6/8/09
I think I could turn and live with animals
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
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
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.]
[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.]
6/1/09
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"
-in "Happiness is Always a Delusion"
Even as I concentrate all my attention on the fly on the table, I glance fleetingly at myself.
-Charles Simic
-Charles Simic
5/31/09
5/30/09
5/28/09
5/23/09
“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
-in Poetry
5/22/09
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]
[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]
5/21/09
5/20/09
5/19/09
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
5/17/09
5/16/09
5/14/09
5/8/09
Flood
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.]
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.]
5/6/09
5/4/09
A student from Brown University went undercover at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and has written a book about it
[clusterflock]
[clusterflock]
5/3/09
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)
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)
4/28/09
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]
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]
4/27/09
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
-Emmett Parker
4/26/09
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
-Intoxicating Studies: The Effects of Alcohol on Social Behavior
4/23/09
4/18/09
Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step.
-Amiri Baraka, 'Black Art'
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step.
-Amiri Baraka, 'Black Art'
4/15/09
A Roadside Encounter
The pheonix tree suddenly tilts
The bicycle bell's ring hangs in air
Earth swiftly reverses its rotation
Back to that night ten years ago
The pheonix tree gently sways again
The ringing bell sprinkles floral fragrance along the trembling street
Darkness gathers, then seeps away
The dawning light of memory merges with the light in your eyes
Maybe this didn't happen
Just an illusion spawned by a familiar road
Even if this did happen
I'm used to not shedding any tears
-Shu Ting, translated by Eva Hung
The bicycle bell's ring hangs in air
Earth swiftly reverses its rotation
Back to that night ten years ago
The pheonix tree gently sways again
The ringing bell sprinkles floral fragrance along the trembling street
Darkness gathers, then seeps away
The dawning light of memory merges with the light in your eyes
Maybe this didn't happen
Just an illusion spawned by a familiar road
Even if this did happen
I'm used to not shedding any tears
-Shu Ting, translated by Eva Hung
Assembly Line
On the assembly line of Time
Nights huddle together
We come down from the factory assembly lines
And join the assembly line going home
Overhead
An assembly line of stars trails across the sky
By our side
A young tree looks dazed on its assembly line
The stars must be tired
Thousands of years have passed
Their journey never changes
The young trees are ill
Dust and monotony deprive them
Of grain and color
I can feel it all
Because we beat to the same rhythm
But strangely
The only thing I do not feel
Is my own existence
As though the woods and stars
Maybe out of habit
Maybe out of sorrow
No longer have the strength to care
About a destiny they cannot alter
-Shu Ting, translated by Eva Hung
Nights huddle together
We come down from the factory assembly lines
And join the assembly line going home
Overhead
An assembly line of stars trails across the sky
By our side
A young tree looks dazed on its assembly line
The stars must be tired
Thousands of years have passed
Their journey never changes
The young trees are ill
Dust and monotony deprive them
Of grain and color
I can feel it all
Because we beat to the same rhythm
But strangely
The only thing I do not feel
Is my own existence
As though the woods and stars
Maybe out of habit
Maybe out of sorrow
No longer have the strength to care
About a destiny they cannot alter
-Shu Ting, translated by Eva Hung
Six Ways of Eating Watermelons
The Fifth Way: The Consanguinity of Watermelons
No one would mistake a watermelon for a meteorite.
Star and melon, they are totally unconnected;
But earth is undeniably a heavenly body,
Watermelons and stars
Are undeniably consanguineous.
Not only are watermelons and the earth related
Like parent and child,
They also possess brotherly, sisterly feelings,
Like the moon and the sun,
The sun and us,
Us and the moon.
The Fourth Way: The Origins of Watermelons
Evidently, we live on the face of the earth;
And they, evidently, live in their watermelon interior.
We rush to and fro, thick-skinned,
Trying to stay outside, digesting light
Into darkness with which to wrap ourselves,
Cold and craving warmth.
They meditate on Zen, motionless, concentrated.
Shaping inward darkness into
Substantial, calm passions;
Forever seeking self-fulfillment and growth.
Someday, inevitably, we'll be pushed to the earth's interior,
And eventually they'll burst through the watermelon face.
The Third Way: The Philosophy of Watermelons
The history of watermelon philosophy
Is shorter than the earth's, but longer than ours;
They practice the Three Don'ts:
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
They are Taoistically wu-wei,
And keep themselves to themselves.
