chg7

I made the jump

2010-02-26T13:51:00.001-05:00

http://chg7.wordpress.com/

David Foster Wallace

2010-01-30T15:19:00.007-05:00

Its protagonist's self-diagnosed "disease" – a blend of grandiosity and self-contempt, of rage and cowardice, of ideological fervor and a self-conscious inability to act on his convictions: his whole paradoxical and self negating character – makes him a universal figure in whom we can all see parts of ourselves, the same kind of ageless literary archetype as Ajax or Hamlet.
From "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, Back Bay Books, New York, 2006.

Editorial: I just finished reading Consider the Lobster, a collection of essays by DFW. He caught my attention when I first read his 2005 commencement address to Kenyon College. The point he makes there (see the beauty, it is everywhere) lingers in my mind. For example I almost always remember it when I'm in the checkout line at a busy market. The two points he makes here are likewise thoughtful. One is mostly a common literary observation, namely that we get to see ourselves in compelling, universal stories and characters. How true! The other point (which is really just an observation) is more poignant, namely that humans can exist with enormous contradictions, that they can feel opposite emotions and act on either in an instance. Also so true, but unsettling at the same time.

David Foster Wallace

2010-01-30T15:18:00.002-05:00

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to becmoe a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience, It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
From "Consider the Lobster" in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, Back Bay Books, New York, 2006.

Editorial: I read this essay in Venice over the New Year. Enough said.

David Foster Wallace

2010-01-30T15:16:00.001-05:00

The mistake here lies in both sides’ assumption that the real motives for redistributing wealth are charitable or unselfish. The conservatives’ mistake (if it is a mistake) is wholly conceptual, but for the Left the assumption is also a serious tactical error. Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people’s sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.
From "Authority and American Usage" in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, Back Bay Books, New York, 2006.

David Foster Wallace

2010-01-30T15:12:00.005-05:00

This argument is not the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it's still vulnerable to some objections.
From "Authority and American Usage" in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, Back Bay Books, New York, 2006.

Editorial: barrel of drugged trout. Brilliant.

David Foster Wallace

2010-01-30T15:09:00.003-05:00

...and it's now pretty much universally accepted that (a) meaning is inseparable from some act of interpretation and (b) an act of interpretation is always somewhat biased, i.e., informed by the interpreter's particular ideology.
From "Authority and American Usage" in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, Back Bay Books, New York, 2006.

Ted Hughes

2010-01-07T09:47:00.006-05:00

My Uncle Dan
by Ted Hughes

My Uncle Dan's an inventor, you may think that's very fine.
You may wish he was your Uncle instead of being mine—
If he wanted he could make a watch that bounces when it drops,
He could make a helicopter out of string and bottle tops
Or any really useful thing you can't get in the shops.
    But Uncle Dan has other ideas:
    The bottomless glass for ginger beers,
    The toothless saw that's safe for the tree,
    A special word for a spelling bee
    (Like Lionocerangoutangadder),
    Or the roll-uppable rubber ladder,
    The mystery pie that bites when it's bit—
    My Uncle Dan invented it.
My Uncle Dan sits in his den inventing night and day.
His eyes peer from his hair and beard like mice from a load of hay.
And does he make the shoes that will go walks without your feet?
A shrinker to shrink instantly the elephants you meet?
A carver that just carves from the air steaks cooked and ready to eat?
    No, no, he has other intentions—
    Only perfectly useless inventions:
    Glassless windows (they never break),
    A medicine to cure the earthquake,
    The unspillable screwed-down cup,
    The stairs that go neither down nor up,
    The door you simply paint on a wall—
    Uncle Dan invented them all.

From "Collected Poems for Children" by Ted Hughes (2005).

Settlement & Landscapes III

2009-11-03T22:14:00.005-05:00

1. Homestead, Yunnan Province, China
2. Penon de Alhucemas, Morocco
3. Rheris, Morocco
4. Munich, Germany
5. Saulsville Township, South Africa
6. Shibam, Yemen

Editorial: See Settlement & Landscapes I.

Settlement & Landscapes II

2009-11-03T13:00:00.009-05:00

1. Kye Monastery, Spiti Valley in Himachal Pradesh, India
2. Houston, Texas
3. Village, Niger, Africa
4. Markham Suburbs, Ontario
5. Monteriggioni, Siena Province, Italy
6. Las Vegas, Nevada

Editorial: See Settlement & Landscapes I.

Settlement & Landscapes I

2009-11-02T10:57:00.017-05:00

1. Kreuzberg (Berlin), Germany
2. Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
3. Village, Farah Province, Afghanistan
4. African Village
5. Ganvié, Benin
6. New York, New York

Editorial: In my work I study the connections between past human events and features of the natural and built environment. Part of this study involves looking at human settlement on diverse landscapes, which is why I collect these aerial images (if you happen to stumble on a fine example please send it along). The theory is quite simple and almost blasé in today’s scholarship: the relationship between human life and physical space is dialectical as the two change and develop through constant interaction (i.e., through a dialogue). If you have any doubt whether the space that contains us (concrete/wooded, flat/inclined, cramped/spacious, etc.) alters or affects our behavior in the same way that our actions (building, farming, digging, moving, etc.) transform landscapes, just take a look at these images. Think how different you would be-- how different your thoughts, beliefs and dreams would be-- if you lived in these places. Clearly I could make the same point about people's social milieu influencing who they are and what they do. In fact, to understand an event and its actors you need to think about both worlds—the material and the social—as well as a few others that I can wrestle with later (ideological and physiological being the big two). In the meantime enjoy these views from around the world.

