May 2012
3 posts
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Notes from Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry interview from the Paris Review:
-History, you know, is one thing and our lives are something else.
-human freedom is conditional. In English, when you are let out of jail you’re “on parole,” and parole means “speech,” “word,” “word of honor.” But the condition under which you are free is language, human awareness.
-There are two situations for every...
“Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than...”
– Slavoj Žižek, Living In The End Times, p. 5. (via heraclitorus)
April 2012
2 posts
dear Tumblr:
oh culture!
If I’ve followed you recently, you’ve probably noticed my reading/posting habits are quite divergent.
I’ve decided to let boars and fury be what it is - a sort of shelf of literary curios - but my brain needs a vent, and Tumblr is made for it.
So:
a circular joy.
queer things, gender, race, power, intersections, living politics, adornment, theory, senses,...
March 2012
2 posts
“What does virginity mean to a queer person, who may never have vaginal...”
– Virginity: Ditch It (via deviantfemme) WERD. (via spankenstein) THIS.
2 tags
January 2012
2 posts
“A poem is like a heavy weight that the poet has carried to the roof bit by bit....”
– Paul Valéry
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December 2011
1 post
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“Sartre pointed out that the trouble with narrative is that it secretly begins at...”
– A. Martin in book review for the Independent
November 2011
1 post
August 2011
2 posts
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“We need to test radically different things. We don’t know what works. Destroy...”
– Behind the scenes: A/B testing part 3: Finalé - (37signals)
'Neil illusions'
Allan Neil in New Scientist, 1971, via (1→2→3)
July 2011
1 post
“English people are rather frank and direct in manner. To express their emotions,...”
– Peilei Chen (‘A Cognitive Study of “Happiness” Metaphors in English and Chinese Idioms’)
June 2011
1 post
3 tags
“Destiny can be directed… one does not need to remain in bondage to the...”
– Anaïs Nin
May 2011
2 posts
2 tags
gairaigo + wasai-eigo from French
アベック (abekku), ‘romantic couple’, from avec (‘with’) ロマン (roman), ‘novel’, ‘something that rouses one’s dreams / longings’, from roman ズボン (zubon), ‘trousers’, from jupon (‘petticoat’, i.e. related to jupe, ‘skirt’) [zubon are worn under an uwagi, and sometimes under a hakama] シュークリーム (shūkurīmu),...
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April 2011
7 posts
2 tags
coincidental post three on time
DP: Every sentence written in English contains some anxiety about time. I’d love to write a poem that was Time-Free. Is that possible?
RZ: Why? Is this particular to English?
DA: I don’t think English is necessarily the only language in which time is embedded in the verbs. But I know that in Mandarin it’s easy to make a sentence that doesn’t tell you at what time things happened. And I wish that...
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“Discourse is not life; its time is not yours.”
– Michel Foucault
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Andrée-Anne Dupuis-Bourret
I’ve fallen instantly head-over-heels in love with the phrase ‘sculptural printworks’. Craft paper, screenprinted, and folded. (via Printeresting, who made a studio visit & photographed it)
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“To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost...”
– Kathryn Schulz
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“The bluesman makes an assertion, then revises it, restating it. The repetition...”
– Douglas Kearney
March 2011
22 posts
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Ólöf Arnalds: “Innundir skinni”
3 tags
fridayreads:
a. Quantum theory: a very short introduction (John Polkinghorne) ⇒ b. Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) ⇒ c. The places that scare you (Pema Chödrön) ⇒
all started, finished, wanting notes. All burrowing into my brain in different ways. I finished Pema’s last night in a few hours, lucky with knowledge. No essays today, sorry; not firing on all cylinders. And that’s okay.
2 tags
'Today I wrote nothing'
Perfect for a day beginning with returning to 750words.com:
April 11, 1937
“Enough of laziness and doing nothing! Open this notebook every day and write down half a page at the very least. If you have nothing to write down, then at least, following Gogol’s advice, write down that today there’s nothing to write. Always write with attention and look on writing as a holiday.”
— Daniil Kharms,...
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meditation: a quick post
Out of the countless little passing sparks of thought-forms in a sitting, some catch, because of their evocations. They light a little longer than thoughts about, say, kettles. So even in my entirely secular practice, in the last week or two I’ve seen:
a golden Buddha a long, grey-stone cathedral nave Medicine Buddha.
It’s not mysterious, but it is comforting. And: each has been...
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“Just as language evolved with increasing specificity, breaking further and...”
– From Fanny Howe’s essay “Bewilderment” (via erininthebay)
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What else could a decision be but the product of a combination of the present state of being, fashioned by the past, and the environment that a person finds themself in? From at least Hume onwards, many philosophers have understood that the only meaningful sense of free will is action free from coercion or force, not action exempt from the causal necessity of the physical world. To that debate,...
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Laurie Kang
via oioiaiai
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“I say this with fervent emotion, which is what I use when I don’t have...”
– Night life: this is your brain on dreams (New Scientist)
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“We develop behavior patterns and emotional coping mechanisms to cover up the...”
– Gabor Mate (posted by steve-kim)
1000reasonsnottostartmakingart: ‘So, how to make sense of it all? How to work to unravel your own true self?’
*
psst…
Been researching on this today. I think these specific words get us off on the wrong tack, though Mate is pushing in the right...
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“It is not what we do that has the greatest impact but who we are being as we do...”
– Gabor Mate (via steve-kim)
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Clint Fulkerson, etchings
via field & sea
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solving, unsolving
Unsolving the City: An Interview with China Miéville Geoff Manaugh BLDGBLOG
(….)
Novelists have an endless drive to aestheticize and to complicate. I know there’s a very strong tradition—a tradition in which I write, myself—about the decoding of the city. Thomas de Quincey, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair—that type-thing. The idea that, if you draw the right...
5 tags
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the uncanny body
Anxiety as Atavism Dylan Trigg Side Effects
(….)
From the wilderness of prehistoric Africa to the aisles of urban supermarkets, the human’s “phylogenetically endowed” (Freud) anxieties materializes as remnants of a lost world. All that has (largely) changed from the Stone Age is the objective absence of danger: what remains in place is the body’s attunement to threat, its ...
3 tags
“All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do...”
– Stevie Smith
February 2011
4 posts
2 tags
fridayreads:
Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective (Mark Epstein) ⇒
Very different to the first time I read it, several years ago. Still mid-book at the moment, so things might change.
This was the book - or at least, I’d thought it was - which introduced me to Buddhist conceptions of mind, and exactly what anatta (no-self) means. The whole, coherent...
?
Podcasts or downloadable radio/audio/lectures on
science
mathematics
please?
I’ll recirculate responses as a post here, but the principal reason is I’m not well & need comfort, and this is what works best in the late dark nights. Thank you.
PS the more complex/involved the better; I’m fairly well read.
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fridayreads:
Whether you’re reading one book or five—or just the back of your cereal box—FridayReads wants to know.
Living Yogācāra (Tagawa Shun’ei, tr. Charles Muller) ⇒
A version of basic Buddhist theories on consciousness, in brief. “… Tagawa Shun’ei makes sense of [Yogacara’s] seeming unwieldiness. He shows what the Yogacara masters are talking about are, in many...
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Jon Day et al.
by Jon Day, an interiors photographer (mostly) scenes by Laurence Pasquier (a-c), Louisa Green for Refined (d-g), unknown (h-i)
via Tea for Joy