and luckier.

"For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would..."

Fri, 24 May 2013 21:40:37 -0400

“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.”

- From W. H. Auden’s In Memory of W. B. Yeats (via kaschisms)

joeydeangelis: “I have these dreams, you know, that I’m...

Fri, 24 May 2013 16:12:39 -0400

joeydeangelis:

“I have these dreams, you know, that I’m standing on a platform, and you keep going by on a train. And you go by, and you go by, and you go by, you go by. And I wake up with the fucking sweats, you know. And then I have this other dream, oh, where you’re pregnant in bed beside me naked. And I want so badly to touch you, but you tell me not to, and then you look away. And I touch you anyway, right on your ankle, and your skin is so soft that I wake up in sobs, all right, and my wife is sitting there looking at me, and I feel like I’m a million miles from her. And I know that there’s something wrong, you know, that I can’t keep living like this, that there’s gotta be something more to love than commitment. But then I think that I might’ve given up on the whole idea of romantic love, that I might have put it to bed that day when you weren’t there. You know, I think I might’ve done that.”

always reblog.

When Ira Glass met Michael Jackson | This American Life

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:49:46 -0400

When Ira Glass met Michael Jackson | This American Life

explore-blog: Be realistic, ask the impossible. Put even more...

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:45:59 -0400

explore-blog:

Be realistic, ask the impossible.

Put even more beautifully: Imagine immensities.

"Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy."

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:12:30 -0400

“Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.”

- Carl Sagan (via we-are-star-stuff)

"Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:10:21 -0400

“Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.”

- Raymond Chandler vs. Atlantic proofreader (via explore-blog)

What Kind of Fool Am I? - Bill Evans From “The Complete...

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:19:19 -0400

What Kind of Fool Am I? - Bill Evans

From “The Complete Riverside Recordings”

This song makes me feel like I believe in things.

"The real problem here is that we’re all dying. All of us. Every day the cells weaken and the fibres..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:33:06 -0400

“The real problem here is that we’re all dying. All of us. Every day the cells weaken and the fibres stretch and the heart gets closer to its last beat. The real cost of living is dying, and we’re spending days like millionaires: a week here, a month there, casually spunked until all you have left are the two pennies on your eyes.

Personally, I like the fact we’re going to die. There’s nothing more exhilarating than waking up every morning and going ‘WOW! THIS IS IT! THIS IS REALLY IT!’ It focuses the mind wonderfully. It makes you love vividly, work intensely, and realise that, in the scheme of things, you really don’t have time to sit on the sofa in your pants watching Homes Under the Hammer.

Death is not a release, but an incentive. The more focused you are on your death, the more righteously you live your life. My traditional closing-time rant – after the one where I cry that they closed that amazing chippy on Tollington Road; the one that did the pickled eggs – is that humans still believe in an afterlife. I genuinely think it’s the biggest philosophical problem the earth faces. Even avowedly non-religious people think they’ll be meeting up with nana and their dead dog, Crackers, when they finally keel over. Everyone thinks they’re getting a harp.

But believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It’s like an insidious and destabilising mental illness. Underneath every day – every action, every word – you think it doesn’t really matter if you screw up this time around because you can just sort it all out in paradise. You make it up with your parents, and become a better person and lose that final stone in heaven. And learn how to speak French. You’ll have time, after all! It’s eternity! And you’ll have wings, and it’ll be sunny! So, really, who cares what you do now? This is really just some lacklustre waiting room you’re only going to be in for 20 minutes, during which you will have no wings at all, and are forced to walk around, on your feet, like pigs do.

If we wonder why people are so apathetic and casual about every eminently avoidable horror in the world – famine, war, disease, the seas gradually turning piss-yellow and filling with ringpulls and shattered fax machines – it’s right there. Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside of jigsaws.

Only when the majority of the people on this planet believe – absolutely – that they are dying, minute by minute, will we actually start behaving like fully sentient, rational and compassionate beings. For whilst the appeal of ‘being good’ is strong, the terror of hurtling, unstoppably, into unending nullity is a lot more effective. I’m really holding out for us all to get The Fear. The Fear is my Second Coming. When everyone in the world admits they’re going to die, we’ll really start getting some stuff done.”

- Caitlin Moran (via relatedworlds)

pbsamericanmasters: nprfreshair: Because today is Mel Brooks...

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:26:43 -0400

pbsamericanmasters:

nprfreshair:

Because today is Mel Brooks day.

oldfilmsflicker:

Anne Bancroft on meeting Mel Brooks

It is indeed. This is beautiful.

