February 2012
65 posts
“You do not write the best you can for the sake of art, but for the sake of...”
– Flannery O’Connor
paint your own nebula →
mikeclevenger:
“People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state—it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle…. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of...
“why yes, I AM lounging around in sweats
….and sparkly silver heels”
– - KMW
the world needs to know.
“Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
– Shakespeare, Macbeth, I, iv
Escape(ism)
hours:
“[T]here is a clear sense in which all reading whatever is an escape. It involves a temporary transference of the mind from our actual surroundings to things merely imagined or conceived. This happens when we read history or science no less than when we read fictions. All such escape is from the same thing; immediate, concrete actuality. The important question is what we escape to. Some...
“Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility.”
– C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
“Man invented cooking before he thought of nutrition. To be sure, food keeps us...”
– Capon, Supper of the Lamb (via karmish)
In the Same Space
hours:
by: C. P. Cavafy from: C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems (Revised Edition) translated by: Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood that I’ve seen and walked through years on end:
I created you while I was happy, while I was sad, with so many incidents, so many details.
And, for me, the whole of you is transformed into feeling.
Home
hours:
“[F]or most migrants, especially migrant artists and writers, the issue of homeland involves arrival more than return. The dichotomy inherent in the word ‘homeland’ is more significant now than it was in the past. Its meaning can no longer be separated from home, which is something the migrant should be able to build away from his native land. Therefore, it is logical to say that your...
Ready for March
In February living stood still. The birds flew unwillingly and the soul chafed against the landscape as a boat chafes against the pier it lies moored to.
- Tomas Tranströmer (from “Face to Face,” the great enigma)
Glad I’m not the only one that feels that way about this month…
An Aggressive Student Focus
hours:
“Teaching is when you have one person, a teacher in a room, doing improv with a class. Looking at the students, looking at them as people. And all faculty should be made to teach freshmen. This idea that ‘Oh, the freshmen—let’s leave that to the graduate students, the slaves.’ That’s absurd. The freshman year is the most important year, especially for people coming from deprived...
Vive la révolution vivante
hours:
“Revolutions begin laudably but sometimes almost immediately degenerate into ideology or into partisanship and so on. Every revolution eventually needs a new revolution.”
— Camille Paglia, “The M.I.T. Lecture: Crisis in the American Universities,” Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (via schizophreniatic)
The Storm
hours:
by: Mary Oliver from: Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
Now through the white orchard my little dog romps, breaking the new snow with wild feet. Running here running there, excited, hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins until the white snow is written upon in large, exuberant letters, a long sentence, expressing the pleasures of...
Don't Be a Drag, Just Be a...
hours:
“In order to be the person I want to be, I must strive, hourly, against the drag of the others.”
— Mary Oliver, “Sand Dabs, Four,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
A Good Scorching
hours:
“In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.”
— Mary Oliver, “The Bright Eyes of Eleonora: Poe’s Dream of Recapturing the Impossible,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
Watching Together
discourseoflove:
“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars (translated from the French by Lewis Galantière)
Frosting on Top
hours:
“In the lyrical poems of Robert Frost there is almost always something wrong, a dissatisfaction or distress. The poet attempts an explanation and a correction. He is not successful. But he has, often in metaphoric language, named whatever it is that disquiets him. At the same time, in the same passages, the poem is so pleasant—so very pleasant—to read or to hear.
In fact we are hearing...
Sinking In
hours:
“I know of one acid test in the theatre. It is literally an acid test. When a performance is over, what remains? Fun can be forgotten, but powerful emotion also disappears and good arguments lose their thread. When emotion and argument are harnessed to a wish from the audience to see more clearly into itself — then something in the mind burns. The event scorches on to the memory an...
“Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to...”
– Brenda Ueland, Strength to Your Sword Arm
“Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a...”
– Helen Keller
“Grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is...”
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (via invisibleforeigner)
how can we sleep when...
hours:
“He hated the hours of sleep. He was a man who thrived and worked in available light. At night his wife would sleep in his embrace but the room around him continued to be alive, his body porous to every noise, his stare painting out darkness. He would sleep as insecurely as a thief does, which is why they are always tired.”
— Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion
Supply Culture
hours:
“Because most scripts are written by and for men, they project a world in which men rule, and in which men play most of the roles. Television and movies project the power structure of our society, and by projecting it, perpetuate it, make it seem normal, make it seem the only thing to do, to talk about, to think about. Once viewers have become habituated to a certain type of story, they...
“[H]ow can you be yourself until you void others’ misnaming of you?”
– — Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why
“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason.”
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (via invisibleforeigner)
On Pigeon-holing People
hours:
by: Movement Without A Name
Lots of us take quite some pleasure in classifying people: He’s irresponsible, she is as lazy as they come, he will never achieve anything just like his father… . Do you know what we are doing if we pigeon-hole people like that? We keep them where they are, we do not allow them to grow, we never give them any chances. Even if it’s true what we say about them...