Francisco de Goya

2009-10-29T17:29:00.004-04:00

Perro Enterrado en Arena (1819-1823)
Museo Nacional del Prado
painting

Fernando Botero

2009-10-29T17:18:00.009-04:00

Still Life with Watermelon (1974)
The University of Texas at Austin, College of Fine Arts
oil on canvas

Jacopo de' Barbari

2009-10-29T17:11:00.007-04:00

Still Life with Partridge, Steel Gauntlets and Cross-Bow Bolts (1504)
Alte Pinakothek (Munich, Germany)
painting on limewood panel

Editorial: I have had the pleasure of seeing this in person. Whao. Every time I stare at this painting my mind heats up a few degrees. How can items so obviously violent be rendered in such peace and elegance?

African Proverb

2009-10-10T15:56:00.024-04:00

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunters.

Editorial: It may help to accept as axiomatic the notion that history is a worthwhile pursuit that produces a useful product. I can wrestle with the fairness of this statement later. For now I consider the idea that history is written by the victors. Other posts that dance around this topic include quotes from Orwell, Faulkner, and Kundera.
Do a nation and its writers create a history that justifies the rightness of its actions? Well, after smashing through Tunisia and creaming their enemies the Romans could (and did) portray the defeated Carthaginians as miserable barbarians. We don't know how the poor (dead) historians in Carthage would have told the story. We see the same imbalance in the narratives about the colonization of the Americas, where European destruction and domination were repackaged as discovery. As we have been taught by Subaltern Studies this does not mean there are not alternative histories that undercut the dominant history, for example feminist history, class history, ethnic history, etc. The joy in looking at this closely is in being able to suss out the public and private mechanisms that serve the purpose of promoting the central history and burying the marginal histories: nationally standardized systems of education, production of state ceremonies and pastimes, state systems of accounting and archiving, and ginormous news agencies. Keep that in mind next time you look at a high school curriculum, watch a helicopter land at the White House, sit down for Thanksgiving, file your taxes, or read a newspaper. It is all quite deliberate!

Alex España

2009-09-28T15:59:00.002-04:00

Today I need to do three things. Fill out my planner. Do what my planner says. Find my planner.

Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht.

2009-09-19T23:39:00.008-04:00

Man plans, God laughs.
Yiddish Proverb

Editorial: Think of all the ludicrous demands made by the fickle gods of ancient mythology: sacrifice this virgin, build a boat, fetch me that animal, if you do this you live and if you don’t you die. On and on. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how some events happen in ways that are surprising and even poetic, as if the gods are indeed crazy and indeed have a wicked sense of humor. The impatient man just misses the bus. The composer loses his hearing. The marathoner dies of heart disease. But how is it that the alternative to the gods giving you exactly what you cannot handle is equally vexing: when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers. This means the gods have us suffering coming and going-- when they don’t and do grant our wishes. The fact that both scenarios are coincidences means little to people who tend to fault or credit the divine for everything that occurs in patterns. Either way I certainly enjoy the proverbs and clichés that spring up around their explanation, especially Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht!

Diego Velázquez

2009-09-10T14:33:00.005-04:00

Portrait of Innocent X (1650)
Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Roma
Oil on canvas

Nana korobi, ya oki.

2009-09-03T16:39:00.010-04:00

Fall seven times - rise eight.
Japanese Proverb

Editorial: The first time I heard this proverb it was mangled in the mouth of a young man who had made a series of colossally poor decisions that confounded common sense. The last in the series was to lie ceaselessly even when he knew that everyone else was on to him. Because the truth seemed destined to go with him to the grave I was thoroughly surprised when he eventually opened up. I asked him why he came around and his reply was the mangled proverb. The gist, however, was straight and true, and profoundly simple: you get up from the place where you fall. Nana korobi, ya oki. Fall seven times - rise eight. The Chinese have a proverb that makes essentially the same point: Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up. Here’s the sentiment told another way: When you reach the point where you just can’t give any more of your time or effort, stand very still. Then take one more step. (thanks, elsah cort).

Woody Allen

2009-08-27T16:29:00.016-04:00

Eighty percent of success is showing up.
I first heard this quote from my brother-- thanks, apg.

Editorial: Every year towards the end of summer students ask me for the best advice I have for success in college, and I offer this quote. I also share these words with my friends, and in my own life I see their veracity everywhere. I’m curious why Woody picked '80', although his reason might be as simple as Douglas Adams’s explanation for why he offered '42' as the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Alternatively Woody probably knows about the Pareto Principle (or the 80-20 Rule). Whatever the reason, I increasingly feel that showing up just might be the second truism I can trust on a regular basis; the first is here.

Kay Ryan

2009-08-19T07:51:00.011-04:00

Fool's Errand
by Kay Ryan

A thing
cannot be
delivered
enough times:
this is the
rule of dogs
for whom there
are no fool’s
errands. To
loop out and
come back is
good all alone.
It’s gravy to
carry a ball
or a bone.

