January 2010
24 posts
WatchBroken Bells‘ “The High Road” - direction by Sophie Muller album available 3/9/10
10 Best Songs about Libraries and Librarians →
via NY Public Library
“There is a graceful and dignified simplicity, as well as a bold and sordid one;...”
– Alexander Pope in the introduction to his translation of The Iliad
"Our Boredom, Ourselves"
[…] “The only horrible thing in the world is ennui,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, suggesting that boredom doesn’t feel much better in French. “That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”
And yet boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. We read, and write, in large part to avoid it. At the same time, few experiences carry more risk of active boredom than...
Watch“Same Old You” - Brandi Carlile “I squeezed every terrible—and by terrible I mean beautiful—bad classic country cliche into one song.” Beautifully terrible and terribly hilarious, indeed.
“Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face...”
– Flannery O’Connor, Intro to “A Memoir of Mary Ann” (here)
“The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows...
First Listen: Patty Griffin's 'Down Town Church' →
"Did I Miss Anything?"- Tom Wayman
Question frequently asked by students after missing a class
Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here we sat with our hands folded on our desks in silence, for the full two hours
Everything. I gave an exam worth 40 per cent of the grade for this term and assigned some reading due today on which I’m about to hand out a quiz worth 50 per cent
Nothing. None of the content...
A Decade in Jobs
Per a recent conversation with a friend, here are the various jobs that I held, chronologically, from 2000-2009:
1. buser 2. waitress 3. landscaper 4. gardener 5. house cleaner 6. stall mucker 7. Dutch bakery employee 8. Italian deli employee 9. student-athlete 10. soccer store employee 11. coach 12. computer lab monitor, night owl shift (10pm-4am) 13. language institute office manager 14. data...
“Atrocities celebrate meaninglessness. The Dresden atrocity, tremendously...”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday
The Beatles and the Hamburg Crucible
The first interesting thing about the Beatles for our purposes is how long they had already been together by the time they reached the United States. Lennon and McCartney first started playing together in 1957, seven years prior to landing in America. (Incidentally, the time that elapsed between their founding and their arguably greatest artistic achievements—Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely...
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“People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as ‘dwelling on it.’ We understand the aversion most of us have to ‘dwelling on it.’ Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the...