November 2009
43 posts
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October 2009
58 posts
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Magnolia Electric Co. :: The Night Shift Lullabye
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“There are people in every age who come early or late to a sense of the futility...”
– Richard Rodriguez, The God of the Desert
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“Every Halloween, Linus faithfully waits by a pumpkin patch, in the hopes that he...”
– Sartre & Peanuts (Philosophy Now Magazine) (via shynessisnice)
But from another existential viewpoint (Kierkegaard’s), Linus’ faith in the Great Pumpkin is all that matters.
(via fuckyeahexistentialism)
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Wasteland and Wilderness →
Pondering ‘zones of exclusion’
No one has yet fathomed how the universe seems to... →
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
– Carl Sagan (via astroinquiry) (via crashinglybeautiful)
“We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken...”
– Lydia Davis, via The Believer
I find this a very fascinating notion, this idea of narrative disconnect. As a teacher of high school English Literature, one of my absolute favorite authors to look at is Virginia Woolf. I usually begin with an experiment: each student is to tape record at least two...
Do you wanna be buried with my people dear
was...
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“There is an altitude above every planet where a moon can orbit forevermore. In...”
– Amy Leach, Sail On, My Little Honeybee
“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted...”
– David Foster Wallace (via tmblg) (via markn) (via synecdoche)
The Anxiety of Influence
From repeated phrases in stories written by Florida fourth-graders for the state’s Comprehensive Assessment Test, cited by authorities as evidence that teachers had given students sentences or plots to memorize. In one plot, protagonists went “poof” and found themselves in a magical land.
One quintessential, supersonic day…
One ordinary day turned into an extraordinary...
songs: ohia :: two blue lights
two blue lights ...
The Edge of the Solar System is Tied Up With a... →
karen dalton :: katie cruel
one of those nights
“Alchemy, astrology, voluminous pantaloons, and a massive moustache like a woolly...”
– Someone nominating Tycho Brahe for the Hotties from History segment in The Bugle, a podcast by Andy Zaltzman and my boyfriend John Oliver.
Tycho’s Wikipedia entry has to be seen to be believed. At one point, he owned 1% of all the wealth in Denmark. As a child, he was kidnapped and raised by his...
crashinglybeautiful:
snakecharmer:
“up north,”...
the referendum →
In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.
The Collider, the Particle, and a Theory about... →
I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who...
“‘Time,’ says Jorge Luis Borges, ‘is the substance I am made of. Time is a river...”
– In the River of Consciousness, by Oliver Sacks - The New York Review of Books — requires subscription if you want to read the full article, annoyingly enough. (via wingsandfins) (via crashinglybeautiful)
“I just wonder how many people never get the one they want, but end up with the...”
– Fried Green Tomatoes (via quotewhore) (via challahtwisted) (via symbiosis)
sometimesagreatnotion:
THINGS MY SON SHOULD KNOW AFTER I’VE DIED
I was young once. I dug holes near a canal and almost drowned. I filled notebooks with words as carefully as a hunter loads his shotgun. I had a father also, and I came second to an addiction. I spent a summer swallowing seeds and nothing ever grew in my stomach. Every woman I kissed, I kissed as if I loved her. My left...
100 Colors, 100 Writings, 100 Days →
The synesthete in me is pleased
“How I’ve missed you lately, and the way you would speak, and all that we...”
– Iron & Wine (via morganmartinez) (via surrenderlove) (via longlivethequeen) (via symbiosis)
Famous dreams:
lickystickypickyme:
Some dreams have been credited with influencing world changing events.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein after having a dream about the monster. “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”
Elias Howe was a sewing machine pioneer who greatly influenced...
“The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters...”
– Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs
the plague cloud →
Late in life, the English writer and art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) became obsessed with what he called variously the black cloud or storm cloud or plague cloud or black wind or plague wind or evil wind or black fog, a new and unexplained weather phenomenon that cast a pall over nature and human affairs and had something to do with the advent of modern times. It was a purely meteorological...
Whistling Languages →
What I would be writing my linguistics paper on if I had the time and leisure to travel