Appears in The New Yorker, August 10&17, 2009

Editorial: This poem evokes a childhood memory steeped in carefreeness. It goes something like this. My family had a trampoline growing up that I would jump on endlessly with my siblings, friends and neighbors. We called it the tramp. We also had a much-loved dog named Mimi who learned how to poke her head through the springs on the edge of the tramp while standing on her hind legs. She was a Springer Spaniel and she did this trick in order to spit out her tennis ball at our bouncing feet. One of us would then dive for the ball, jump as high as we could on the tramp, and hurl the ball forever in whatever direction. Sometimes we would do that trick when you fake a throw one way and then hurl it the other while Mimi had her head turned. It didn’t matter to Mimi. She eventually always found the ball. We could throw it into the deepest bush, over the house, over the fence, over the fence and across the street, over the fence across the street and over the next fence, and on and on. (Why we led her across the busy street with our throws I’ll never know.) It occurs to me now reading Ryan’s poem that while it took Mimi all of ten seconds to execute her trick of depositing the ball through the springs on the tramp, it might have taken her ten or twenty minutes to find her ball buried deep in a hedge far away. I always imagined that she was seeking our approval by proudly retrieving the ball. But this poem gives me pause and makes me wonder whether Mimi considered us jumpers an inconvenient necessity. Maybe all we were to her was a means to looping out, and that her pride and joy was not the delivery, but the search and discovery.

Naguib Mahfouz

2009-08-18T21:18:00.015-04:00

The darkness was thicker now and he could see nothing at all, not even the outlines of the tombs, as if nothing wished to be seen. He was slipping away into endless depths, not knowing either position, place, or purpose. As hard as he could, he tried to gain control of something, no matter what. To exert one last act of resistance. To capture one last recalcitrant memory. But finally, because he had to succumb, and not caring, he surrendered. Not caring at all now.
The Thief and the Dogs (1961)

Editorial: This passage describes a man’s last living moments. It strikes me as profound and nearly perfect. It also reminds me of the fitful, dreamless sleep that afflicts me when I am sick. But how could the living Mahfouz know about death? And why would it resonate with me, undead as I am? It seems good literature does this— it brings alien experiences, emotions and moments to unsuspecting readers.

Naguib Mahfouz

2009-08-15T11:03:00.001-04:00

It occurred to him that habit is the root of laziness, boredom, and death, that habit had been responsible for his sufferings, the treachery, the ingratitude, and the waste of his life's hard toil.
The Thief and the Dogs (1961)

Joao Padua

2009-08-15T10:49:00.007-04:00

Marta Mamani, an Aymara indigenous woman, hits a drive during her work break at La Paz Golf Club on November 26, 2008. Photo by Joao Padua (AFP/Getty Images). Source:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/bolivia_and_its_new_constituti.html

Anton Chekhov

2009-08-05T00:14:00.001-04:00

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.
In 1889, Ilia Gurliand noted these words from a conversation with Chekhov (see Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997, p.203). Chekhov repeated this point a number of times.

Charles Simic

2009-08-01T23:17:00.004-04:00

The Toad
by Charles Simic

[…]
God never made a day as beautiful as today,
A neighbor was saying.
I sat in the shade after she left
Mulling that one over,
When a toad hopped out of the grass
And finding me harmless,
Hopped over my foot on his way to the pond.

Sherman Alexie

2009-08-01T23:03:00.004-04:00

Survivorman
by Sherman Alexie

Here’s a fact: Some people want to live more
Than others do. Some can withstand any horror

While others will easily surrender
To thirst, hunger, and extremes of weather.

In Utah, one man carried another
Man on his back like a conjoined brother

And crossed twenty-five miles of desert
To safety. Can you imagine the hurt?

Do you think you could be that good and strong?
Yes, yes, you think, but you’re probably wrong.

Appears in the New Yorker, June 8, 2009

Sort Sol

2009-07-29T15:19:00.012-04:00

There is a phenomenon in Denmark known as Sort Sol (Black Sun) in which vast numbers of European Starlings gather and swarm creating black shapes against the sky just before evening twilight. These sixteen pictures were taken over the course of one hour during an evening in April 2006 (image created by Bjarne Winkler).
http://epod.typepad.com/blog/2006/06/black-sun-in-denmark.html

UPDATE: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=970_1257546785&p=1

Pambamarca Archaeology Project

2009-07-20T21:36:00.009-04:00

2009 Team Photo
http://www.pambamarca.net/

Milan Kundera

2009-07-20T10:46:00.001-04:00

And you should not be astonished or incensed, for this is the most obvious thing in the world: man is separated from the past (even from the past only a few seconds old) by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms).
It is the most obvious thing, but it is hard to accept, for when one thinks it all the way through, what becomes of all the testimonies that historiography relies on? What becomes of our certainties about the past, and what becomes of History itself, to which we refer every day in good faith, naively, spontaneously? Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable (there is no doubt that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo), stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misconstrued, an infinite realm of nontruths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal.
The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (2005), "The Novel, Memory, Forgetting"

Milan Kundera

2009-07-20T10:39:00.002-04:00

Aesthetic concepts only began to interest me when I first perceived their existential roots, when I came to understand them as existential concepts: people simple or refined, intelligent or stupid, are regularly faced in life with the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the comical, the tragic, the lyrical, the dramatic, with action, peripeteia, catharsis, or, to speak of less philosophical concepts, with agelasty or kitsch or vulgarity; all these concepts are tracks leading to various aspects of existence that are inaccessible by any other means.
The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (2005), "Aesthetics and Existence"

Miquel Barcelo

2009-07-14T09:38:00.012-04:00

La Solitude Organisative (2008)
private collection
mixed media on canvas

Denis Diderot

2009-07-13T21:31:00.000-04:00

Everything changes, everything passes. Only the totality remains.
Le Rêve de d’Alembert (D’Alembert’s Dream), 1769

