John Estes/Works&Days

Lectionary

2011-11-20T13:26:19Z

It would be foolish of me to claim to be an expert on Edson's work. Writing it does not make the work any more open to me, perhaps less so than anyone else. I approach my work as a reader, rather than as a writer writing it. Each of my pieces is written without premeditation or expectation. For one thing, if I have an idea what I shall be writing about, such as this little article, I am bored and blocked from the secret message; I want to follow the writing as a reader; which is to say, I am as surprised as anyone might be as the writing begins to come out of the typewriter; they mysterious other life begins to send its message. It is also necessary not to have a literary expectation, but to the enjoy the special reality on its own terms.

~ Russell Edson, "On Counting Sheep"

In art, one must never claim that what one is doing is possible.

2011-10-14T03:29:20Z

Nobel Prize winner in chemistry was ridiculed for years for chasing quasicrystals, which possess a pattern that is not a pattern, thus against nature.

Dr. Shechtman himself is said to have cried "Eyn chaya kazo", which translates from the Hebrew as "there can be no such creature".

Ordered but not Periodic. They are, as things unreal go, beautiful to a fault.
I like this one, too, from JG:

A car promises you there is a road.

Lectionary

2011-10-14T02:36:34Z

He resented their coming up and guzzling his liquor, heavy as he was with financial responsibilities--hardly two nickels he could clink in his pocket; college expenses of his son and daughter, the heavy debts and expenses of his wife in Providence--and he resented even more his visitors' invasion of the narrow space his life's errors had left him, though it was true, he would admit, that he took some comfort from their proof that, contrary to what he'd always thought, misery was universal.

- John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts

I Have Wasted My Life

2011-10-14T02:27:46Z

A Blurb By Any Other Name

2011-10-12T06:32:19Z

It is well not to dwell too long on the word blurb; it has an unusually low threshold of unconscious acceptability before it starts sounding ridiculous and one begins to wonder if it's at all a good thing to possess. The well-known origin of the word bears out this suspicion. Yet, a good blurb is a joy forever--one whose praise is just this side of fulsome--and until I get a proper whole page made for Kingdom Come I'll just post this here, the blurb written for the forthcoming Eighth Day Books catalog. I shall study deserving.

'This gospel of loneliness says / Two pleasures endure: / those of the flesh / and those of the writing desk.' With these opening lines, we are ushered into the alternating rhythms of John Estes's poetry, its delicious balance between the playful and the profound, between ordinary life--that profusion of conjugal love, sleepless toddlers, and broken plumbing that inspired Virginia Woolf's plea for 'a room of one's own'--and the kind of insight that can only spring, Athena-like, from the writer's solitary mind. Gifted with an irreverent humor, Estes revels in the absurdities of domestic life ('I contest the equation...that a nursery / is where babies sleep / not where babies get made') and conjures up Dickinson and Plath to get himself through birthing classes. Before we're done laughing, however, he's pried up the melancholy edge of that same life with its misunderstandings ('we practice our perfection / the way a buzzard, / when it believe no one listens / will crash through the branches / and attack, attack, attack'), miscarriages ('our lost baby, our would-be who would-not-be / who will miss the seventh moon's expected swell / but asks for no condolences'), and the inevitable 'breaking of all that is breakable.' Within the taut lines of Kingdom Come, life's disparate possibilities crumble and reunite again to form a tenuous harmony, an ironic, unexpected joy.

Lectionary

2011-10-12T03:52:39Z

Although we say faith is a thing of the will, perhaps it would be better to say that faith is another psychic potency, different from intelligence, will, and sentiment. Faith is the creative power of the human being. But as it has a more intimate relationship to will than to any other of the three potencies, we present it in volitive form. Let it be noted, however, that to want to believe--that is, to want to create--is not precisely believing or creating, although certainly the initiation of it.

***

And I replied, "Theologians kill faith." Especially in medicine the science of my physician can heal me, although I may not know the whereabouts of my liver; but in religion, the faith of my confessor cannot save me. In the life of the spirit, only my truth saves me, and my truth is not the truth that I ignore, although this may be the truth of everybody else. As long as I do not know what it means that the Holy Ghost comes from the Father and the Son, and not the Father alone, what difference does it make for the life of the spirit that it may be one thing or another or neither of the two, of what use is it for me to hear them sing at Mass, with the music of Palestrina in Latin, that business of qui ex Patre et Flioque procedit? What hinders harms, and in the soul every herb that yields nothing, every infertile weed, every idea, or rather, every phrase that does not respond to any sentiment at all, every word that evokes no warm, luminous concept constitutes a hindrance.

