2009-08-19T21:02:00.001-05:00

Laugh, kookaburra, laugh.

"If owls were the professors of the avian kingdom, then kookaburras, I thought, might well be the gym teachers."

-David Sedaris, "Laugh, Kookaburra"

2009-08-14T00:39:00.001-05:00

17 Least Appropriate Playmobil Sets for Children
[via ayjay]

2009-08-13T11:22:00.001-05:00

-Amy Bennett

2009-08-12T22:50:00.001-05:00

How Is America Going to End? Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" lets you map out the death of the United States.

2009-08-12T17:25:00.001-05:00

Michael Cera on "Arrested Development"

My favorite Millennial actor is Michael Cera, from "Arrested Development," "Superbad," and "Juno." He's perfected the art of pushing the good-kid stereotype to its limit (on "Arrested Development," he'd study math behind his father's back), thereby revealing it as an absurd ideal. Why should we want young Americans to be so damn good?

-Joshua Glenn

2009-08-12T17:22:00.004-05:00

From Joshua Glenn at Hilobrow, an alternate generational periodization scheme:

1844-53: The Prometheans
1854-63: The Plutonians
1864-73: The Anarcho-Symbolists
1874-83: The Psychonauts
1884-93: ~~The Lost Generation~~ The New Kids
1894-1903: ~~The Lost Generation~~ The Hardboiled Generation
1904-13: ~~The Greatest Generation~~ The Partisans
1914-23: ~~The Greatest Generation~~ The New Gods
1924-33: ~~The Silent Generation~~ The Postmoderns
1934-43: ~~The Silent Generation~~ The Anti-Anti-Utopians
1944-53: The Boom Generation
1954-63: ~~The Boom Generation, or Post-Boomers~~ The OGXers (Original Generation X)
1964-73: ~~Generation X~~ The PC Generation
1974-83: ~~Generations X/Y~~ The Net Generation
1984-93: The Millennials
1994-2003: ~~The Millennials~~ TB

[kottke]

2009-08-11T10:20:00.000-05:00

2009-08-10T14:12:00.002-05:00

Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827–1895) was a French artist, astronomer and amateur entomologist. (Curiously, he is most noted for the unfortunate introduction of the Gypsy Moth into North America.)

His drawings of celestial phenomena were so good that the Director of Harvard College Observatory put Trouvelot on staff where he gained access to their powerful telescope. He would go on to produce some 7000 astronomical drawings and publish 50 scientific papers.

- but does it float

2009-08-09T14:25:00.002-05:00

He watched Sheila and her new husband whispering and box-stepping, and undertook the same experiment. She seemed pleased enough - smiling and flushed and mad to be wearing that dazzling dress - but she didn't look like she was in love, as he imagined love to look. Her eye was restive, vaguely troubled, as though she were trying to remember exactly who this man was with his arms around her waist, tipping her backward on one leg and planting a kiss on her throat.

-Michael Chabon, "S Angel"

2009-08-09T14:19:00.002-05:00

It was a windy, damp evening with no trace of June in it, and as they drove into the pale, almost imperceptible sunset he toyed with the idea of leaving without saying a word, of truly deserting Nathan - as his own father had done, in a different way, a year ago. The thought of his own insubstantiality, of his capacity simply to vanish, was horrible and seductive.

____

The best man in the world could fill a thousand pages with fine resolutions and still feel forced to leave his home in shame.

-Michael Chabon, "More Than Human"

2009-08-08T15:57:00.001-05:00

What really attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov's heroes he recognized the Russian idealist, a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything - a good man who cannot make good. This is the character that passes - in the guise of a doctor, a student, a village teacher, many other professional people - all through Chekhov's stories.

-Nabokov

[emphasis added, via April's note]

2009-07-22T12:13:00.003-05:00

It may be that she was simply an extreme case, that many other poets' works nurse and analyse their roots as doggedly as hers do, but that she is distinguished by an unusually clear root system and an abnormally clear and clinically exact system of attending to it... Maybe her singularity derives from a feminine bee-line instinct for the real priority, for what truly matters - an instinct for nursing and repairing the damaged and threatened nucleus of the self and for starving every other aspect of her life in order to feed and strengthen that, and bring that to a safe delivery.

