February 2012
86 posts
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“But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the dominant culture’s views and beliefs, and, for this, it is...
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“Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”
Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
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“The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in our heads.”
Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
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“True, the desire to read is an insatiable desire and you must read. Nevertheless, you must also think. Intellectual isolation loses value in an existence of books. I think I sent you some time ago a quotation from Henry James about living in a world of creation. A world of creation is one of the areas, and only one, of the world of thought and there is no passion like the passion of...
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“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in...”
– René Descartes
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“I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a...
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“Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibers, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that...
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The Place of the Solitaires
Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.
Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;
And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,
In the place of the solitaires,...
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“You cannot save people, you can only love them.”
– Anaïs Nin [February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977]
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From Wilhelm Reich’s “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” (1933):
“Fascist mentality is the mentality of the subjugated ‘little man’ who craves authority and rebels against it at the same time. It is not by accident that all fascist dictators stem from the milieu of the little reactionary man. The captains of industry and the feudal militarist make use of this social fact for their own purposes. A...
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“Change occurs among other people. It seems real when we can see it in other...”
– Todd Heatherton, in Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit
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A murmur of syllables, air and water, words with no weight: night unfolds and looks at me… Your shadow covers this page.
—Octavio Paz, As One Listens to the Rain
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“And the holy wilderness takes root, rich in promise. So rich it burns. For we lack Song to set the spirit loose. It would turn against itself, And be consumed, Godly fire cannot Bear captivity.”
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Friedrich Holderlin, from ‘The Titans’ [Die Titanen], translated by Richard Sieburth.
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The Mother of the Commander Michitsuna (10th century)
Have you any idea How long a night can last, spent Lying alone and sobbing? -Translation by Kenneth Rexroth
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“I have been spared the fate
of those who love words
more than what they mean”
-Franz Wright, from “University of One”
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The unknown is an abstraction; the known, a desert; but what is half-known, half-seen, is the perfect breeding ground for desire and hallucination.
-Juan Jose Saer, The Witness
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We seek Nothing beyond reality. Within it, Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana Included, the spirit that goes roundabout And through included, not merely the visible, The solid, but the movable, the moment, The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints, The pattern of the heavens and high, night air. From Wallace Stevens’s “An Ordinary Evening...
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Let us no more contend, nor blame each other, blamed enough elsewhere, but strive, In offices of love, how we may lighten each other’s burden. - John Milton
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“I’m interested in the theater because I’m interested in communication with...”
– Stephen Sondheim, on life, writing, theater.
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“In a Dark Time” In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood— A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire! I know the purity of pure despair,...
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“The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather, they are manifestations of the same thing. The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.”
—Mae Jamison, TED2002
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Out of these nothings —All beginnings come. From Theodore Roethke’s “North American Sequence: The Longing” (1964)
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Epilogue
Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed...
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nprfreshair:
From 2007: A John Waters...
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Proper technique for removal of the heart from the...
The heart should be grasped by inserting the index finger into the left ventricle, the thumb in the right ventricle, and grasping the ventricular septum. Raise the heart towards the chin, putting a stretch on the blood vessels. Cut vessels one-by-one in a circular direction, beginning with either the inferior vena cava or lower pulmonary vein.
-Henry W. Cattell, Postmortem Pathology, 1906
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“Breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is...”
– Guy de Maupassant
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“ … Who could refrain That had a heart to love, and in that heart Courage to make’s love known?”
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth
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Inside Higher Ed: The "Be Yourself" Myth →
Today’s myth is: “When interviewing for a tenure-track academic position, it’s best to just be yourself.”
A number of months ago, I was working with a client whom I’ll call Margaret, a full professor and department head in the social sciences in an East Coast R1, who had contacted me for assistance in refining the letters of recommendation she was writing for the...
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I wrote about the night bird cries, the sea sounds, and the lonely barking, and I liked what I wrote in flashes; but something was wrong with it. There is always something wrong with writing. So I tore the paper up at last, liking the untouched memory so much better, not wanting it forced into the insincerity of words.
-Denton Welch, A Voice Through A Cloud
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“A poem is a sonic, sensuous event and not a statement or a string of ideas.”
– Denise Levertov
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wwnorton:
“I think it’s really important to go to your room and sit there. I couldn’t mean that more seriously. The amateur writer only writes when something big happens in his or her life. Unless you have a better life than I do, you would write only three or four poems a year. So you go to your room and you wait for something to happen. You do that regularly.” — From A Conversation With...
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The nothingness was a nakedness, a point
Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice
Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.
From Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (1947)
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“I’ve always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was. … I...”
– Former poet laureate Donald Hall on poetry. (via nprfreshair)
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“In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of...”
– Wallace Stevens in Adagia