Paying attention

Looking for Jonathan Franzen's 2011 commencement speech at Kenyon College (it's okay, somewhat belaboured), I find David Foster Wallace's from 2005:

And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

vintage children's book blog!

oh my.

directions

There are good ideas, and there are terrible ideas, and graduate school is clearly one of the latter.

via stopping off place

Reach me a gentian

Words we don't say

Oh. Oh! Oh. Words not to be used when Kurt Anderson was editor of the New York Magazine.

breakfast

a tumblr all about breakfast! have a picture of waffles.

[breathe]

[fragment 138]

stand to face me beloved
and open out the grace of your eyes

- Sappho, trans. Anne Carson

Looking for housing

is a discouraging process.

elephant, unicyle

Or I ♥ Wondermark.

Pinhole

Lucy Phillips, a British photographer, created pinhole cameras from matchboxes and sent them to anyone who asked for one, loaded with one shot. She asked participants to take "what cannot be seen" and send the camera back for her to develop the film. Which is a fantastic idea for a public project, and elicited some very touching photos (someone's birth mother, someone's foetus, a mother's old letters, a place to smoke, toadstools in a garden, music, sanctuary), and makes you wonder at the confessional (or, perhaps, artistic?) instinct in people, and raises the question that seems to always accompany projects of this kind - which part of it is art? Or perhaps - because it's photography, because it's a pretentious question (a question with pretensions to theory) - that's not at all the right question. Have a pinhole garden instead:

Out of the frying pan

- You're not the same person you used to be, he said.
- When did you last see her?
- When you were going to Cambridge. And in Cambridge, sometimes.
- But not since I came home?
- Sometimes. Not often.

Better the fire, then.

Bookmill

Oh look at this. A bookmill!

Though if I had a bookshop it would look like this, with serendipity as an organising principle.

(Via evencleveland)

The Forms of Love

Parked in the fields
All night
So many years ago,
We saw
A lake beside us
When the moon rose.
I remember

Leaving that ancient car
Together. I remember
Standing in the white grass
Beside it. We groped
Our way together
Down-hill in the bright
Incredible light

Beginning to wonder
Whether it could be lake
Or fog
We saw, our heads
Ringing under the stars. We walked
To where it would have wet our feet
Had it been water.

- George Oppen

Buttercup Festival

is back!

Right that's all folks.

postcard

(via Cup of Jo)

Buttercup Festival

Is buttercup festival gone? Even the archives? That's terrible. So terrible it has to be mentioned somewhere almost public.

Not even then

"I understand you're married," a man said to me at a formal lunch in New York my published had arranged. "How do you have time to write a book?"

Sir?

"Well," he said, "you have to have a garden, for instance. You have to entertain." And I thought he was foolish, this man in his seventies, who had no idea what you must do. But the fanaticism of my twenties shocks me now. As I feared it would.

- From Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

On Courtship

"The first intimation of a new romance [in Heian-kyo, a thousand years ago] for a woman of the court was the arrival at her door of a messenger bearing a five-line poem in an unfamiliar hand. If the woman found the poem sufficiently intriguing, the paper it was written on suitable for its contents and mood, and the calligraphy acceptably graceful, her encouraging reply -- itself in the form of a poem -- would set in motion a clandestine, love-night visit from her suitor. The first night together was, according to established etiquette, sleepless; lovemaking and talk were expected to continue without pause until the man, protesting the night's brevity, departed in the first light of the predawn. Even then he was not free to turn his thoughts to the day's official duties: a morning-after poem had to be written and sent off by means of an ever-present messenger page, who would return with the woman's reply. Only after this exchange had been completed could the night's success be fully judged by whether the poems were equally ardent and accomplished, referring in image and nuance to the themes of the night just passed. Subsequent visits were made on the same clandestine basis and under the same circumstances, until the relationship was either made official by a private ceremony of marriage or ended."

- from the introduction to The Ink Dark Moon, trans. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani

Blessing

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

- James Wright
From "A Blessing"

Caged

Photographer Oscar Ciutat took pictures of the eyes of caged animals at the local zoo.

 

(Via Cup of Jo.)

Mockingbirds

This morning

two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing

the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing

better to do
than listen.
I mean this
seriously.

In Greece,
a long time ago,
an old couple
opened their door

to two strangers
who were,
it soon appeared,
not men at all,

but gods.
It is my favorite story--
how the old couple
had almost nothing to give

but their willingness
to be attentive--
but for this alone
the gods loved them

and blessed them--
when they rose
out of their mortal bodies,
like a million particles of water

from a fountain,
the light
swept into all the corners
of the cottage,

and the old couple,
shaken with understanding,
bowed down--
but still they asked for nothing

but the difficult life
which they had already.
And the gods smiled, as they vanished,
clapping their great wings.

Wherever it was
I was supposed to be
this morning--
whatever it was I said

I would be doing--
I was standing
at the edge of the field--
I was hurrying

through my own soul,
opening its dark doors--
I was leaning out;
I was listening.

- Mary Oliver 

Heat and Desperation

Preparation, she thought,
as if a pianist,
limbering, stretching.
But fingers are tendon, not spirit;
are bone and muscle and skin.
Increase of reach extends reach,
but not what comes then to fill it.
What comes to fill it is something that has no name,
a hunger from outside the wolf-colored edges.
Thirteen smoke jumpers died at Mann Gulch.
Two ran faster.
One stopped, set a match ahead of himself,
ahead of the fire. Then stepped upslope,
lay down inside still-burning ashes, and lived.

- Jane Hirshfield

Overseen

"I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot." (Revelations 3:15)

Overheard on the Titanic

Indecision

Looks like this: I am ate up with anxiety.

1. If it is to be done, it must be done for love. With love.
2. If I loved it would I not be reading Rousseau in my spare time? That I am not - therefore I don't love it?
3. But love has to be worked at, and can be easily lost - through lack of application and laziness and some kind of self-destructiveness.
4. The self gets in the way of seeing clearly.
5. If I were free - but I am not, and would not exchange anything I have in you for that freedom. The thrownness of the world. And - that communion requires obligations to one another.
6. I am so afraid for you. I am so afraid for us.
7. Some days I think I might love it.
8. Think about working in Singapore - already the attraction diminishes. No cloistered place here.
9. Still, I'd like to come home.
10. How can I do this?