Joan Didion Commencement Address at Riverside, 1975

I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.

Jenny Offill, Weather

And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished. 

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you." 

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. 

bell hooks, Thinking About Love

"One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. 

It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself."

Lisel Mueller - “Tears”

The first woman who ever wept

was appalled at what stung

her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

Saltwater. Seawater. 

How was it possible? 

Hadn't she and the man

spent many days moving

upland to where the grass

flourished, where the stream

quenched their thirst with sweet water?

How could she have carried these sea drops

as if they were precious seeds; 

where could she have stowed them? 

She looked at the watchful gazelles

and the heavy-lidded frogs;

she looked at glass-eyed birds

and nervous, black-eyed mice.

None of them wept, not even the fish

that dripped in her hands when she caught them.

Not even the man. Only she carried the sea inside her body. 

Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

She was handling it well, even though some mornings she put her bra on inside-out and it seemed too hard to fix, so she just sat there staring at the news in an inside-out bra. She was handing it just fine, even though her face had been replaced by one question mark after another question mark after another question mark, and her heart had been replaced by what happens to a bunch of seagulls when a dog comes running down the beach, and the only way it was possible to comfort herself anymore was to stand in front of the mirror and say out loud, "Cows don't know about him."

 

Charles B. Brenner & Jeffrey M. Zacks in Scientific American, December 13, 2011

So there's the thing we know best:  The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you've forgotten what you went there to do.  We all know why such forgetting happens: we didn't pay enough attention, or too much time passed, or it just wasn't important enough.  But a "completely different" idea comes from a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame.  The first part of their paper's title sums it up:  "Walking through doorways causes forgetting."

…

The doorway effect suggests that there's more to the remembering than just what you paid attention to, when it happened, and how hard you tried.  Instead, some forms of memory seem to be optimized to keep information ready-to-hand until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff.  Radvansky and colleagues call this sort of memory representation an "event model," and propose that walking through a doorway is a good time to purge your event models because whatever happened in the old room is likely to become less relevant now that you have changed venues.  That thing in the box?  Oh, that's from what I was doing before I got here; we can forget all about that. 

Jerry Seinfeld

Pain is knowledge rushing in very fast.

James Baldwin, "The Fire Next Time"

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

John Maynard Keynes

I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

Oscar Wilde, "Don't Forget to Sing in the Lifeboats"

If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.

William Blake, "Nurse's Song" - Songs of Experience

Then come home, my children, the sun has gone down,
And the dews of night arise;
Your spring & your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.

David Foster Wallace - “This Is Water”

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

Sheldon Kopp, If You Meet The Buddha on the Road, Kill Him

You are free to do whatever you want. You need only face the consequences.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the paradoxes of creative people in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discover and Invention

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also often quiet and at rest.

2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted.

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.

9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.

10. Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.

Nick Cave, asking to not be considered for MTV award, 1996

MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MY MUSE IS A DELICATE ONE AT THE BEST OF TIMES AND I FEEL THAT IT IS MY DUTY TO PROTECT HER FROM INFLUENCES THAT MAY OFFEND HER FRAGILE NATURE.

SHE COMES TO ME WITH THE GIFT OF SONG AND IN RETURN I TREAT HER WITH THE RESPECT I FEEL SHE DESERVES — IN THIS CASE THIS MEANS NOT SUBJECTING HER TO THE INDIGNITIES OF JUDGEMENT AND COMPETITION. MY MUSE IS NOT A HORSE AND I AM IN NO HORSE RACE AND IF INDEED SHE WAS, STILL I WOULD NOT HARNESS HER TO THIS TUMBREL — THIS BLOODY CART OF SEVERED HEADS AND GLITTERING PRIZES. MY MUSE MAY SPOOK! MAY BOLT! MAY ABANDON ME COMPLETELY!

Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia

The labor of writing touches every point of the body. When the book is finished, it's as if you had been rudely searched, and you desire only to regain integrity, to return to being the person you usually are, in occupations, in thoughts, in language, in relationships. The work is public: in it, there is everything we have to say.

 

Adrienne Rich, "Twenty-One Love Poems" IX

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It's not my own face I see there, but other faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever's lost there is needed by both of us—
a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,
a key… Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,
this inarticulate life. I'm waiting
for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water
for once, and show me what I can do
for you, who have often made the unnameable
nameable for others, even for me.

Dwight Morrow to his son, Dwight Jr., 1925 | The Rotarian

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There's far less competition.