They don't envy ova,
Nor do they despise chicken's eggs.
Watermelons are neither oviparous, nor viviparous,
And comprehend the principle
Of attaining life through death.
Consequently, watermelons are not threatened by invasion,
Nor do they fear
Death.
The Second Way: The Territory of Watermelons
If we crushed a watermelon,
It would be sheer
jealousy.
Crushing a melon is equivalent to crushing a rounded night,
knocking down all the
stars,
Crumbling a perfect
universe.
And the outcome would only make us more jealous,
Would only clarify the relationship
Between meteorites and watermelon seeds,
The friendship between watermelon seeds and the universe.
They would only penetrate once again, more deeply,
into our
territory.
The First Way:
EAT IT FIRST.
-Luo Qing, translated by Zhang Cuo
No one would mistake a watermelon for a meteorite.
Star and melon, they are totally unconnected;
But earth is undeniably a heavenly body,
Watermelons and stars
Are undeniably consanguineous.
Not only are watermelons and the earth related
Like parent and child,
They also possess brotherly, sisterly feelings,
Like the moon and the sun,
The sun and us,
Us and the moon.
The Fourth Way: The Origins of Watermelons
Evidently, we live on the face of the earth;
And they, evidently, live in their watermelon interior.
We rush to and fro, thick-skinned,
Trying to stay outside, digesting light
Into darkness with which to wrap ourselves,
Cold and craving warmth.
They meditate on Zen, motionless, concentrated.
Shaping inward darkness into
Substantial, calm passions;
Forever seeking self-fulfillment and growth.
Someday, inevitably, we'll be pushed to the earth's interior,
And eventually they'll burst through the watermelon face.
The Third Way: The Philosophy of Watermelons
The history of watermelon philosophy
Is shorter than the earth's, but longer than ours;
They practice the Three Don'ts:
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
They are Taoistically wu-wei,
And keep themselves to themselves.
They don't envy ova,
Nor do they despise chicken's eggs.
Watermelons are neither oviparous, nor viviparous,
And comprehend the principle
Of attaining life through death.
Consequently, watermelons are not threatened by invasion,
Nor do they fear
Death.
The Second Way: The Territory of Watermelons
If we crushed a watermelon,
It would be sheer
jealousy.
Crushing a melon is equivalent to crushing a rounded night,
knocking down all the
stars,
Crumbling a perfect
universe.
And the outcome would only make us more jealous,
Would only clarify the relationship
Between meteorites and watermelon seeds,
The friendship between watermelon seeds and the universe.
They would only penetrate once again, more deeply,
into our
territory.
The First Way:
EAT IT FIRST.
-Luo Qing, translated by Zhang Cuo
4/14/09
Beyond the Solace of a Devastated Landscape
You don't need a war.
You don't need to go anywhere.
It's a myth: if you hurl
yourself at chaos
chaos will catch you.
-Eliza Griswold
You don't need to go anywhere.
It's a myth: if you hurl
yourself at chaos
chaos will catch you.
-Eliza Griswold
There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.
-Christian Wiman 'My Bright Abyss'
-Christian Wiman 'My Bright Abyss'
4/9/09
The Purity Myth is a book that I've been thinking about for a long time; the sexual double standard has irked me since I was a teenager and the framing of sexually active women as "dirty" has fascinated me for just as long. But it was really the work I do on Feministing that led me to write this book. I started to notice a trend emerging in the stories we were covering - whether it was pop culture or policy, there seemed to be an obsessive focus on young women's sexuality. Not exactly news, I know. But this focus went beyond your run-of-the-mill objectification. Hundreds of moral panic articles about "girls gone wild" and spring break madness were popping up around the same time books about "modesty" and the dangers of "hooking up" were all the rage....
In terms of what I'd like to cover for TPMCafe, I figure it's best to start with the purity myth itself - the lie that virginity and sexuality have some bearing on who young women are and how good they are.
-Jessica Valenti
[via 3quarks]
In terms of what I'd like to cover for TPMCafe, I figure it's best to start with the purity myth itself - the lie that virginity and sexuality have some bearing on who young women are and how good they are.
-Jessica Valenti
[via 3quarks]
4/4/09
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.
-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.
-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
4/3/09
One always writes in order to confess, to ask forgiveness; no doubt one always teaches, also, in order to ask forgiveness.