-Ted Hughes, 'Sylvia Plath and Her Journals'

2009-07-22T11:55:00.002-05:00

Where [Hardy] differed from so many of his contemporaries was in the absoluteness, the literalness, with which he believed that not to be born was best...

when writing to Mrs Henniker about the fighting in South Africa, at a time when her husband was still on active service there, [he] allowed himself to remark: 'It is sad, or not, as you look at it, to think that 40,000 will have found their rest there. Could we ask them if they wish to wake up again, would they say Yes, do you think?'

-Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy
[quoted]

2009-07-19T14:53:00.002-05:00

You all know that in the due course of time
If you continue scratching on a stone,
Little by little some image thereon
Will be engraven. Thus her friends went on
Comforting her so long, till in the end
She, with the help of hope and common sense,
Received the impress of their consolation,
Which loosened at long last her heavy sorrow:
She could not have endured such grief for ever.

-Chaucer, from "The Franklin's Tale" (trans. David Wright)

2009-06-18T18:49:00.001-05:00

King Lear, like Hamlet, is peculiarly modern because in both, nature is no longer a home... There is no new house for man. Infinity must enter the image. In the nineteenth century, man's last home is music.

-Auden

2009-06-17T23:17:00.002-05:00

Chewing in Venice by Simone Decker

[via]

2009-06-15T21:01:00.000-05:00

Time has told me
You're a rare rare find
A troubled cure
For a troubled mind

And time has told me
Not to ask for more
Someday our ocean
Will find its shore

So I'll leave the ways that are making me be
What I really don't want to be
Leave the ways that are making me love
What I really don't want to love

Time has told me
You came with the dawn
A soul with no footprint
A rose with no thorn

Your tears they tell me
There's really no way
Of ending your troubles
With things you can say

And time will tell you
To stay by my side
To keep on trying
'til there's no more to hide

So leave the ways that are making you be
What you really don't want to be
Leave the ways that are making you love
What you really don't want to love

Time has told me
You're a rare rare find
A troubled cure
For a troubled mind

And time has told me
Not to ask for more
For some day our ocean
Will find its shore

-Nick Drake, "Time Has Told Me"

2009-06-14T22:19:00.000-05:00

O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.

—Howard Nemerov, from “The Blue Swallows”

[via The Ramblr]

2009-06-14T15:17:00.003-05:00

"The Fish"

[via]

2009-06-13T22:37:00.001-05:00

The play is written entirely out of spite against actors, and by its nature the role of Hamlet cannot be done by an actor. An actor can act everything except an actor. Hamlet should be played by an actor brought in off the street, and the rest of the characters should be professional actors. The point about Hamlet is that he is an actor and you can't act yourself. You can only be yourself.

-Auden, in Lectures on Shakespeare

2009-06-13T22:32:00.002-05:00

Shakespeare's very success as a dramatic poet may have led him to a kind of dissatisfaction with his life that is reflected in Hamlet. A dramatic poet is the kind of person who can imagine what anyone can feel, and he begins to wonder, "What am I?" "What do I feel?" "Can I feel?" Artists are inclined to suffer not from too much emotion but rather from too little. This business of being a mirror - you begin to question the reality of the mirror itself.

-Auden, in Lectures on Shakespeare

2009-06-13T22:22:00.002-05:00

Boredom is the demoniac side of pantheism. Pantheism is, in general, characterized by fullness; in the case of boredom we find the precise opposite, since it is characterized by emptiness; but it is just this which makes boredom a pantheistic conception. Boredom depends on the nothingness which pervades reality; it causes a dizziness like that produced by looking down into a yawning chasm, and this dizziness is infinite.

