Or an Undulating Fragment from Oblivion?
I don’t know.
But this image that the Hubble Space Telescope took is quite beautiful:
X at 11000mph
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#1452
Your thoughts don’t have words ever day
They come a single time
Like signal esoteric sips
Of the communion Wine
Which while you taste so native seems
So easy to be
You cannot comprehend its price
Nor its infrequency
– Emily Dickinson
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Whenever I sense that I’m getting too tangled up in a specific process, or overly attached to a particular tool or way of thinking, I often find myself muttering: “My pen! My pen!”
I just recently found the sketch that inspired that little tactic of re-centering, after not seeing it for years:
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The epidemic I’m most worried about isn’t swine flu. It’s the death of logical thinking. The cause, I assume, is that most people now get their information from random images on a screen—pop-ups, windows, and sidebars—or from scraps of talk on a digital phone. But writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn’t the writing; it’s the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?”
Hmm, I guess I’ve got some thinking to do.
via @WaltPascoe and @zoewesthof
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There are “Books You Can Live Without“? Really?
The NYT’s Room for Debate blog makes this claim, and asked six book enthusiasts how they go about the task of choosing what stays on the bookshelves, and what should go.
My own attitude is closest to that of Joshua Ferris:
“Books are notes from the field, bound and domesticated, life brought into narrow focus. Get rid of a book? No way. Every one is a brick keeping the building standing. Books are my life. I leave and come back, and the books I find there tell me I’m home.”
I can only hope he’s joking about piling books on top of his wife — well, unless she’s into that kind of thing.
And Fred Bass, co-owner of The Strand Book Store, summarizes the economic conundrum that lurks within every book-purging project:
“When you’re all finished, think of selling your books to the Strand! Though we’ll definitely buy the quality books you plan on discarding, we really want the books you’re keeping.”
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Final de Año
Neither the symbolic detail
of a three instead of a two,
nor that rough metaphor
that hails one term dying and another emerging
nor the fulfillment of an astronomical process
muddle and undermine
the high plateau of this night
making us wait
for the twelve irreparable strokes of the bell.
The real cause
is our murky pervasive suspicion
of the enigma of Time,
it is our awe at the miracle
that, though the chances are infinite
and though we are
drops in Heraclitus’ river,
allows something in us to endure,
never moving.
– Jorge Luis Borges (translated by W.S. Merwin)
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I actually choked on a snowflake earlier this evening, but my cold, wet walk was worth it.
This evening in Portland
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Gary Snyder, quoted in the book “Where Inspiration Lives”:
Another key principle in this creative stewardship is waking up to “wild mind.” He clarifies that “wild” in this context does not mean chaotic, excessive, or crazy.
“It means self-organizing,” he says. “It means elegantly self-disciplined, self-regulating, self-maintained. That’s what wilderness is. Nobody has to do the management plan for it. So I say to people, ‘let’s trust in the self-disciplined elegance of wild mind.’ Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking, brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.”
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From the back cover of Haiku Year:
“In 1996, seven friends agreed to write one haiku a day and mail them to each other. At the end of the year, they realized that their collection of simple, critical observations had given them a new way to look a the details of their lives.”
Examples:
Tom Gilroy:
The Smiths on
Starbucks’ sound system
another dream over
Rick Roth:
Bitter stamp taste
Licked for a letter
that will get no reply
Jim McKay:
People in cars
telling life stories
in red light glances
Tom Gilroy:
the father pushing
the kid on the tricycle
when it’s easier to tell him to pedal
Anna Grace:
at dawn
we fall asleep
mid-sentence
You can even post your own to their guest book.
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“The God Abandons Antony” by C.P. Cavafy:
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
Some backstory from Roger Housden:
“In Plutarch’s version, the night before the city falls, Mark Antony hears an invisible troupe of musicians and singers leaving the city. At that moment he passes out, in the realization that the god Bacchus, his protector, and god of music, wine, and festivity, is deserting him, and that he, Antony, is destined to lose the city. Historically, Antony and Cleopatra, on realizing that all is lost, are said to have committed suicide rather than suffer defeat.”
Leonard Cohen also reinterpreted this poem in his song “Alexandra Leaving”.
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The FCC has conditioned us to hear prurience where a beep replaces…counting.
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Kate Monahan shares her experience with putting Carolyn See’s “charming note” idea into practice.
Quoting See:
“These notes are like paper airplanes sailing around the world, and they accomplish a number of things at once. They salute the writer (or editor or agent) in question. They say to him or her: Your work is good and admirable! You’re not laboring in a vacuum. There are people out in the world who know what you do and respect it.”
And:
“These are paper airplanes of affection. They are the glue of human sweetness in literary society.”
Tip of the hat: Mark Levy
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CERN flipped the switch again on the Large Hadron Collider, two proton beams sped towards each other — a crash, then sub-atomic shrapnel.
And a roomful of people experience a moment of joy that’s been 14 years in the making:
LHC Scientists: Professional Ecstasy
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Yoinks! I have 80+ possible items in the queue for publishing on this scrapbook, but I’ve been so busy with other projects I haven’t taken the time to edit and post them.
Here’s the good news: not only am I going to get caught up, but I’m going to pre-schedule at least two or three items a week so there’s bit more consistency in the publishing schedule in the future. I hope…
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