-Jacques Derrida
[via some kid]
-Jacques Derrida
[via some kid]
3/31/09
Just Now
a ladybug, its carapace blown open
so a translucent trace of orange gleams
from its body, has ascended link by link
the smudgy silver curve of my watch band.
It must have helicoptered past the sill
while I was slumped here squinting in the paper
at the ashen packaging another bombing's
made of a minivan. Made available
in the photo like the homeless in a poem.
The pain is far away. But then for moments
utterly clear: molten metal guttering
down from the Milky Way to fall on us.
And sometimes, God, it lands with all its will.
My spluttered prayer for it to hold its distance:
how ludicrous to blurt it from this comfort.
Still it impels itself from me. Please stay
away from me. Please stay away from this
insectile soul who only weeks ago
was wind and shit and jasmine leaves and rain.
-Peter Campion
so a translucent trace of orange gleams
from its body, has ascended link by link
the smudgy silver curve of my watch band.
It must have helicoptered past the sill
while I was slumped here squinting in the paper
at the ashen packaging another bombing's
made of a minivan. Made available
in the photo like the homeless in a poem.
The pain is far away. But then for moments
utterly clear: molten metal guttering
down from the Milky Way to fall on us.
And sometimes, God, it lands with all its will.
My spluttered prayer for it to hold its distance:
how ludicrous to blurt it from this comfort.
Still it impels itself from me. Please stay
away from me. Please stay away from this
insectile soul who only weeks ago
was wind and shit and jasmine leaves and rain.
-Peter Campion
3/29/09
“This photo was taken by photographer Jack Bradley and depicts the exact moment this boy, Harold Whittles, hears for the very first time ever. The doctor treating him has just placed an earpiece in his left ear. Date unknown."-ScienceBuzz
[via it loved to happen]
3/21/09
There is only this now. It does not come from anywhere; it is not going anywhere. It is not permanent, but it is not impermanent. Though moving, it is always still. When we try to catch it, it seems to run away, and yet it is always here and there is no escape from it... When Fa-ch'ang was dying, a squirrel screeched on the roof. "It's just this," he said,"and nothing else."
-Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
-Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
"In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble." In other words, the mind cannot act without giving up the impossible attempt to control itself beyond a certain point... This is why Zen often seems to take the side of action as against reflection, and why it describes itself as "no-mind" (wu-hsin) or "no-thought" (wu-nien), and why the masters demonstrate Zen by giving instantaneous and unpremeditated answers to questions. When Yün-men was asked for the ultimate secret of Buddhism, he replied, "Dumpling!"
-Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
-Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world... the Taoist mentality makes, or forces, nothing but "grows" everything. When human reason is seen to be an expression of the same spontaneous balance of yang and yin as the natural universe, man's action upon his environment is not felt as a conflict, an action from outside. Thus the difference between forcing and growing cannot be expressed in terms of specific directions as to what should or should not be done, for the difference lies primarily in the quality and feeling of the action. The difficulty of describing these things for Western ears is that people in a hurry cannot feel.
-Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
-Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
3/20/09
3/18/09
Meditation at Lagunitas
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
-Robert Hass
[Foster said this was either the most famous, most representative, or most important lyric poem of the last quarter century. Maybe all three, I can't remember.]
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
-Robert Hass
[Foster said this was either the most famous, most representative, or most important lyric poem of the last quarter century. Maybe all three, I can't remember.]
3/17/09
Many years later the older Updike, now giving up on alcohol, coffee and salt, put into the mouth of that God the words of Frederick the Great excoriating his battle-shy soldiers -- "Dogs, would you live forever?" But all the life-enhancing substances were set aside, and writing became Updike's "sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality." In the mornings, he could write "breezily" of what he could not contemplate in the dark without "turning in panic to God". The plain facts of life were "unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light -- in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalising it -- approaches blasphemy."
-Ian McEwan
[via I forget who]
-Ian McEwan
[via I forget who]
With a frequency over a million, billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, it is the deepest note ever detected from an object in the Universe.
'Black hole hums B flat'
'Black hole hums B flat'
3/16/09
For 25 years I have read criticisms of my stories and I don't remember a single remark of any value or one word of valuable advice. Only once [a critic] said something which made an impression on me - he said I would die in a ditch, drunk.