-Kierkegaard
[quoted]

2009-06-13T14:26:00.000-05:00

Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News

[via Yee Sum's facebook]

2009-06-08T21:52:00.002-05:00

-Alex MacLean, "Dinghies Clustered Around Dock"
Duxbury, Massachusetts

I think I could turn and live with animals

2009-06-08T20:52:00.002-05:00

I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.

-Walt Whitman

2009-06-08T18:09:00.002-05:00

Sex, Drugs and Thom Gunn by Tom Sleigh

[I'm posting this because I feel cool for having heard this paper read by the author at AWP before it was published. Oh yeah.]

2009-06-07T21:53:00.000-05:00

Aye! There it is!

2009-06-07T21:49:00.003-05:00

The Great and Magnificent Artichoke

2009-06-01T23:01:00.001-05:00

The proposed subtitle rankled because Phillips is against guidebooks to happiness. "A culture that is obsessed with happiness must really be in despair, mustn't it? Otherwise why would anybody be bothered about it at all?" asks the psychoanalyst, closing his eyes as he does repeatedly during the interview when he wants to clinch a thought, and then leaning forward to put his head in his hands. "It's become a preoccupation because there's so much unhappiness. The idea that if you just reiterate the word enough and we'll all cheer up is preposterous."

-in "Happiness is Always a Delusion"

2009-06-01T22:33:00.000-05:00

Even as I concentrate all my attention on the fly on the table, I glance fleetingly at myself.

-Charles Simic

2009-05-31T20:06:00.002-05:00

To rest, go to the woods
Where what is made is made
Without your thought or work.

-Wendell Berry, "A Timbered Choir"

2009-05-31T00:47:00.002-05:00

JeanYves Lemoigne

2009-05-30T01:11:00.002-05:00

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

-Georges Braque

2009-05-30T00:52:00.003-05:00

The way to develop good taste in literature is to read poetry.

-Joseph Brodsky, "How to Read a Book"

2009-05-28T23:57:00.003-05:00

PBF

2009-05-23T12:55:00.000-05:00

“The difference between poets and novelists is this,” writes the poet Randolph Henry Ash to the poet Christabel LaMotte in A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, “that the former write for the life of the language—and the latter write for the betterment of the world.” In Byatt’s novel this has the glint of irony: a fictional poet contemplating his independence from the medium in which, unbeknown to himself, he exists. But it also contains the germ of a modern stereotype. The idea that poets and novelists possess separate and incompatible temperaments, like fortune-tellers and pharmacists, that poets are preoccupied with language (“for the life of the language”) while novelists are engrossed by society (“for the betterment of the world”), is a commonplace—perhaps also a consequence—of the paced battlements of the contemporary literary world.

-in Poetry

2009-05-23T11:38:00.001-05:00

“I am the most artificial person you’ll ever meet.”

-Francis Bacon

2009-05-22T17:26:00.001-05:00

Poltergeist (help·info) (from German poltern, meaning to rumble or make noise, and Geist, meaning "ghost" or "spirit") denotes an invisible spirit or ghost that manifests itself by moving and influencing objects, generally in a particular location such as a house or room or place within a house.

[as in Conor Oberst's "I felt your Poltergeist love / Like Savanna heat." Competing with Krankenschwester to be the greatest German word, and making me like the language again]

2009-05-21T20:55:00.000-05:00

"Hejira" by David Sedaris

2009-05-20T16:10:00.000-05:00

Amazon.com: Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt

Read the reviews.

[via it loved to happen]

2009-05-19T22:24:00.003-05:00

By official decree, within the City of Salt, the right to use any of the following words and terms is suspended until further notice: henceforth nothing shall be deemed circular, infinite, innumerable, ancient, mysterious, endless, eternal, abstract, recursive, obscure, invisible, ambiguous, ludic, visionary, crystalline, dark. The following words shall be used only in discussing the objects they represent: mirror, labyrinth, dictionary, encyclopedia, library, lottery, memory, city.

