February 2012
3 posts
2 tags
“The homeland of a writer, [someone] said, is his language. […] Though...”
– Roberto Bolaño. From Between Parenthesis which I happily discovered at the local library last week.
A philosophy teacher I had once said (something like) you could do worse than to read a little Montaigne every day, to which I would add Bolaño.
1 tag
“The sperm whale has gone so far into philosophical studies that he sees The...”
– John C Lilly, quoted in NYRB. His is an intriguing bibliography on Wikipedia.
1 tag
January 2012
6 posts
2 tags
“All of us are collectors. We are not simply collectors of prints or drawings, we...”
– Frederick Sommer, “A Talk Given at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1970”
1 tag
“Mammoth productive facilities with computer minds, cities that engulf the...”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
2011
I spent lots of time in libraries. My favorite is the Brookline Public Library (main branch) despite finding my librarian-nemesis there.
I was quietly depressed for much of the year. Today I feel balanced and happy.
I didn’t keep a consistent journal, but there were a few things I wrote that helped me in tough spots, and when I read them now I’m amazed I wrote them. I will try to...
1 tag
The Joy of Quiet →
A nice read for the new year. Quotes Blaise Pascal:
Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries.
And I like this definition of joy from the monk David Steindl-Rast:
that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.
1 tag
Keith Jarrett, Rio (Part VIII)
December 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Writing I've liked, 2011
Not everything was published this year; I just happened to read it.
education and the humanities:
How Billionaires Rule Our Schools
Inside the multimillion-dollar essay-scoring business
Harvard and Class
Why Bother?
Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling
sports:
The Pain Principle
Federer as Religious Experience
sex and gender:
My First Time, Twice
Transitions
...
1 tag
“Here’s the nut: The F.D.A. has no money to spare, but the corporations that...”
– Mark Bittman
3 tags
“As a scientific naturalist, I gain my inspiration from overlaying my...”
– Bernd Heinrich in Field Notes: on Science & Nature (a Christmas present I am much enjoying).
Heinrich, incidentally, had an excellent running career.
“Be more comfortable with agnostic, and I mean this about the things that make...”
– Tyler Cowen (transcript)
November 2011
3 posts
1 tag
Dock Walsh, “In The Pines”
“We’ve all got these layers of self, and a period where you think, well, I’m just...”
– Nicholson Baker in a radio interview with Christopher Lydon (follow the link for the broadcast) who is, I’ve been told, the original Tom Ashbrook. (He is at least much smarter.) The whole piece is worth listening.
1 tag
“Every living creature is in fact a sort of lock, whose wards and springs...”
– William James
October 2011
13 posts
“[…] one recent study concludes that $5.2 million must be spent on...”
– Considering When It Might Be Best Not to Know About Cancer – NYT
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
differences
My torn jeans are evidently noticeable, that they are ripped and rolled up and puffy and dirty, and that my shoes are clunky old running sneakers. The man beside me is wearing a black coat and black pants and is talking with a woman I can’t see about cell phones and people at work. He bounces now and again when he laughs, and he has a rough and slow Boston accent that he can’t hide...
1 tag
“We shouldn’t intellectualize food, because that makes it too remote from...”
– Adam Gopnik, The Table Comes First
2 tags
“I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not...”
– William Lloyd Garrison, introductory column for The Liberator
1 tag
“For a short while my local small, happily anonymous bar in a desire to retain a...”
– Jan Chipchase. Sad? True.
1 tag
“My job is not to fuck up somebody’s day on their way to work. It’s...”
– Lawrence Weiner at TYPO.
“But this method of fixing belief, which may be called the method of tenacity,...”
– Charles Pierce, The Fixation of Belief
This is a sufficient reason for me to live in a city.
1 tag
engaged
My life is busy. I am becoming engaged with things. I have a set of schedules
to follow. I am interested in my work. I am in love. I am trying to get the most out of the time I spend.
I love the books I am reading. I love the weather; I love the chill air now
and the hot humid air a week before. I love the dead leaves on the ground. I
enjoy beyond my wildest expectations riding my bike. It is...
1 tag
crazy at the library
The library is a quiet place. It is also a mental echo chamber. The smallest repetitive sound, nervous tick, coughing, whispering, clicking of pens, amplifies exponentially over time. It all oozes in from perception’s periphery and demands attention. We become annoyed, then hostile (but unwilling to get up and yell), and feel a great discord in our environment, as though a revolution were...
September 2011
3 posts
Just so you know,
said the computer software advertisement; I missed the first part after that,
but caught “you can even create a folder within a folder.”
There must be some person who made the decision that, yes,
I needed to know this. The ‘just-so’ is a lie, of course:
I was meant ultimately to buy a product. However, there was
a kind of direct importance of the...
1 tag
Uncomfortable
A job is your life. This a time of opportunity: if you don’t feel comfortable in your job now, leave! Find a new one!
A job is not your life. You are young and need to save up. Stick it out.
—
The kind of job you’re in now is not what you want to be doing later. You aren’t learning anything important; even a job that pays much less can be far more valuable in terms of...
1 tag
“Unmolested is a great football word. We walk around in our daily life never...”
– Prose Football
August 2011
9 posts
1 tag
“All of the 200 million European Starlings found in North America today are...”
– Interesting facts | European Starling
“In her misery she read a great deal, and discovered that she had lost something...”
– The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
“…above all, let it be considered that what is more wholesome than any...”
– Charles Pierce
“The pluralist, far from being anti-scientific, accepts the sciences at full...”
– Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking.
“Many physical quantities are actually quantized by physical entities. Examples...”
– Quantization error - Wikipedia
I had this very thought (the italicized text) while running today.
July 2011
9 posts
1 tag
“That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show; (if...”
– Ada Lovelace, writing to Charles Babbage, as she struggled to develop the world’s first computer program.
“The whole world talks endlessly, at any given moment there are millions of...”
– from A Heart So White, Javier Marías
1 tag
2 tags
“But it was one thing to threaten force against the South, long regarded as the...”
– J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground
(And apparently it is yet another thing to incorporate the problems of civil rights in the North into its history education. This whole book is news to me.)
Did you know Ted Kennedy was once chased (~2:00) in Government Center by protestors, throwing tomatoes and...
1 tag
“I thought, as I have many times in the concourse, that if I were a stranger to...”
– Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place, on emerging from the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal.
The idea that the unspoken contracts between city-goers — as simple as avoiding running into each other — enhances a personal connection to an otherwise anonymous, lonely urban setting, and even...
“In any swing of a writer’s work, chances are there will be passages that will...”
– evanfleischer
2 tags
2 tags