-Anton Chekhov
-Anton Chekhov
3/14/09
Chekhov said: "Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy." By this I take him to mean that other people are fundamentally opaque, mysterious - even people you know very well, your wife or husband, your family. Janet Malcolm, who has written a profound and insightful book on Chekhov (Reading Chekhov), says that "We never see people in life as clearly as we see the people in novels, stories and plays; there is a veil between ourselves and even our closest intimates, blurring us to each other." This, it seems to me, is the great and lasting allure of all fiction: if we want to know what other people are like we turn to the novel or the short story. In no other art form can we take up residence in other people's minds so effortlessly. Chekhov tells us a great deal about his characters but, however, resists full exposure: there always remains something "blurry", something secret about them. This is part of his genius: this is what makes his stories seem so real.
-William Boyd, 'A Chekhov Lexicon'
[via Anecdotal Evidence]
-William Boyd, 'A Chekhov Lexicon'
[via Anecdotal Evidence]
3/13/09
It is the word pejorative that hurts.
My old boat goes round on a crutch
And doesn't get under way.
-Wallace Stevens
My old boat goes round on a crutch
And doesn't get under way.
-Wallace Stevens
Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.
-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
7
Dear stranger
extant in memory by the blue Juniata,
these letters
across space I guess
will be all we will know of one another.
So little of what one is threads itself through the eye
of empty space.
Never mind.
The self is the least of it.
Let our scars fall in love.
-Galway Kinnell, 'The Book of Nightmares'
3/12/09
A recent long-term study conducted in Scandinavia sought to discover which activities related to a healthy and happy later life. Three stood out: camping, dancing and singing.
-Brian Eno
-Brian Eno
3/10/09
The late Richard Rorty saw irony as a state of mind intimately connected with the postmodern worldview—a withdrawal from judgment that nevertheless aims at a kind of consensus, a shared agreement not to judge. The ironic temperament, however, is better understood as a virtue—a disposition aimed at a kind of practical fulfillment and moral success. Venturing a definition of this virtue, I would describe it as a habit of acknowledging the otherness of everything, including oneself. However convinced you are of the rightness of your actions and the truth of your views, look on them as the actions and the views of someone else and rephrase them accordingly. So defined, irony is quite distinct from sarcasm: it is a mode of acceptance rather than a mode of rejection. It also points both ways: through irony, I learn to accept both the other on whom I turn my gaze, and also myself, the one who is gazing. Pace Rorty, irony is not free from judgment: it simply recognizes that the one who judges is also judged, and judged by himself.
3/8/09
3/1/09
This stranger-poet-survivor carries "a book of myths" in which her/his "names do not appear." These are the old myths of patriarchy, the myths that split male and female irreconcilably into two warring factions, the myths that perpetuate the battle between the sexes. Implicit in Rich's image of the androgyne is the idea that we must write new myths, create new definitions of humanity which will not glorify this angry chasm but heal it. Rich's visionary androgyne reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s assertion that the great artist must be mentally bisexual. But Rich takes this idea even further: it is not only the artist who must make the emphatic leap beyond gender, but any of us who would try to save the world from destruction.
-Erica Jong, on Adrienne Rich's 'Diving into the Wreck'
-Erica Jong, on Adrienne Rich's 'Diving into the Wreck'
2/25/09
Poetry is a superior amusement: I do not mean an amusement for superior people. I call it an amusement, an amusement pour distraire les honnêtes gens, not because that is a true definition, but because if you call it anything else you are likely to call it something still more false. If we think of the nature of amusement, then poetry is not amusing; but if we think of anything else that poetry may seem to be, we are led into far greater difficulties.
-T.S. Eliot
[quoted]
-T.S. Eliot
[quoted]
2/18/09
Crying Angel
Nothing prepared me for heaven.
Its scaffolds -- street after street --
halls leading to halls,
rooms papered with distance
Its scaffolds -- street after street --
halls leading to halls,
rooms papered with distance
as if heaven were only perspective,
a vanishing point drawing us
until we vanished. And if
I am crying, it's for small things:
staplers, bowls, gloves, spoons
on their pedestals, their ideal forms
lost at the ends of corridors --
for Music in its winged box,
Math's fulcrum and see-saw,
Geography's colored pins, its there, there.
How did we ever come to think
the single world was precious,
the model for us to love --
one town, one house, one sky,
one woman, the mole on her back --
when it is the universe, its gaps,
the mileage between its outposts,
God loves and is his image?
They weren't lies after all, the stories
where we are transmuted into stars
or into water lost in the infinity
of itself. Who could have imagined
God's need for distance,
his hurling us away to be near him?