~ Miguel de Unamuno, Treatise on the Love of God

Lectionary

2011-09-19T10:53:52Z

But in general, we relate to the world as more disembodied being than our ancestors; that is, the centre of gravity of the person each one of is, as we interact with others, has moved out of the body. It stands outside, in the agent of disengaged discipline, capable of dispassionate control. This is the persona we project towards others, and they toward us, and in this mutual projection we help each other to see ourselves as having attained this rational distance, and hence help each other to live up to this exalted ideal.

- Charles Taylor A Secular Age

Lectionary

2011-07-27T14:40:05Z

And this is the progress of every earnest mind; from the works of man and the activity of the hands to a delight in the faculties which rule them; from a respect to the works to a wise wonder at this mystic element of time in which he is conditioned; from local skills and the economy which reckons the amount of production per hour to the finer economy which respects the quality of what is done, and the right we have to the work, or the fidelity with which it flows from ourselves; then to the depth of thought it betrays, looking to its universality, or that its roots are in eternity, not in time. Then it flows from character, that sublime health which values one moment as another, and makes us great in all conditions, and as the only definition we have of freedom and power.

- Emerson, "Works and Days"

Lectionary

2011-07-21T15:01:02Z

Every real question is fruitful, as the history of human thought so clearly demonstrates. And "fruitful" is by no means a synonym for "soluble." What is man? One answer on offer is, An organism whose haunting questions perhaps ought not to be meaningful to the organ that generates them, lacking as it is in any means of "solving" them. Another answer might be, It is still too soon to tell.

- Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind

Lectionary

2011-07-19T15:32:25Z

That religious consciousness is deadened and reactionary which does not have the courage of creative effort, of the daring act of creating knowledge or beauty, because it considers this heroic action only in proportion of the saints; it takes from man the burden of free initiative, the burden of responsibility for revealing the secrets of creativeness. On this soil there grows up a powerless and unconscious envy of saintliness, a hesitant and cowardly inactivity in any kind of creative action. The new consciousness of the creative epoch must recognize in the psychological sphere the equal value of genius and saintliness.

- Nicolas Berdyaev, "Creativity and Asceticism: The Genius and the Saint"

Contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half century. If something doesn't give you a shot at comprehension in the first couple of readings, then my motto is "Fuck it," but I never swore once [at Tony Hoagland's What Narcissism Means to Me]. They can use that as a blurb, if they want. Who wouldn't want to buy a poetry book that said "I never swore once" on the cover?

- Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

The End of Bordeom

2011-07-18T22:01:37Z

Scott Adams (Dilbert, yes) on the decline of creativity as a function of the decline of boredom.

It's worth keeping an eye on the link between our vanishing boredom and innovation. It's the sort of thing that could literally destroy the world without anyone realizing what the hell is going wrong. If it reaches critical proportions, we probably won't recognize the root cause of the problem. A lack of creativity always looks like some other problem.

(Via Shawn Blanc)

Lectionary

2011-07-18T21:58:38Z

But it came to pass at last that the end of bliss was at hand, and the noontide of Valinor was drawing to its twilight. For as has been told and is as known to all, being written in lore and sung in many songs, Melkor slew the Trees of the Valar with the aid of Ungoliant, and escaped, and came back to Middle-earth.

- The Silmarillion

The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.

- Lionel Trilling, "The Function of the Little Magazine"

Lectionary

2011-07-17T18:04:23Z

Disillusionment/is what happens when men/dabble in magic.

- Maggie Smith, "Doubting Thomas"

Easy to cross the river if you are part river.

- James Shea, "Dream Trial"

Poetry Bombs

2011-07-16T13:22:50Z

Terrorist goes around sewing lines of poetry into clothes at resale shops.

"Sewing poems in clothes is a way of bringing poetry to everyday life just by displacing it, by removing it from a paper to integrate it and fuse it with our lives. Sometimes little details are stronger when they are separated from where they are expected to be," [Augustina Woodgate] said.

(Via Iain Broome.)

Lectionary

2011-07-16T12:53:49Z

So you see, the sinking of the Pequod was only a metaphysical tragedy, after all. The world goes on just the same. The ship of the soul is sunk. But the machine-manipulating body works just the same: digests, chews gum, admires Botticelli, and aches with amorous love.

- D.H. Lawrence

The role of the artist is to create anti-environments as a means of perception and adjustment.

- Marshall McCluhan