Jonathan Freedland

2009-07-13T21:04:00.009-04:00

Above all, it serves as a case study for the way contemporary empire operates, exploding the myth that the United States differs from its British, Spanish, and Roman predecessors by eschewing both the brute conquest of land and the dispossession of those unfortunate enough to get in the way. [...]
In Vine's persuasive telling, it is from the expansionist instincts of the military services, rather than the conscious decisions of civilian policymakers, that the imperialist project draws much of its energy. It is the military brass's reflexive empire-building that builds an empire. [...]
Vine's evidence casts a fresh light on the ongoing debate over whether or not the US can be said to constitute an empire and, if so, how it might compare with its historical predecessors. It had previously been fashionable to regard the US empire as exceptional, a break from the past in that its influence is almost entirely indirect and economic, since it refuses to join the Romans or British in ruling over colonies directly. [...]
Thanks to the work of scholars such as Chalmers Johnson and now Vine, we can see the weakness in that argument. The latter estimates that there are one thousand US military bases and installations "on the sovereign land of other nations." This "base world," as Johnson calls it, is presented benignly, as the product of voluntary, bilateral pacts between the US and those states that agree for their land to be occupied. But often this presentation is, in the idiom of that British official, a "fiction." Behind the veneer can lie the crude expropriation of land and the callous dispossession of some of the world's weakest people. That is how it used to be in the old days of empire, whether under Rome or Queen Victoria. And that's how it was in the Chagos Islands not much more than a generation ago. [...]

The New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 9 · May 28, 2009
'A Black and Disgraceful Site', by Jonathan Freedland
A review of David Vine's 'Island of Shame: The Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia' (2009)

Milan Kundera

2009-07-12T22:03:00.006-04:00

The everyday. It is not merely ennui, pointlessness, repetition, triviality; it is beauty as well; for instance, the magical charm of atmospheres, a thing everyone has felt in his own life: a strain of music heard faintly from the next apartment; the wind rattling the windowpane; the monotonous voice of a professor that a lovesick schoolgirl hears without registering; these trivial circumstances stamp some personal event with an inimitable singularity that dates it and makes it unforgettable.
The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts (2005), "The Consciousness of Continuity"

V. S. Naipaul

2009-06-30T00:41:00.001-04:00

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
A Bend in the River (1979)

Chad Gifford

2009-06-14T12:55:00.004-04:00

Teach me things.
What kind of things?
The things you know.

Gabriel García Márquez

2009-06-14T12:31:00.002-04:00

Let no one be deceived, no, thinking that what he awaits will last longer than what he has seen.
Memories of My Melancholy Whore (2006)

Robert Burns

2009-06-12T09:43:00.000-04:00

To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest, with The Plough (1785)
by Robert Burns

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell-
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

2009-06-07T20:07:00.007-04:00

The Martyrdom of Saint Peter (1600-1601)
Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, Italy
oil on canvas

Frederic Edwin Church

2009-06-07T19:26:00.007-04:00

Cayambe (1858)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
oil on canvas

TBD

2009-05-24T21:42:00.002-04:00

rise above...
It doesn’t matter if you like it. It matters if it is good...

Esther Hicks

2009-05-10T20:52:00.001-04:00

Lighten up.
Laugh more.
Appreciate more.
All is well.

Ron Mueck

2009-05-02T13:49:00.007-04:00

Mask II (2001-2)
private collection
mixed media

Samuel Beckett

2009-03-19T11:44:00.011-04:00

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.
'From an Abandoned Work', Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 (ed. S. E. Gontarski), p. 160.

David Foster Wallace

2009-03-15T21:45:00.004-04:00

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
From the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address (May 21, 2005) -- Thanks, Em.

Malcolm Gladwell

2009-03-12T16:49:00.005-04:00

But what did [Hunter College Elementary School] achieve with that best-students model? In the nineteen-eighties, a handful of educational researchers surveyed the students who attended the elementary school between 1948 and 1960… This was a group with an average I.Q. of 157—three and a half standard deviations above the mean—who had been given what, by any measure, was one of the finest classroom experiences in the world. As graduates, though, they weren’t nearly as distinguished as they were expected to be. “Although most of our study participants are successful and fairly content with their lives and accomplishments,” the authors conclude, “there are no superstars . . . and only one or two familiar names.” The researchers spend a great deal of time trying to figure out why Hunter graduates are so disappointing, and end up sounding very much like Wilbur Bender [Harvard's admissions dean from 1952 to 1960]. Being a smart child isn’t a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. “Non-intellective” factors—like motivation and social skills—probably matter more. Perhaps, the study suggests, “after noting the sacrifices involved in trying for national or world-class leadership in a field, H.C.E.S. graduates decided that the intelligent thing to do was to choose relatively happy and successful lives.” It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didn’t want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isn’t enough.
'Getting In: The social logic of Ivy League admissions', The New Yorker (October 10, 2005).
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge

David Foster Wallace

2009-03-04T11:47:00.001-05:00

Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.
From ‘The Pale King’ (forthcoming)

David Foster Wallace

2009-03-04T11:46:00.003-05:00

Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?
Interview with Larry McCaffery (1991)

David Foster Wallace

2009-03-04T11:46:00.001-05:00

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
From ‘Good Old Neon’ (2001)

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

2009-03-03T11:57:00.004-05:00

The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599-1600)
San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, Italy
oil on canvas

Hendrick van Vliet

2009-03-02T22:21:00.011-05:00

Interior of the Oude Kerk, Delft (1660)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
oil on canvas

