January 2012
3 posts
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Anonymous asked: can you explain the 'rave worthy' post? what it means?
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"The Assault" -- a translation
This short poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay immediately reminded me of the 3.5km walk I made twice daily in France to go between the school where I worked and the ranch where I boarded. Though the route never changed, I consistently felt arrested — scared, even — by its “savage Beauty” and the pressure to take that in while somehow escaping my own eruption.
I wanted to send...
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December 2011
6 posts
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OK, I’ve found the song I’ll sing to...
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“[La magie nouvelle] C’est un art dont le langage est le détournement du réel...”
– -Avant garde magician Raphaël Navarro, in an issue of Stradda, distinguishes his domain’s latest movement from other art forms and from previous types of magic that worked by falsifying representations of reality:
[‘La magie nouvelle’, or, ‘The New Magic’] is an art...
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Anonymous asked: Hello again. Thank you for your response on the Pound quote question. Here is a thought: If one takes the soul's sensation of ascent to mean something like the experience of the sublime, one might say that such experiences can, for example, also be found in very good conversations or in the contemplation of non-intentional things (landscapes,cities,stars...). And then one might say that such...
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November 2011
5 posts
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Anonymous asked: Do you think Pound is right in claiming that art is the only means to communicate the soul's sensation of ascent to others? Couldn't there be other means?
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Literary Death Match: Boston →
LDM came back to Boston a couple weeks ago so I went to see the showdown. Had myself such a good time I ended up writing the episode summary for their website — check it out to catch up on what you missed, then cross your heart and swear never to miss it again.
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“The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless.
The true artist: capable,...”
– “The Artist” — an Aztec poem translated into English by Denise Levertov.
Note on vocabulary: “Toltec” refers to the Aztecs’ Mesoamerican predecessors, who were greatly revered as exemplars of high artistic culture and idealized civilization. “Carrion”...
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"Shitty First Drafts" by Anne Lamott →
This excerpt from Bird by Bird is considered pretty classic among my composition colleagues, including good friend and fellow writer Emily, who recently reminded me to brush up on Lamott’s most famous lesson: let yourself write shitty first drafts. And you know Lamott knows what she’s talking about, because I’ve never read a more accurate description of the initial writing...
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October 2011
7 posts
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“What you’re looking for, you won’t find. But only by looking for it...”
– Charles Eisenstein at last night’s Evolver Boston: Shamanism 101 event, answering a question on the pursuit of enlightenment.
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Scale of the Universe →
The link to this interactive website was a birthday gift to me today. Yes indeed, it’s good to be a part of this world.
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Anonymous asked: define beauty
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September 2011
4 posts
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Husband's Haiku
Before you churned through I was a dormant water Now I am a wake
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“The parts that embarrass you the most are unusually the most interesting...”
– Allen Ginsberg, paraphrasing what he learned from Jack Kerouac about the process of letting meaning emerge in your art.
August 2011
3 posts
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Anonymous asked: How to get through heart break?
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“A gift that has the power to change us awakens a part of the soul. But we cannot...”
– Lewis Hyde on “suffering gratitude” in The Gift
July 2011
2 posts
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Anonymous asked: thought without action, talk without action...
what about insincere action that contributes positively?
what about insincere action that contributes positively?
June 2011
5 posts
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N SKY C →
The average color of the New York City sky, updated every 5 minutes.
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“If you want fluency and depth in your life, you must cultivate a state in which...”
– Artist and yogi Suzanna Harwood Rubin
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“It is part of a well-trained rational faculty to be able to judge when reason...”
– Dr. Mary Klages summarizes the philosophy of Sir Joshua Reynolds in her text, Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed.
April 2011
15 posts
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desertmanian asked: HEy, I just wanted to say that I really love that post you wrote on epistemology for the belief and knowledge blog! I love the topic of Epistemology and I think the vast majority of misunderstanding between secular and Christian discussions are heavily related to misunderstands about different theories of knowledge. Have a great day!
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Post @ "Belief and Knowledge" →
I received an invitation from the editor of this site to write about difference and dialogue between theist and atheist perspectives. I mostly focus on the erroneously oppositional dichotomy we in the post-Enlightenment era have made between science and religion, recalling a period when no inherent clash was perceived because the two disciplines were intertwined:
In Europe, the pre-reformation...
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“St. Augustine wrote that the things of the world pour forth from God in a double...”
– -Flannery O’Connor in Novelist and Believer
Ergo, great works of art are more than representations of the mundane; they are purifications of the mundane. They can paradoxically reduce a thing into more than itself by promulgating its essence, otherwise shrouded by materiality.
So contrary to...
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Supervalent Thought →
My admiration/resentment for Dr. Laura Berlant goes back to the days of early research for my thesis project on Nathaniel Hawthorne, at which time I discovered that most of what I planned to investigate had already been brilliantly explained by her articles “Fantasies of Utopia in The Blithedale Romance” and “America, post-Utopia: Body, Landscape, and National Fantasy in...
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"An Rí (The King) An Example of Traditional Social...
Originally published in Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (Vol III, 1981, pp. 14-28), I’m republishing this article not only for its insights on folk social structure within colonized Ireland, but also out of tingly pride that it cites my family line as one great example of community elected leadership. The Kings of the Great Blasket mentioned here were the father and...
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Academic Earth →
This site makes me wish I had a real job so I could call in sick from it and spend a week guiltlessly lounging in front of my computer taking notes on various seminars. Honestly, tell me this course wasn’t specially designed to steal twenty hours from my productivity?
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Watch
biancavirina:
CLICK THE SQUARES.
THE WHOLE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THIS.
THIS THIS THIS THIS!
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Anonymous asked: when you were younger, did you live for love?
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“I’m suggesting that minds are field-like and spread out beyond brains in a...”
– Biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake explaining the controversial thesis behind his investigation of paraspychology in dogs and humans.
His findings (the patterns of which do suggest some form of unarticulated/unsignified dialoguing), have of course been railed by skeptics, but none invalidated. And...