November 2009
55 posts
“Suppose any man whose spirit has survived had consulted his contemporaries as to...”
– Wallace Stevens
“…worlds of form and discipline, worlds created accurately out of...”
– p.132, Without My Cloak: Kate O’Brien (London” Heinemann, 1931)
“Freedom of speech. The freedom to disagree. That’s what I think pretty much...”
– Will Phillips, an Arkansas 10-year old who refuses to recite the pledge of allegiance until gay people can marry, on what it means to be an American. Will has so far endured a substitute teacher, his school principle and plenty of taunting from his classmates for his simple protest.
There are...
paperpools: mute inglorious Nabokovs →
A very interesting idea.
(via Instapaper)
Scipion. —Mais parce que je me délecte d’un melon particulièrement doux, faut-il que je m’intéresse au jardinier et supporte ses commérages? Tais-toi et me laisse en paix contempler ce grand spectacle.
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Scipio. — …But because I am enjoying an especially sweet melon, must I take an interest in the gardener and endure his gossip? Be quiet and leave me to contemplate this grand...
Contrapunctus 8 from Bach: Kunst der fuge, BWV...
“Sous le règne des grands principes, tout ce qui est sous le ciel était à tous.”
– Confucius
This translates the forst part of a sentence in the Li Yun chapter of the Confucian classic Li Ji (Li Chi in the Wade-Giles system): “Da dao zhi xing ye, tian xia wei gong…” (Sec. 1.2). James Legge renders it, “When the Grand course was pursued, a public and...
merlin:
Jorge Luis Borges - “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940)
As recommended by Hodgman in our interview last Saturday.
Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer of the southern railways, persists in the hotel at Adrogue, amongst the effusive honeysuckles and in the illusory depths of the mirrors. In his lifetime, he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen; once...
“Nunc me jubet Fortuna expeditius philosophari.”
– Sir C Wren, on losing his appointment as Surveyor-General
The above is from a paper by Walter Leaf quoted by his wife in a memoir which follows his autobiography in Walter Leaf (Murray, 1932). The paper seems to have been written after a considerable reverse in buisness and illustrates...
Baudelaire and the ‘gouffre’
From: G. T. Clapton, review of Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre, by Benjamin Fondane,French Studies, January 4, 1950 pp. 60-61
For him [Fondane] true poetry has no relation with the Idea, it springs from thegouffre, from the hidden, primitive sources of life, rebellious to the formal constructions, ideological or technical, of men. And certain artists are aware of this, if only dimly,...
a thought
La vie ne laisse plus guère de place ni à la fantasie ni aux traditions, qui lui donnaient saveur et couleur.
Life no longer leaves much room for imagination or traditions, which used to give it savor and color.
“REG [at a meeting of the People’s Front of Judea]: All right, but apart...”
– “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.”
e.e. cummings: i like my body when it is with your
i like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more. i like your body. i like what it does, i like its hows. i like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling -firm-smooth ness and which i will again and again and again kiss, i like kissing this and that of you, i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz of your electric...
E. M. Forster at the Congrès International des...
E.M. Forster, “Liberty in England”, London Mercury, 32 August 1935, 331.
From an address at the Congrès International des Ecrivains at Paris, June 21, 1935:
I am worried by thoughts of a war oftener than by thoughts of my own death, yet the line to be adopted over both these nuisances is the same. One must behave as if one is immortal, and as if civilization is eternal. Both statements are...
“My son asked about the birds & the bees so I talk penis/vagina til he looks...”
– @hoosiergirl
“What we know about eating animals is that we don’t want to know.”
– The New Yorker: Should you eat meat? (via marco)
“La pensée folâtre et triste est l’humeur.
Dans les yeux on rit, dans la...”
– Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, act II
Visions of Autumn
waning season light shifts to silver from gold— leaves fall in silence.