Atheist Bus Campaign

2009-03-02T19:48:00.002-05:00

There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_Bus_Campaign

Francis Bacon

2009-03-02T13:33:00.013-05:00

Study for Chimpanzee (1957)
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
oil and pastel on canvas

Ron Padgett

2009-02-03T11:49:00.002-05:00

The Stapler
by Ron Padgett

When my mother died
she left very little: old clothes,
modest furniture, dishes, some
change, and that was about it.
Except for the stapler. I found it
in a drawer stuffed with old bills
and bank statements. Right off
I noticed how easily it penetrated
stacks of paper, leaving no bruise
on the heel of my hand.
It worked so well I brought it home,
along with a box of staples, from
which only a few of the original 5000
were missing. The trick is remembering
how to load it—it takes me several minutes
to figure it out each time, but I persist until
Oh yes, that's it! Somewhere in all this
my mother is spread out and floating
like a mist so fine it can't be seen,
an idea of wafting, the opposite of stapler.

Appears in The New York Review of Books, December 18, 2008 (Volume 55, Number 20).

constult / latibulate / yepsen

2009-02-03T11:41:00.001-05:00

constult
to act stupidly together.
latibulate
to hide oneself in a corner.
yepsen
the amount that can be held in two hands cupped together; also, the two cupped hands themselves.

Samuel Eliot Morison

2008-12-23T23:36:00.000-05:00

America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.
The Oxford History of the American People, 1965, Chapter 2.

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

2008-12-18T21:04:00.002-05:00

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Lest we forget--lest we forget! (Rudyard Kipling, "Recessional")

nomenclature / nomenklatura

2008-12-10T23:38:00.002-05:00

nomenclature
1. a set or system of names or terms, as those used in a particular science or art, by an individual or community, etc.;
2. the names or terms comprising a set or system.
nomenklatura
a select list or class of people from which appointees for top-level government positions are drawn, esp. from a Communist Party.
Thanks, dictionary.com

Jonathan Aaron

2008-12-10T23:24:00.003-05:00

Acting Like a Tree
by Jonathan Aaron

When I got to the party and saw everybody
walking around in Christmas costumes,
I remembered I was supposed to be wearing one, too.
Bending slightly, I held out my hands
and waved them a little, wiggling my fingers.
I narrowed my eyes and pursed my lips, making
a tree face, and started slowly hopping on one foot,
then the other, the way I imagine trees do
in the forest when they’re not being watched.
Maybe people would take me for a hemlock,
or a tamarack. A little girl disguised as an elf
looked at me skeptically. Oh, come on!
her expression said. You call that acting like a tree?
Behind her I could see a guy in a reindeer suit
sitting down at the piano. As he hit the opening
chords of “Joy to the World” I closed my eyes
and tried again. This time I could feel the wind
struggling to lift my boughs, which were heavy
with snow. I was clinging to a mountain crag
and could see over the tops of other trees a few late-
afternoon clouds and the thin red ribbon of a river.
I smelled more snow in the air. A gust or two whispered
around my neck and face, but by now
all I could hear was the meditative creaking
of this neighbor or that—and a moment later, farther off,
the faint but eager call of a wolf.

Appears in the New Yorker, December 15, 2008
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/12/15/081215po_poem_aaron

Bob Hicok

2008-12-01T21:12:00.003-05:00

As I Was Saying
by Bob Hicok

Long, thin clouds as if the sky were smoking.
I tell it to stop or share, it doesn’t stop or share,
this is what happens to my requests: they rise.
When I was a kid, a neighbor man
had a few and tied a cherry bomb to a pigeon,
it flew furiously until kaboom. Feathers
and bits of what made the pigeon go
landed on the Smitky twins playing hopscotch,
they looked up, I looked at them looking up,
two of everything the same, as if their parents
knew the odds of needing a spare. My wife
wants to fly in a hot-air balloon. I say to her,
I’ll wait here with the turtles. I try to save them
from getting squished when they cross the road.
They don’t know it’s a road or what a road
is for, getting away is what a road is for,
then coming back, then wondering why you came back
is what a road is for. My wife’s people
are Ukrainian, beets are important to them.
I tried to arm-wrestle her father once, he said,
Why would I do that: if I beat your arm,
the rest of you will want revenge.
I never looked at it that way. Forty-two years now
I’ve tried to look at it that way. The other day,
some kids knocked a ball through our window,
one of them asked for it back, I said, Sure,
if you give me the bat. He did, then asked
for the bat, I said, If you give me the ball,
he started to hand it over when I saw understanding
bloom in his face. That never happened for me:
understanding blooming in my face. Not the way
I wanted it to. So I’ll die and someone
will have to deal with what’s left, the body,
the shoes, the socks. The last person on Earth
will just be dead: not buried or mourned
or missed. As with kites, I cut the string
when they’re way up, because who’d want to come back.
So somewhere are all these kites, as somewhere
are all the picture frames from the camps,
and the bows from hair, and the hair itself
I saw once in a museum, some of it, in a room
all its own, as if one day the heads
would come back and think, That’s where I put you,
as I do with keys when I find them in my hand.

The New Yorker, December 8, 2008
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/12/08/081208po_poem_hicok

Stanley Kunitz

2008-11-30T22:16:00.003-05:00

Halley's Comet
by Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the storm tracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills
with a wild look in his eyes
stood in the public square
at the playground's edge
proclaiming he was sent by God
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
"Repent, ye sinners!" he shouted,
waving his hand-lettered sign.
At supper I felt sad to think
that it was probably
the last meal I'd share
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate.
So mother scolded me
and sent me early to my room.
The whole family's asleep now
except for me. They never heard me steal
into the stairwell hall and climb
the ladder to the fresh night air.

Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street --
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.

Appears in the New Yorker, May 29, 2006.

Edward Hirsch

2008-11-30T22:10:00.000-05:00

Self Portrait
by Edward Hirsch

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two-party system.

My left leg dawdled or danced along,
my right cleaved to the straight and narrow.

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,
my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

Let's just say that my left side was the organ
donor and leave my private parts alone,

but as for my eyes, which are two shades
of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo.

Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow
while Adam puts his right foot down.

No one expected it to survive,
but divorce seemed out of the question.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

Special Orders: Poems (Knopf 2008)

Edward Hirsch

2008-11-30T22:09:00.000-05:00

A New Theology
by Edward Hirsch

God couldn’t bear their happiness
when He heard them laughing together in the garden.
He caught them kneeling down in the dirt
(or worse) and letting pomegranate juice
run down their faces. He found them
breaking open a fig with fresh delight
as if something crucial had dawned upon them.
I think the whole shebang—the serpent, the apple
with knowledge of good and evil—was a setup
because God couldn’t stand being alone
with His own creation, while Adam and Eve celebrated
as a man and a woman together in Paradise,
exactly like us, love, exactly like us.

Special Orders: Poems (Knopf 2008)

Edward Hirsch

2008-11-30T22:08:00.003-05:00

Special Orders
by Edward Hirsch

Give me back my father walking the halls
of Wertheimer Box and Paper Company
with sawdust clinging to his shoes.

Give me back his tape measure and his keys,
his drafting pencil and his order forms;
give me his daydreams on lined paper.

I don’t understand this uncontainable grief.
Whatever you had that never fit,
whatever else you needed, believe me,

my father, who wanted your business,
would squat down at your side
and sketch you a container for it.

Appears in The New York Review of Books, February 9, 2006. Editorial: Would seem to work for the living as well as the dead.

William Matthews

2008-11-30T21:52:00.003-05:00

The Four Subjects of Poetry
by William Matthews

1. I went out into the woods today, and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.
2. We're not getting any younger.
3. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey.
4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent, and on what we know not what.

Gehenna

2008-11-30T21:33:00.005-05:00

1. The valley of Hinnom, near Jerusalem, where propitiatory sacrifices were made to Moloch. [II Kings 23:10];
2. Hell;
3. Any place of extreme torment or suffering.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gehenna

Gehenna (also gehenom or gehinom) is the Jewish equivalant to the Christian Purgatory. The name derived from the burning garbage dump near Jerusalem (the Valley of Hinnom), metaphorically identified with the entrance to the underworld. Gehenna is cited in the New Testament and in early Christian writing to represent the place where evil will be destroyed. It lends its name to Islam's hell, Jahannam. In both Rabbinical Jewish and Christian writing, Gehenna as a destination of the wicked is different from Sheol, the abode of all the dead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_Hinnom

encomium / Huguenot / cozen

2008-11-30T21:23:00.006-05:00

encomium
Warm praise, especially a formal expression of such praise; a tribute (plural: encomiums or encomia).
Huguenot
A member of the Protestant Reformed Church of France during the 16th and 17th century.
cozen
To cheat; to defraud; to beguile; to deceive, usually by small arts, or in a pitiful way.

limn

2008-11-30T21:08:00.003-05:00

1. To draw or paint; delineate.
2. To describe.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/limn

Philip Schultz

2008-11-25T20:21:00.001-05:00

The God of Loneliness
by Philip Schultz

It’s a cold Sunday February morning
and I’m one of eight men waiting
for the doors of Toys R Us to open
in a mall on the eastern tip of Long Island.
We’ve come for the Japanese electronic game
that’s so hard to find. Last week, I waited
three hours for a store in Manhattan
to disappoint me. The first today, bundled
in six layers, I stood shivering in the dawn light
reading the new Aeneid translation, which I hid
when the others came, stamping boots
and rubbing gloveless hands, joking about
sacrificing sleep for ungrateful sons. “My boy broke
two front teeth playing hockey,” a man wearing
shorts laughs. “This is his reward.” My sons
will leap into my arms, remember this morning
all their lives. “The game is for my oldest boy,
just back from Iraq,” a man in overalls says
from the back of the line. “He plays these games
in his room all day. I’m not worried, he’ll snap out of it,
he’s earned his rest.” These men fix leaks, lay
foundations for other men’s dreams without complaint.
They’ve been waiting in the cold since Aeneas
founded Rome on rivers of blood. Virgil understood that
death begins and never ends, that it’s the god of loneliness.
Through the window, a clerk shouts, “We’ve only five.”
The others seem not to know what to do with their hands,
tuck them under their arms, or let them hang,
naked and useless. Is it because our hands remember
what they held, the promises they made? I know
exactly when my boys will be old enough for war.
Soon three of us will wait across the street at Target,
because it’s what men do for their sons.
The New Yorker, May 5, 2008
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/05/05/080505po_poem_schultz

Jim Hightower

2008-11-19T15:23:00.001-05:00

Like daddy, George W. was born on third, but thinks he hit a triple.
October 21, 1989

Alice Walker

2008-11-12T16:42:00.003-05:00

...One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is all that so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, or barely manage, but this is because it is not yet clear to them that success is truly an inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.
An Open Letter to Barack Obama, TheRoot.com, Nov. 5, 2008. Thanks, Em.