-Kahn & Selesnick, from their stunning series City of Salt

2009-05-19T22:18:00.002-05:00

The moon, tonight seems
To be the full moon
But the hare inside the moon
Does not seem to be alive

-Tsanyang Gyatso, number 36 in Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama

2009-05-17T14:40:00.000-05:00

2009-05-17T12:15:00.001-05:00

Oregon Trail Emulator. Dreams really DO come true. [via]

2009-05-16T23:22:00.001-05:00

swings on the subway

[via]

2009-05-15T13:25:00.002-05:00

here via

2009-05-15T13:20:00.001-05:00

holy shit

2009-05-14T21:09:00.004-05:00

My Life is Average, a perfectly normal spin on Fuck My Life.

2009-05-08T16:29:00.001-05:00

"what is common about our “common sense” is not mutual suffering or universal benevolence, but a common rejection of pain by any sensitive person when he discovers that it can do neither the giver nor the receiver any good."

-Elizabeth Barnes, about Herman Melville's sympathy

Flood

2009-05-08T15:47:00.002-05:00

I woke to a voice within the room. perhaps.
The room itself: "You're wasting this life
expecting disappointment."
I packed my bag in the night
and peered in its leather belly
to count the essentials.
Nothing is essential.
To the east, the flood has begun.
Men call to each other on the water
for the comfort of voices.
Love surprises us.
It ends.

-Eliza Griswold

[damn end of the goddamn year. I don't deal well with goodbyes.]

2009-05-06T16:32:00.003-05:00

[via it loved to happen]

2009-05-04T17:01:00.000-05:00

A student from Brown University went undercover at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and has written a book about it

[clusterflock]

2009-05-04T15:53:00.002-05:00

the man who believed in the mot juste - the one and only correct word to use - the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives

-Hemingway about Pound, A Moveable Feast (134)

2009-05-03T22:00:00.001-05:00

Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.

-Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (54)

2009-05-03T21:42:00.000-05:00

[heehee. I've thought about doing that...]

2009-05-03T19:46:00.001-05:00

accident-explanatory slings

2009-05-03T16:39:00.003-05:00

In The Booth

2009-05-03T13:28:00.004-05:00

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion. There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Sir, I do not know what you mean by love. It does not sound well as you say it.

Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are all marked by it and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times. I would sooner have the pox than to fall in love with another woman loving the one I have.

-Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (122)

2009-04-28T22:46:00.001-05:00

I had a professor in college who claimed to know Samuel Beckett personally and told stories about him staring out of his classroom window, unsure of what to say to his charges. My professor said Beckett feared that he had nothing to teach, or that if he did, it would ultimately come to little more than language itself....

I sometimes wonder, in fact, if we might not both be better off, my students and I, if we spent a semester in silence thinking collectively on a subject and only rising to speak when the spirit moved us, Quaker style.

-in The Mediocre Professor

[via sweatervestboy]

2009-04-27T21:13:00.001-05:00

How To Graduate From Christianity

2009-04-27T16:53:00.003-05:00

From [Camus'] point of view it was a question of "To create or not to create," as he wrote in his notebook on 10 October 1937. "In the first case everything is justified. Everything, without exception. In the second case, one is faced with complete absurdity. It only remains to choose the most esthetic form of suicide: marriage plus a forty hours a week or a revolver."

-Emmett Parker

2009-04-26T19:24:00.001-05:00

After coding these written responses, the authors found that after about two to three drinks containing 1.5-ounce shots of 86-proof alcohol, participants displayed an increase in “fantasy” thinking, particularly in relation to the “mysteries of life” image theme. In fact, they tended to see a mystery of life dimension even in those images that weren’t meant to induce such thoughts. “Apparently,” the researchers write, “[alcohol] acts to allow or encourage [people] to think in contrasting terms about large or existential life issues. One can think of these…. as indicating a yearning for reflecting on some of life’s basic issues (success-failure, life-death, pleasure-unpleasure, etc.) which is encouraged or released by alcohol in small quantities under social conditions.” For example, a wet participant wrote in response to the “ski jumper in midair” image: “Paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

-Intoxicating Studies: The Effects of Alcohol on Social Behavior