He went on eating greedily, and saying all the while: ‘How good they are! Do try one!’ It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.
Chekhov’s Gooseberries & The Student
Blue Jays
It left me wondering: If attention leads to love, then what is the best way to love a wild thing? And if all living things are connected, what is my human role? How do I play my part?
Starling Arcadia
“We cling to narratives of our association with a local ecosystem, and want to believe that we fight as hard as we can against that ecosystem’s eventual disappearance under a light-blotting alien invasion as if it were our own lives and works at stake. Part of that may be delusory – this ecosystem is not our own, has no love for us, and it is our own force that keeps it from eradicating our efforts and our lifeways.”
Why I love: William Carlos Williams (on his birthday)
His work and his career as a writer seem to embody so much of what I value in art: a desire to shape the way you see the world around you through creativity, but always grounded in an appreciation of the ordinary, the every day. His writing and his thoughts on the writers of his time are full of generosity, sincerity, and a constant questioning examination of life and art.
American Mythologies, #4: The Catcher in the Rye is a sophomoric over-rated novel about teen angst
Over the years, our ideas of what the novel is about have taken on a life of their own, so that now they seem more real in some ways than the original story, and they bear little relation to it.
Literature: Discovering Adrienne Rich
A journey into Adrienne Rich’s life and poetry.
Literature: Myshkin on reckoning up the minutes
The point is in life, in life alone–discovering it, constantly and eternally.
The Literature of Ancient Egypt
It’s so strange to read words from an almost incomprehensible time ago, when it’s hard to imagine how people lived, and find truth in them that still resonates today. I’m not always the biggest fan of human beings in general, but sometimes in the bright round mystery of our history, we’re remarkable and beautiful and persistently true.
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