Notions

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 16:12:00 -0400

” I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change. Although I claimed to be a poet, although my supposed talent as a writer had earned me my fellowship in Spain, I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf.”

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Skeptic: A Life of H L Mencken by Terry Teachout

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 14:36:09 -0400

“His critique of democracy is uncomplicatedly elitist: by placing power in the hands of the unlettered and envious majority, it threatens “the two greatest intellectual possessions of modern man… The idea of personal freedom and the idea of the limitations of government.”Few writers have put the case against the common man so memorably, whether in his mordant accounts of democracy in action or is theoretical discussions of the inherent flaws of democratic rule: “there is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness – to bring him down to the miserable level of the ‘good, men, i.e., of stupid, cowardly and chronically unhappy men. And there’s only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.”“
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Christopher Hitchens

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 12:47:17 -0400

“After New Orleans, which suffered from a lethal combination of being built below sea level and neglected by the Bush administration, I learned from a senior rabbi in Israel that it was revenge for the evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, and from the mayor of New Orleans (who had not performed his own job with exceptional prowess) that it was God’s verdict on the invasion of Iraq.”

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Act One

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 12:35:55 -0400

… advice, however well-intentioned, can never take the place of one’s own judgment, good or bad. Every time I have departed from my own values and substituted those of others, I have suffered the inevitable consequences.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Act One

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 12:26:08 -0400

It is always best if one is about to embark on a wild or reckless venture not to discuss it with anybody beforehand. Talk will rob the scheme of its fire and make what seemed mettlesome and daring merely foolhardy. It is easier on everyone concerned to presented as an accomplished fact, turn a deaf ear to argument, and go ahead with it.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Act One by Moss Hart

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 23:43:20 -0400

It is hard to describe or to explain concisely the overwhelming and suffocating boredom that is the essence of being poor. A great deal has been written about the barren drudgery of poverty; but I do not recall that the numbing effect of its boredom has been much written or talked about. Yet boredom is the keynote of poverty—of all its indignities, it is perhaps the hardest of all to live with—for where there is no money there is no change of any kind, not of scene or of routine.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 08:34:03 -0400

The imposition of one kind of a guest upon another is a form of exercising power that appeals to most persons who have devoted a good deal of their life to entertaining.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 08:32:38 -0400

When you are in love with someone, their life, past, present and future, becomes in a curious way part of your life; and yet, at the same time, since two separate human entities in fact remain, you merely carry your own prejudices into another person’s imagined existence; not even into their ‘real’ existence, because only they themselves can estimate what their ‘real’ existence has been. Indeed, the situation might be compared with that to be experienced in due course in the army where an officer is responsible for the conduct of troops stationed at a post too distant from him for the exercise of any effective control.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Anthony Powell, "The Acceptance World"

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:33:09 -0400

“People can only be themselves. If they possessed the qualities you desire in them, they would be different people.”

“The illusion that anyone can escape from the marks of his vocation is an aspect of romanticism common to every profession.”

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Meeting Orson Welles

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 11:41:00 -0400

“… Tybalt appeared suddenly in that Sunlet Verona Square: death, in scarlet and black in the form of a monstrous boy – flat-footed and graceless, yet swift and agile; soft as jelly one moment and uncoiled the next, in a spring of such furious energy that, once released, it could be checked by no human intervention. What made this figure so obscene and terrible was the pale, shiny child’s face under the unnatural growth of a dark beard, from which there issued a voice of such clarity and power that it tore like a high wind through the genteel, modulated voices of well trained professionals around him. … Orson Welles’s initial impact – if one was sensitive or allergic to it - was overwhelming and unforgettable.”

“It was always a shock to see Welles without the makeup and the false noses behind which he chose to mask himself. … I was conscious once more of the remarkable hands and the voice that made people turn at the neighboring tables startled not so much by its loudness as by it’s surprising vibration.”

Run-Through by Houseman

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Run-through by John Houseman

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 11:03:19 -0400

“To say that our life is entirely what we make of it or entirely the data we are given is to say the same thing … as far as freedom is concerned two things are certain: we are never predetermined and we never change; we can always find in our past presage of what we have become.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:43:06 -0400

Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more

waterworks 2011

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 14:11:21 -0400

The Week's Best Photos: 8.19.2011 - Photo Gallery - LIFE

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:10:05 -0400

The Week's Best Photos: 8.19.2011 - Photo Gallery - LIFE:

Wild elephants play at a wild life sanctuary in Sri Lanka. The island’s elephant population has dwindled to some 4,000 from a high of 12,000.

theatlantic: tarnoff: A phrenological chart, mapping the...

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:15:05 -0400

theatlantic:

tarnoff:

A phrenological chart, mapping the different zones of the human brain. “Destructiveness” is near the ear; “Individuality” is right above the nose.

Why do we talk about foreheads when discussing culture? The word “highbrow” first appeared in the 1880s; “lowbrow” came into use right after the turn of the century. They came from phrenology, a nineteenth-century pseudoscience based on the (entirely false) idea that the shape of a person’s skull revealed something fundamental about their character. The creative, intellectual parts of the brain were located behind the forehead: thus Anglo-Saxons were superior to other, darker races because of their higher foreheads, or “brows.” Italians, Irishmen, Africans, Asians couldn’t create art on the level of Shakespeare or Milton because their brains simply weren’t built for it. They belonged to the “lowbrow,” on account of their lower foreheads.

Check out Perry Meisel’s The Myth of Popular Culture from Dante to Dylan for more on this.

The Einstein You Never Knew - Photo Gallery - LIFE

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 21:45:14 -0400

The Einstein You Never Knew - Photo Gallery - LIFE:

Einstein was good friends with the film star Charlie Chaplin. (Pictured here: Einstein and Chaplin attend the premiere of Chaplin’s great film, City Lights, in 1931.) Of the crowds that followed them, separately and when they attended events together, Chaplin told Einstein, “People cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because nobody understands you.”