F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter, 18 Apr 1938 - Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you will trust my scheme of making a mental habit of doing the hard thing first, when you are absolutely fresh, and I mean doing the hardest thing first at the exact moment that you feel yourself fit for doing anything in any particular period, morning, afternoon or evening, you will go a long way toward mastering the principle of concentration.

Djuna Barnes to Emily Coleman, 1960 - The Book of Repulsive Women and Other Poems

There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole. 

Camille Guthrie, "Diamonds"

Judith Butler, I am calling you
here in the kitchen where I'm unloading the dishwasher
performing my gender as I'm wont to do
My son yells from upstairs, How do you spell probably?
My daughter plays a game on my phone
caring for little green monster who needs a bath
I need to buy diamonds so her monster can sing
I need a sack of diamonds so I can work part-time
to take care of my kids and still eat when I'm old
performing my old lady tasks
I hope I'm yarn-bombing an embassy somewhere
Better start learning to knit or whatever
Knitting performs femininity, apparently
We need diamonds to afford my house
now that I'm a single mom
Conflict-free ones for a conflict-free life
To perform a single mom's gender
is to need a chest of gold coins
and my life is easy I am not hungry
not beaten up working three jobs taking night classes
not ill without insurance I have a good job
I'm already leveled up! Got all my privileges
I'm not floating on a raft to escape war
not having sex with soldiers for food
my children are not digging for diamonds
we're not being exploited in any way
Could Be Worse, that's a book we love to read
at bedtime, it's by James Stevenson
It is, my son & I think, the plot to most movies
It is I think the plot to most lives
I'm lucky, I get to teach you, Judith Butler
to students who eat up your words like candyhearts
who return to the arms of their friends
to dye their hair blue & fuck everyone & not shave
and make manifestos & tweet witty protests
who do drugs & sleep late & dance naked
They seem so unafraid ahistorical dreamfull
They stand outside the library smoking cigarettes
as if we're not going to die!
As if there aren't books to read!
I have the greatest job in the world!
Could be a lot worse
But I'm lonely in debt there's no one to love me
I'm feeling sorry for myself & guilty for all my luck
Mutually-contradictory states of mind
that's what Shakespeare invented, supposedly
Gender, you say, is a performance
continually created through citational repetition
Daily rituals we put on again & then again
as if we were born into a theatrical family
putting on the same play that's been going on forever
and there's no way out, so says Foucault
Michel, my turtle-necked darling, I love you
even though you make me feel imprisoned
And docile and subject to self-surveillance
Judith, Michel, I'm calling on you
I think I'm stuck in Hamlet
in the role of Queen Gertrude
but not at all royal I'm from Pittsburgh
because my son lashes out at me
He says I put my job before my kids
If I mention any man's name
he says, I hate that guy
I asked him if he thought I was pretty
He said, Eh, you're okay to good
He says he'd rather die than go to school
For his birthday he'd like a BB gun
My daughter spins in the living room to Rhianna
who has a pile of diamonds, probably
This little Ophelia talks to her Legos
and swims with waterwings
She wants to know if music is air
She says my butt jiggles when I walk
Yes, that's it, I am a single Gertrude
in a little New England hamlet
Yet there are no louche kings to marry
no murderous uncles available round these parts
Yet in the porches of my ear has poured
the poison of the wish for Reliable Love
Marriage's a prison
                        Then is the world one
What I really want is someone not a husband
to perform the male gender around my house
I need help stacking wood putting the garden to bed
for the winter I need a man in my bed
It goes way below zero in the winter round here
The garage door is broken I don't know how to fix it
Better learn to fix stuff or whatever
Like Gertrude, I am the Interpreter of the men around me
as I put snacks into little plastic bags
and so disciplined plan another playdate
I play the Assuager I'm afraid
of being left with nothing for my future
No castle no bolthole on this dirty planet
No extra-small bag of gems
I have unappreciated skills, it's true
I know how to do a close reading
I know where commas go
I can spot phallologocentrism miles away
in my cat glasses I'm laying it down
Yet I'm really terribly lonely, Judith
less lonely than Ophelia floating downstream
clutching flowers and singing sad songs
I want someone to perform love on me
Any kind of love any kind of role I don't care
but I want the real thing Real Love
to be a prisoner of Love, the songs say
and to perform all the sex acts, too
I want a long masterful performance of that
with repeat performances
            Who's there?
I am sitting here folding laundry on the couch
performing the pairing of the socks
In anxiety and pleasure, you say
And in the porches of my other ear
Pours the poison of the wish for diamonds
Could be worse       
My daughter spins her own tornado
My son builds a house of diamond blocks
I want the curtains to part now
I want to be swept away

Semi https://blinkingtwelve.blogspot.com

Margalo Goldbach's personal precept

Do what you know you should do.

Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

 

CS Lewis - "The Great Divorce"

I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.

Anne Lamott - “Almost Everything”

This is good news, that almost everyone is petty, narcissistic, secretly insecure, and in it for themselves, because a few of the funny ones may actually long to be friends with you and me. They can be real with us, the greatest relief. As we develop love, appreciation, and forgiveness for others over time, we may accidentally develop those things toward ourselves, too.

poem by GPT-3 open AI

Julia Cameron, “The Artist’s Way”

By Malcolm Venable

 SEP 17, 2021

When we do what we are meant to do … doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play.

Kanye, “Dark Fantasy”

…

Beyond the truest, hey, teacher, teacher
Tell me, how do you respond to students?
And refresh the page and restart the memory?

Respark the soul and rebuild the energy?
We stopped the ignorance, we killed the enemies
Sorry for the night demons still visit me
The plan was to drink until the pain over
But what's worse, the pain or the hangover?

…

Cleo Wade

Yell if you need to
Need if you need to

Just dont be scared
Just dont not live

While you are here

Adrienne Rich, “Power”

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power

Alex Dimitrov, from “Monday” in The New Yorker 8/31/21

…

Doesn't it bother you sometimes
what living is, what the day has turned into?
So many screens and meetings
and things to be late for.
Everyone truly deserves
a flute of champagne
for having made it this far!
Though it's such a disaster
to drink on a Monday.

…

Tomas Transtromer, “The Blue House”

…

It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.

…

Alison Bechdel in The Believer September 2021

Whenever I write anything, I somehow want to write everything.

Wendell Berry, “A Meeting”

In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: "How you been?"
He grins and looks at me.
"I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees."

Jeff Buchanan, in writers room

"I don't watch movies to read."

Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

…

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.  I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down  into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,  how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,  which is what I have been doing all day.  Tell me, what else should I have done?  Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?  Tell me, what is it you plan to do  with your one wild and precious life?

Albert Einstein, quoted by Sam Goldbach age 11.99999

I don't know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Stella Gibbons, forward to Cold Comfort Farm

Far be it from me to pretend that the following pages achieve what first burned in my mind with pure lambency ten years ago. Which of us does? But the thing's done! Ecco! E finito! And such as it is, for what it's worth, it is yours.

Edsger Dijkstra

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

Semi https://blinkingtwelve.blogspot.com

Alex Cameron 'Stranger's Kiss (Duet with Angel Olsen)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4C-Lw-YaWg

Mrs. Prouty, writing to Sylvia Plath

…the person who wants to write enough will make time. So will you. But I hope you won't have to make it at dawns, before breakfast. Someone remarked to me after reading your poem in th eAtlantic — 'How intense.' Sometime write me a little poem that isn't intense. A lamp turned too high might shatter its chimney. Please just glow sometimes.

In Katey Rich's "Titanic’s Greatest Unsolved Mystery Involves a Conga Line, P.C.P., and an Unidentified Chowder" - Vanity Fair

[James] Cameron remembers a Russian-Canadian P.A., who was working as a translator on set, summing it up succinctly: "I feel toxic and beside myself."
 

Jeff Tweedy (podcast with Ezra Klein)

Exercise the muscle that pushes the ego out of the way.

W.E.B. Du Bois letter to his daughter

The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin—the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world. 

Don't shrink from new experiences and custom. Take the cold bath bravely. Enter into the spirit of your big bedroom. Enjoy what is and not pine for what is not. 

Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself. Make yourself do unpleasant things, so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.

Brandon Taylor, “Massachusetts holy ghost”

Ask not for whom the hand claps back for it claps back at you. 

Dorothy Parker | Telegram to Robert Benchley, 31 Dec 1929

YOU COME RIGHT OVER HERE AND EXPLAIN WHY THEY ARE HAVING ANOTHER YEAR

Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool

THE POOL PLAYERS. 
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Sharon Olds

I was a late bloomer.
But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Rosemary Hill reviewing Mark Dery’s biography of Edward Gorey

Some fans who wrote to him got a postcard saying 'You've written to me to no avail/Because I never read my mail'; others didn't. When he read that Carol Burnett answered all her fan letters he was aghast. 'This isn't possible! Are you insane? Have you no priorities?!'

Adrienne Rich, “Transcendental Etudes”

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
–And in fact we can't live like that: we take on
everything at once before we've even begun
to read or mark time, we're forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.