Andrew Marvell

2008-11-11T14:42:00.001-05:00

To His Coy Mistress

by Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shoudst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingéd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

omphaloskepsis

2008-11-06T12:59:00.008-05:00

Contemplation of one's navel as an aid to meditation. From the Greek: omphalos (navel) + skepsis. The word has several other forms, such as omphaloskeptic, for someone who engages in navel-gazing, and omphaloskeptical, meaning to be in a self-absorbed state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphaloskepsis (thanks, bri)

lepidopterist / colocynth

2008-11-06T11:02:00.006-05:00

lepidopterist
A person who catches and collects, studies, or simply observes lepidopterans, members of an order encompassing moths and the three superfamilies of butterflies, skipper butterflies, and moth-butterflies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepidopterist
colocynth
A viny plant native to the Mediterranean Basin and Asia. It produces a lemon-sized, yellowish, green-mottled, spongy, and extremely bitter fruit, a powerful hepatic stimulant and hydragogue cathartic used as a strong laxative. Also see vine of Sodom.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/colocynth

George Orwell

2008-09-30T20:42:00.000-04:00

Old Benjamin, the donkey, seemed quite unchanged since the Rebellion. He did his work in the same slow obstinate way as he had done it in Jones's time, never shirking and never volunteering for extra work either. About the Rebellion and its results he would express no opinion. When asked whether he was not happier now that Jones was gone, he would say only "Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey," and the others had to be content with this cryptic answer.
Animal Farm (1945), Chapter 3

George Orwell

2008-09-30T20:38:00.003-04:00

The vote was taken at once, and it was agreed by an overwhelming majority that rats were comrades. There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.
Animal Farm (1945), Chapter 1

Noam Chomsky

2008-09-22T20:23:00.001-04:00

When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality which is beyond belief. In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think it's quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on topics such as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do.
The Chomsky Reader (1987, p. 33)

William Shakespeare

2008-09-20T23:05:00.001-04:00

When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that.
The Winter's Tale, Florizel, scene iv

Mahmoud Darwish

2008-09-11T22:25:00.005-04:00

Viewpoint
by Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

The difference between narcissus
and sunflower
is a point of view: the first
stares at his image in water
and says, there is no I but I
and the second looks
at the sun and says I am
what I worship.
And at night, difference shrinks
And interpretation widens.

Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah. Appears in The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 14 · September 25, 2008.

floccinaucinihilipilification

2008-08-31T22:50:00.006-04:00

A coinage ... combining a number of roughly synonymous Latin stems. Latin flocci, from floccus, a wisp or piece of wool + nauci, from naucum, a trifle + nihili, from nihilum, nothing + pili, from pilus, a hair, something insignificant (all therefore having the sense of "worthless" or "nothing") + -fication.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/floccinaucinihilipilification

J. D. Salinger

2008-08-24T14:00:00.002-04:00

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Holden Caulfield's opening statement in The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

William Faulkner

2008-08-22T15:10:00.002-04:00

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
Unsourced

William Faulkner

2008-08-22T15:09:00.005-04:00

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
Unsourced

William Faulkner

2008-08-22T15:09:00.003-04:00

The past is never dead. It's not even past.
Requiem for a Nun (1951)

William Shakespeare

2008-08-22T09:58:00.004-04:00

...Great floods have flown
From simple sources; and great seas have dried,
When miracles have by the greatest been denied.
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises.
All's Well That Ends Well, Helena, scene i

Flannery O'Connor

2008-08-21T10:21:00.001-04:00

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

Giordano Bruno

2008-08-21T10:03:00.005-04:00

In a dialogue that Bruno wrote in the 1570s he imagines his home town of Nola in which fate has decreed...
that Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl her hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won’t burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio’s foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim’s progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random. . . . Antonio Savolino’s bitch shall conceive five puppies, of which three shall live out their natural lifespan and two shall be thrown away, and of these three the first shall resemble its mother, the second shall be mongrel, and the third shall partly resemble the father and partly resemble Polidoro’s dog. . . . Paulino, when he bends over to pick up a broken needle, shall snap the red drawstring of his underpants, and if he should blaspheme for that reason, I mean for him to be punished thus: tonight his soup shall be too salty and taste of smoke, he shall fall and break his wine flask.
Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600) was an Italian philosopher, priest, cosmologist, and occultist. A statue of Bruno was erected in Campo de' Fiori in Rome in 1889.

Salvatore Quasimodo

2008-06-21T20:00:00.003-04:00

[Untitled]
by Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968)

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.

Everyone stands alone at the heart of the earth
transfixed by a ray of sun:
and suddenly it is evening.

William Shakespeare

2008-06-01T20:54:00.006-04:00

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, Act V, Scene v.
Day after day after day. The days go slowly, up to the end of time. All the days in the past did no good except to bring fools through their lives up to the times of their deaths. Get blown out, flame of life! Life is short. Life is only a walking shadow. Life is only a poor actor, who walks around on the stage for a short time, and after that no one hears him any more. Life is a story that an idiot tells, full of sound and fury, but not meaning anything.
http://simple.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare

John Bradford

2008-05-30T14:16:00.004-04:00

There but by the grace of God go I.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bradford

Theodore Roethke

2008-05-28T23:39:00.004-04:00

The Meadow Mouse
by Theodore Roethke

1
In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
Cradled in my hand,
A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard-feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his
bottle-cap watering-trough--
So much he just lies in one corner,
His tail curled under him, his belly big
As his head; his bat-like ears
Twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

Do I imagine he no longer trembles
When I come close to him?
He seems no longer to tremble.