See you tonight!

jtotheizzoe: The chemical formulas of various substances used...

Sun, 19 May 2013 21:53:50 -0400

jtotheizzoe:

The chemical formulas of various substances used to mimic plant-based aromas and flavors.

Tastes like science.

"… it is not news that we live in a world Where beauty is unexplainable And suddenly ruined..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:02:56 -0400

“… it is not news that we
live in a world
Where beauty is
unexplainable
And suddenly ruined
And has its own routines.
We are often far
From home in a dark
town, and our griefs
Are difficult to translate
into a language
Understood by others.”

- The Meaning of Birds, Charlie Smith

I’ve had “and kisses are a better fate than wisdom” as my gchat status for weeks....

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:11:13 -0400

I’ve had “and kisses are a better fate than wisdom” as my gchat status for weeks. truth is, I’m not too sure I believe that.

this.

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:58:55 -0400

this.

A Polley Family Secret, Deftly Pieced Together : NPR

Wed, 15 May 2013 23:26:13 -0400

A Polley Family Secret, Deftly Pieced Together : NPR:

In a striking documentary, Sarah Polley turns the camera on her own family. The director and actor, known for films such as Away from Her and The Sweet Hereafter, was teased growing up about not looking like her actor father. At 27, she discovered that it wasn’t a joke.

lydiahorowitz: yesss. tv at its finest.

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:07:37 -0400

lydiahorowitz:

yesss. tv at its finest.

stunningpicture: ‘Cause people seem to only post the...

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:59:01 -0400

stunningpicture:

‘Cause people seem to only post the 20-something Audrey Hepburn

theparisreview: We meet Mr Messy—a man whose entire day-to-day...

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:10:25 -0400

theparisreview:

We meet Mr Messy—a man whose entire day-to-day existence is the undiluted expression of his individuality. His very untidiness is a metaphor for his blissful and unselfconscious disregard for the Social Order. Yes, there are times when he himself is a victim of this individuality—as when he trips over a brush he has left on his garden path—but he goes through life with a smile on his face.

This series of reviews from 2010 is, in a word, brilliant.

thereconstructionists: For more than half a century, poet and...

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:00:45 -0400

thereconstructionists:

For more than half a century, poet and essayist Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 — March 27, 2012) explored with equal parts courage and conviction such complex cultural phenomena as identity and ideology, gender and politics, oppression and freedom. The recipient of numerous honors, including the National Book Award for Poetry, two Guggenheim fellowships, and a MacArthur “genius” grant — Rich is celebrated as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.

For Rich, art was as much a tool of creative expression as it was a vehicle for empathy, for expanding one’s understanding of the world beyond the limits of the individual. In a 2005 conversation at the Kelly Writers House, she articulates her ethos with a beautiful definition of art:

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

Rich’s own life was anything but ordinary. In 1953, she married Harvard professor Alfred Haskell Conrad, who fathered her three children. Over the decade that followed, her career exploded, in the process catapulting her into a spurt of personal growth, self-discovery, and political awakening. In 1970, stifled by the institution of marriage, Rich divorced Conrad. In 1976, she met and fell in love with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff, who became her lifelong partner and inspired Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), her first literary exploration of lesbian desire and sexuality, later included in one of her most celebrated works, The Dream of a Common Language (1978). The two remained together for thirty-six years, until Rich’s death in 2012. In a lamentable manifestation of the current failings of marriage equality, as of this writing, her Wikipedia entry still lists Conrad as her only spouse.

In 1997, in protest against the growing monopoly of power and the government’s proposed plan to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, Rich famously became the first and only person to date to decline the prestigious National Medal of Arts, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual artist on behalf of the people of the United States, previously awarded to such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Updike, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and fellow reconstructionist Maya Angelou.

But despite the strong undercurrents of political and sociocultural commentary, Rich’s work was driven first and foremost by the irrepressible stirrings of her inner life. She reflected in an interview:

A poem can come out of something seen, something overheard, listening to music, an article in a newspaper, a book, a combination of all these… There’s a kind of emotional release that I then find in the act of writing the poem. It’s not, ‘I’m now going to sit down and write a poem about this.’

Learn more: Brain Pickings | Wikipedia

"But this is the kind of thing that fiction is: it’s the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 20:05:28 -0400

“But this is the kind of thing that fiction is: it’s the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science.”

- Lorrie Moore

"The hardest thing about writing is writing."

Sun, 12 May 2013 14:42:25 -0400

“The hardest thing about writing is writing.”

- Nora Ephron