January 2011
21 posts
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Success is like some horrible disaster Worse than your house burning, the sounds of ruination As the roof tree falls following each other faster While you stand, the helpless witness of your damnation
Fame like a drunkard consumes the house of the soul Exposing that you have worked for only this— Ah, that I had never suffered this treacherous kiss And had been left in darkness forever to founder...
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“From the mirror within the window an ocean creature so drenched and coppered by...”
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Divergent English town pronunciations
Featherstonehaugh - Fanshaw
Cholmondeley - Chumly
Berkeley - Barkly
Mainwaring - Mannering
Belvoir - Beaver
Trottiscliffe - Trozli
ἀτύφος
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A Defense of Books
by William H. Gass
One
When Ben Jonson was a small boy, his tutor, William Camden, persuaded him of the virtue of keeping a commonplace book: pages where an ardent reader might copy down passages that especially pleased him, preserving sentences that seemed particularly apt or wise or rightly formed and that would, because they were written afresh in a new place, and in a context of...
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“The detection of small errors has always been the property of minds elevated...”
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In the beginning, people remembered things.
The world saturated the life that lived in it to such an extent that a kind of consubstantiation took place. The world and its sequences became beached inside the life that experienced them, long after the sensations that represented those sequences had drained back into nothingness.
Memory.
Can you think of a pure memory? Do the common features of...
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Listen
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I hike into the hills and sit in a graveyard. The stars are blinking like cat’s eyes and burned blood is pouring from the slaughterhouse chimney. My crotch is cold with the pee and the breeze. The moon goes behind a cloud and six pale forms start down from the foothills. At first I think they’re ghosts but they’re only starving pronghorn come down to lick salt from the...
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The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes
1.
In 1935, three years before his death, Edmund Husserl gave his celebrated lectures in Vienna and Prague on the crisis of European humanity. For Husserl, the adjective “European” meant the spiritual identity that extends beyond geographical Europe (to America, for instance) and that was born with ancient Greek philosophy. In his view, this philosophy, for the first time in...
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Abraham Lincoln at Independence Hall, February...
Mr. Cuyler: I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here in the place where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live. You have kindly suggested to me that in my hands is the task of restoring peace to our distracted country. I can say in return, sir, that all the political sentiments I...