2/17/09
The most important thing a beginning writer may have going for her is her bone-deep impulse to defend a self that at the time might not look all that worth getting worked up about.
-Kay Ryan
-Kay Ryan
even if your preferred mode is fragment, you need syntax to love. Still, there is a "leaking" when we try to put things together. As a bowl starts out being a bowl, the not- bowlness drains out of it. Later, form is not something we remember doing, like being born.
-Brenda Hillman, quoted by Mark Doty at AWP 2009
Now here I am, going to AWP. How am I going to remember: these people are THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL? They will seem like individuals, not deadly white threads of the great creative writing fungus...
I don’t want to be connected to poetry in an easy, fellowshipping way, but I do want to be connected in a way that will earn me the respect of the dead.
-Kay Ryan, 'I Go to AWP,' and you should have too!
I don’t want to be connected to poetry in an easy, fellowshipping way, but I do want to be connected in a way that will earn me the respect of the dead.
-Kay Ryan, 'I Go to AWP,' and you should have too!
The Annihilation of Nothing
Nothing remained: Nothing, the wanton name
That nightly I rehearsed till led away
To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.
That nightly I rehearsed till led away
To a dark sleep, or sleep that held one dream.
In this a huge contagious absence lay,
More space than space, over the cloud and slime,
Defined but by the encroachments of its sway.
Stripped to indifference at the turns of time,
Whose end I knew, I woke without desire,
And welcomed zero as a paradigm.
But now it breaks - images burst with fire
Into the quiet sphere where I have bided,
Showing the landscape holding yet entire:
The power that I envisaged, that presided
Ultimate in its abstract devastations,
Is merely change, the atoms it divided
Complete, in ignorance, new combinations.
Only an infinite finitude I see
In those peculiar lovely variations.
It is despair that nothing cannot be
Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark
Of dread.
Look upward. Neither firm nor free,
Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.
-Thom Gunn
2/9/09
Children as young as three readily attribute design and purpose to inanimate objects. When Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist "to make nice music", while rivers exist so boats have something to float on. "It was extraordinary to hear children saying that things like mountains and clouds were 'for' a purpose and appearing highly resistant to any counter-suggestion," says Kelemen.
-Michael Brooks, in 'Born Believer: How Your Brain Creates God'
[via morethan95theses]
-Michael Brooks, in 'Born Believer: How Your Brain Creates God'
[via morethan95theses]
2/8/09
2/7/09
Awesome thing about Twitter #1,729: No one asks you to post twenty-five random boring facts about yourself.
-ayjay
2/4/09
Those To Come
Eyeless in the morning sun you were
pale and mild, a modern girl
taken with thought, still prone to care
makin tea in your underwear
you went out in the yard to find
something to eat and clear your mind
something bad inside me went away
quaking leaves and broken light
shifting skin the coming night
the bearers of all good things arrive
climb inside us, twist and cry
a kiss on your molten eyes
myriad lives like blades of grass
yet to be realized, bow as they pass
they are cold,
still,
waiting in the ether,
to form,
feel,
kill,
propagate,
only to die
(x2)
dissolve
magically,
absurdly,
they'll end,
leave,
dissipate,
coldly
and strangely
return
-The Shins
pale and mild, a modern girl
taken with thought, still prone to care
makin tea in your underwear
you went out in the yard to find
something to eat and clear your mind
something bad inside me went away
quaking leaves and broken light
shifting skin the coming night
the bearers of all good things arrive
climb inside us, twist and cry
a kiss on your molten eyes
myriad lives like blades of grass
yet to be realized, bow as they pass
they are cold,
still,
waiting in the ether,
to form,
feel,
kill,
propagate,
only to die
(x2)
dissolve
magically,
absurdly,
they'll end,
leave,
dissipate,
coldly
and strangely
return
-The Shins
2/1/09
1/29/09
1/26/09
1/25/09
Our metaphors go on ahead of us, they know before we do. And thank goodness for that, for if I were dependent on other ways of coming to knowledge I think I'd be a very slow study. I need something to serve as a container for emotion and idea, a vessel that can hold what's too slippery or charged or difficult to touch. Will doesn't have much to do with this; I can't choose what's going to serve as a compelling image for me. But I've learned to trust that part of my imagination that gropes forward, feeling its way toward what it needs; to watch for the signs of fascination, the sense of compelled attention (Look at me, something seems to say, closely) that indicates that there's something I need to attend to. Sometimes it seems to me as if metaphor were the advance guard of the mind; something in us reaches out, into the landscape in front of us, looking for the right vessel, the right vehicle, for whatever will serve.
