September 2009
28 posts
Thousands of Hyphens Perish as English Marches On →
“But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must, — when the...”
– Emerson, on reading (The American Scholar)
Umberto Eco on the Lost Art of Handwriting →
“‘Touch’ is a word that comes from the old French...”
– Thomas Dumm
Potential Title for the Philosophy in Literature...
Yo Kierkegaard, I’m really unhappy for you, and Imma letchyou finish…but Neitzche was one of the best haters of all time. Best hater of all time!
“Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who...”
– Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces
This makes me think of this, which moved me beyond words.
Colleen :: Everyone Alive Wants Answers
Nicholas Knight :: Sentence Diagrams →
“The title of Aldous Huxley’s book ‘The Doors of Perception’...”
– Scott Black, from Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing
A diverting game to play while in miserable...
fallingandlaughing:
Earlier this week I found myself in an extremely interior circle of hell. I speak of the Comcast Customer Service Center in Chicago, where I thought I was just stopping by to pick up some self-install equipment. This stopping-by turned into over an hour of queueing followed by one of the most angrymaking customer service interactions I’ve ever had. I resurrected my...
“And that’s why books are never going to die. It’s impossible. It’s the only time...”
– Paul Auster (via youmightfindyourself)
2 tags
“An informant told me that many years before he was sitting in a tent one...”
– D.H. Hymes, The Analysis of Communicative Events (1964)
Hymes argues that in general, no phenomenon can be defined in advance as never to be counted as constituting a message.
http://savethewords.org/ →
Words that once led meaningful lives now lie unused—old words, wise words, hard-working words.
ex. sparsile, adj.
of a star; not included in any constellation
Bob had to give up his job at the observatory because each time he spotted a sparsile star he began to cry.
“What about little microphones? what if everyone swallowed them, and they played...”
– Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
This is kind of the most amazing thing ever.
...
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the...”
– Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993
I came late to Toni Morrison. So late, in fact, that I had never read anything by her until I had to teach Sula for an American Lit class I was substituting. And Sula became one of those rare, literary palate-cleansing books, a book that wipes clean what you... 