January 2012
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Second letter to Federico Garcia Lorca
Dear Lorca,
When I translate one of your poems and I come across words I do not understand, I always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right. A really perfect poem (no one yet has written one) could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word of the language it was written in. A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.
It is very difficult. We want to...
So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch
On her side, reclining on her elbow. This mechanism, this apparition, Suppose we call it Projection A.
She floats in air at the level of The eye, completely anonymous, Born, as she was, at twenty-one,
Without lineage or language, only The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture, Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.
If just above her head there hung, Suspended in air, the slightest crown Of...
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Teaching the Classics (and Why the World Won't...
…But first the rhetoric of decline, and let me read you another piece of gloom:
On many sides we hear confident assertions…that the work of Greek and Latin is done—that their day is past. If the extinction of these languages as potent instruments of education is a sacrifice inexorably demanded by the advancement of civilisation, regrets are idle, and we must bow to necessity. But we know...
December 2011
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WatchTake This Book: The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street by Melissa Gira Grant, on Kickstarter
“This used to be a library: thousands of books, thousands of people, tended to by a dozen or so librarians in Zucotti Park, the first home of Occupy Wall Street…”
Somewhere in that library was my name, printed and bound above the first story I ever published. On a...
from Messiah (Christmas Portions)
This music
demonstrates what it claims:
glory shall be revealed. If art’s
acceptable evidence,
mustn’t what lies
behind the world be at least
as beautiful as the human voice?
The tenors lack confidence,
and the soloists,
half of them anyway, don’t
have the strength to found
the mighty kingdoms
these passages propose
—but the chorus, all together,
equals my burning clouds,
and...
WatchJames George, “Alley Posts” | Beyond The Beyond
“an old tourist movie from the future. filmed in an evening walking the streets of Barcelona with a handheld 3d scanner.”
…Beautiful.
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Dirge
thelazylazarus:
1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1; bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow— O, executive type, would you like to drive a floating power, knee-action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a Hollywood star? Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack? O, fellow with a will who won’t take no, watch...
November 2011
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#Occupy as Live Action Role-Playing
We have so much knowledge, so many skills, maybe too much time and energy. Our knowledge is widely distributed and too easily evaporates into the cloud, but we have more of it than ever. We may have fewer skills than past societies (how many cobblers are left?), but there are more of us and a surprising diversity of interest between. For good or for ill, our time and energy, once consumed by a...
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Aviary
do you remember the time we didn’t go to Topeka we were ready to go with our sandwiches packed and you had your harpoon and I had my headdress but we didn’t go though we agreed it totally boffo we could go to Topeka whenever we liked but I said I’d rather live here than Topeka where all they have is a crummy zoo and whoever heard of Topeka anyway so we didn’t go and spent the day instead...
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from Between the Wars
When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon— midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote, read Polish history, and there was a woman whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid American sublime—late in the afternoon, toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening, the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails. They were death’s idea of twilight, the whole notes of a requiem the...
October 2011
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from Of Being Numerous
…6
We are pressed, pressed on each other, We will be told at once Of anything that happens
And the discovery of fact bursts In a paroxysm of emotion Now as always. Crusoe
We say was ‘Rescued’. So we have chosen.
7
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous…
— George Oppen
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Synchronicity Reading List: "The Accursed Share"
1.
“When involuntary unemployment exists, the marginal disutility of labour is necessarily less than the utility of the marginal product. Indeed it may be much less. For a man who has been long unemployed some measure of labour, instead of involving disutility, may have a positive utility. If this is accepted, the above reasoning shows how ‘wasteful’ loan expenditure may...
"Beauty Contest"
“[P]rofessional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest,...
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Context Dependent
Our secret shame, isn’t it of us?—Utopia, to better make the world. To make, better: a world, still frames, a sheet of ice, a thready fire burning scraps and gas poured on it,
a testimonial, a city’s statues, a foreign tongue. None of it weighty as we think, prone to fall away. What’s left? Want of imaginary things coded into landscapes, conglomerations; categories...
September 2011
2 tags
Morning Letter
The various members of the hierarchy move, early morning awakening of the world. They are like the shuffling of doors, eager and reluctant, two-faced, I suppose. Eight o’clock carillons seem universal magic.
Now after hoping for magic, I was an ordinary messenger to arrive. Wake up, you are yourself the God of Love asleep. Whom did you expect? you lay eyes closed as if afloat. Proud boy,...
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Piso's Justice
That is Piso’s justice. Verbally right, but morally wrong. Seneca tells us that Piso condemned a man on circumstantial evidence for murder; but when the suspect was at the place of execution, the man supposed to have been murdered exclaimed, “Hold, hold! I am the man supposed to have been killed.” The centurion sent back the prisoner to Piso, and explained the case to him; whereupon Piso...
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"The Examined Life"
“…Many of my critics pretend that they have been entirely self-made. They seem to feel responsible for their intellectual gifts, for their freedom from injury and disease, and for the fact that they were born at a specific moment in history. Many appear to have absolutely no awareness of how lucky one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be...