2

But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty.
Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm?--
To run under the hawk's wing,
Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,--
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.

Abraham Lincoln

2008-05-28T11:04:00.002-04:00

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!
September 30, 1859, 'Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin'.

George Orwell

2008-05-22T21:44:00.002-04:00

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
Nineteen Eighty-Four

Mark Twain

2008-05-20T23:35:00.002-04:00

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Unknown

Brad Leithauser

2008-05-20T14:52:00.003-04:00

Old Globe
by Brad Leithauser

For her big birthday
we gave her (nothing less would do)
the world, which is to say

a globe copyrighted the very year
she was born—ninety years before.
She held it tenderly, and it was clear

both had come such a long way:
the lovely, dwindled, ever-eager-to-please
woman whose memory had begun to fray

and a planet drawn and redrawn through
endless shifts of aims and loyalties,
and war and war.

*

Her eye fell at random. "Formosa," she read.
"Now that's pretty. Is it there today?"
A pause. "It is," my brother said,

"though now it's called Taiwan."
She looked apologetic. "I sometimes forget..."
"Like Sri Lanka," I added. "Which was Ceylon."

And so my brothers and I, globe at hand, began:
which places had seen a change of name
in the last ninety years? Burma, Baluchistan,

Czechoslovakia, Abyssinia, Transjordan, Tibet.
Because she laughed, we extended our game
into history, mist: Vineland, Persia, Cathay...

*

She was in a middle place—
her fifties—when photos were first transmitted,
miraculously, from outer space.

Who could believe those men—in their black noon—
got up like robots, wandering the wild
wastelands of the moon,

and overheard a wholly naked sun
and an Earth so far away
it was less real than this one,

the gift received today—
the globe she'd so tenderly fitted
under her arm, like a child.

*

Finally, there's cake: nine candles in a ring.
...Just so, the past turns distant past,
each rich decade diminishing

to a little stick of wax, rapidly
expiring. I say, "Now make a wish before
you blow them out." She says, "I don't see—"

stops. Then mildly protests: "But they look so nice."
We laugh at her—and wince when a look of doubt
or fear clouds her face; she needs advice.

Well—what should anyone wish for
in blowing candles out
but that the light might last?

Jane Kramer

2008-05-20T14:46:00.003-04:00

Archeology, as it is practiced today in nearly every country with an interest in shaping a historical identity, falls somewhere between a hard science - "facts" that can be ascertained by dating, testing, and inscription experts - and an interpretive social science whose "facts" have traditionally derived from ancient texts and their mapping and attribution clues.
'The Petition', The New Yorker, April 14, 2008, Vol. 84, Issue 9.

Ted Hughes

2008-05-20T14:27:00.002-04:00

Crow's Account of the Battle
by Ted Hughes

There was this terrific battle.
The noise was as much
As the limits of possible noise could take.
There were screams higher groans deeper
Than any ear could hold.
Many eardrums burst and some walls
Collapsed to escape the noise.
Everything struggled on its way
Through this tearing deafness
As through a torrent in a dark cave.

The cartridges were banging off, as planned,
The fingers were keeping things going
According to excitement and orders.
The unhurt eyes were full of deadliness.
The bullets pursued their courses
Through clods of stone, earth, and skin,
Through intestines pocket-books, brains, hair, teeth
According to Universal laws
And mouths cried "Mamma"
From sudden traps of calculus,
Theorems wrenched men in two,
Shock-severed eyes watched blood
Squandering as from a drain-pipe
Into the blanks between the stars.
Faces slammed down into clay
As for the making of a life-mask
Knew that even on the sun's surface
They could not be learning more or more to the point
Reality was giving it's lesson,
Its mishmash of scripture and physics,
With here, brains in hands, for example,
And there, legs in a treetop.
There was no escape except into death.
And still it went on--it outlasted
Many prayers, many a proved watch
Many bodies in excellent trim,
Till the explosives ran out
And sheer weariness supervened
And what was left looked round at what was left.

Then everybody wept,
Or sat, too exhausted to weep,
Or lay, too hurt to weep.
And when the smoke cleared it became clear
This has happened too often before
And was going to happen too often in the future
And happened too easily
Bones were too like lath and twigs
Blood was too like water
Cries were too like silence
The most terrible grimaces too like footprints in mud
And shooting somebody through the midriff
Was too like striking a match
Too like potting a snooker ball
Too like tearing up a bill
Blasting the whole world to bits
Was too like slamming a door,
Too like dropping in a chair
Exhausted with rage
Too like being blown up yourself
Which happened too easily
With too like no consequences.

So the survivors stayed.
And the earth and the sky stayed.
Everything took the blame.

Not a leaf flinched, nobody smiled.

N. Scott Momaday

2008-05-20T14:26:00.002-04:00

The Gift
by N. Scott Momaday

Older, more generous,
We give each other hope.
The gift is ominous:
Enough praise, enough rope.

W. H. Auden

2008-05-20T14:25:00.003-04:00

O Tell Me The Truth About Love
by W. H. Auden

Some say that love's a little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round,
And some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pajamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does it's odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway-guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house;
it wasn't ever there:
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton's bracing air.
I don't know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn't in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all it's time at the races,
Or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of it's own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my shoes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

Miller Williams

2008-05-20T14:17:00.010-04:00

The Ways We Touch
by Miller Williams

Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don't want it.
What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism
is always a sign of things no ears have heard,
no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.