-Mark Doty, Reflects on His Poem 'A Display of Mackerel'
-Mark Doty, Reflects on His Poem 'A Display of Mackerel'
1/24/09
1/17/09
About love and how to survive - not to make a living - but how to survive whole in a world where we are all of us, in some measure, victims of something. Each one of us in some way at some moment a victim and in no position to do anything about it. Some child is always left unpicked up at some moment. In a world like that, how does one remain whole - is it just impossible to do that?
-Toni Morrison, in Conversations
-Toni Morrison, in Conversations
1/14/09
Origins
I'm from touch football in parking lots and street corner Romeos
I'm from half-brothers and three-quarter nelsons
I'm from watered-down blue blood and finger-painting on subway walls
I'm from tongue kisses in stairwells and tequila sunsets in the closet
I'm from stealing the coins out of other people's wishing wells
I'm from jordache jeans and pick-up games in the twilight
I'm from Italian girls wearing murmurs I oh so badly wanted to speak
I'm from sidestepped obligations and nomadic fingertips
I'm from listerine in alleyways and whiskers in the vaseline
I'm from unreliable narrators and abandoned buildings
I'm from don't cross 24th Street because of the Irish and don't cross South Street because of the blacks
I'm from the merry-go-round where white guys in cars slow down after midnight to take a visual bite out of my twelve-year-old ass
I'm from fuck you when my friends are around, and please stop looking at me, please stop looking at me, please stop looking at me, when I'm alone
I'm from sucker punches and a mouthful of blood spit in my face
I'm from a nightgown breathing at the bottom of a staircase
I'm from I wished you died in that hospital
I'm from exit plans that involve shotguns
I'm from you gonna front like the hard guy, you better back that shit up
-Jeffrey McDaniel, in The Endarkenment
I'm from half-brothers and three-quarter nelsons
I'm from watered-down blue blood and finger-painting on subway walls
I'm from tongue kisses in stairwells and tequila sunsets in the closet
I'm from stealing the coins out of other people's wishing wells
I'm from jordache jeans and pick-up games in the twilight
I'm from Italian girls wearing murmurs I oh so badly wanted to speak
I'm from sidestepped obligations and nomadic fingertips
I'm from listerine in alleyways and whiskers in the vaseline
I'm from unreliable narrators and abandoned buildings
I'm from don't cross 24th Street because of the Irish and don't cross South Street because of the blacks
I'm from the merry-go-round where white guys in cars slow down after midnight to take a visual bite out of my twelve-year-old ass
I'm from fuck you when my friends are around, and please stop looking at me, please stop looking at me, please stop looking at me, when I'm alone
I'm from sucker punches and a mouthful of blood spit in my face
I'm from a nightgown breathing at the bottom of a staircase
I'm from I wished you died in that hospital
I'm from exit plans that involve shotguns
I'm from you gonna front like the hard guy, you better back that shit up
-Jeffrey McDaniel, in The Endarkenment
1/10/09
1/7/09
Planetarium
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848),
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
a woman 'in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles'
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
She whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses
Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind
An eye,
'virile, precise and absolutely certain'
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us
Tycho whispering at last
'Let me not seem to have lived in vain'
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
-Adrienne Rich
… Many of those who seek help in workshops in order get published have a dream, I think, not so much of devoting the most intense part of their lives to the hard, lonely. Glorious, transcendent work-play of writing poetry, but of appearing before the world as a poet. It is a dream of individual freedom, an unexamined, perhaps even unconscious need in a country where even the individualizing first name of a human being has been reduced to the uniformed and meaningless: "My name is Jean; I am your waitress for the evening." It does not in any way resemble the hippie rebellion in which youth divided itself from age by dressing alike, acting, talking, wearing their hair, eating, living alike. The point of this dream is the expression of freedom and uniqueness of a self. Need I say that, though some few professional poets have felt free to express outwardly their quirky selfness, it is the strong inner sense of self, usually protected from the public eye, saved from and dedicated to the poems, that is characteristic of most successful publishing poets/ Most of them are happy to be indistinguishable in public, leading quiet, domestic lives. The private aspects of the wild and the unique are saved for the poems. Iconoclasm is saved, hoarded, for language – for forms on the page.
-Mona Van Duyn, "Matters of Poetry"[via Fort of Sand]
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