Fighting our way out

“When we read, we start at the beginning and continue until we reach the end. When we write, we start in the middle and fight our way out.”
– Vickie Karp

“No one is asking, let alone demanding, that you write. The world is not waiting with bated breath for your article or book. Whether or not you get a single word on paper, the sun will rise, the earth will spin, the universe will expand. Writing is forever and always a choice — your choice.”
– Beth Mende Conny

From http://kprichardson.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/what-the-best-college-teachers-do-epilogue/

What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain

Epilogue: What can we learn from them?

1. Part of being a good teacher is knowing that you always have something new to learn–not so much about teaching techniques but about these particular students at this particular time and their particular sets of aspirations, confusions, misconceptions, and ignorance.

Good teaching is not just a matter of technique. The best teaching is often both and intellectual creation and a performing art.

From Marie Curie

“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”

Words To Remember Over The Holidays

1 hour ago by alexodom.

A bit on memoir from the wonderful and painfully missed Nuala O’Faolain

Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written… I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place.

For the mother and father who read to me, for the library card I remember signing the very first time before I could even write my last name, for the people I’ve met who loved books as much I do, for the places I’ve been and continue to go in the pages of a book. Nothing more magical than a library.

In the Library
by Charles Simic

for Octavio

There’s a book called
“A Dictionary of Angels.”
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

From Jeanette Winerson

Language is what stops the heart exploding.

Read the whole essay at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/ts-eliot-festival-donmar-jeanette-winterson

What Keeps Mankind Alive :
Performed by Tom Waits
(Weill/Brecht)

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that’s where it begins

You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
What keeps mankind alive?

What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
And for once you must try not to shriek the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts

From the late Studs Terkel

“Take it easy, but take it.”

Amen to that.

From “Another and Another Before That: Some Thoughts on Reading”
by Carl Phillips

One way to look at reading: as the lifelong construction of a map by which to trace and plumb what it has ever meant to be in the world, and by which to gain perspective on that other, ongoing map—the one that marks our own passage through the world as we both find and make it.

If all we can ever know comes filtered through the lens of our own experience, and if we are readers, some part of our very selves will be the result of what we have read—this is obvious enough. Good writers not only have read widely and deeply, but they continue to do so—not in order to be better writers, but because for them the act of reading is as inseparable from living as writing is.

As for the fear that by reading the great work that has come before one’s original voice will either be influenced away from itself or overwhelmed into utter silence: an original voice can perhaps half willingly be seduced; it is rarely mastered.

The whole essay can be read at http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19238

Lest we forget: – The United States Constitution ©1791. All Rights Reserved

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Soren Kierkegaard

Life must be understood backwards; but… it must be lived forward.”

From Mother Teresa

There is no great difference in the reality of one country or another, because it is always people you meet everywhere. They may look different or be dressed differently, or may have a different education or position. But they are all the same. They are all people to be loved. They are all hungry for love.

From Wallace Stevens

Be thou the voice, not you.

blessing the boats
by Lucille Clifton

(at St. Mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

From Lucy Grealy

“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people.”

From Mad Men “The Jet Set” 2008

Roger Sterling (John Slattery) to Duck Phillips (Mark Moses):
“Everyone thinks you’re a fine fella, but if I were you, I’d go out there and make rain.”

In times of crisis, we learn, and love wins.

What Work Is
by Phillip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is–if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

From Shakespeare’s King Richard II, Act I, Scene I, Line 18283

Mine honor is my life; both grow in one; Take honor from me, and my life is done.

From George Orwell

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

From Andre Schriffin, “The Business of Books” Verso

If the domain of ideas is surrendered to those who want to make the most money, then the debate which is so essential to a functioning democracy will not take place.

From Voltaire

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.

In a Station of the Metro
by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

I just can’t write, not now. Too much weight and worry, drifts of sadness. I’ll let others who do it so much better lead me now.

Williams has always brought me peace.

Peace on Earth
by William Carlos Williams

The Archer is wake!
The Swan is flying!
Gold against blue
An Arrow is lying.
There is hunting in heaven—
Sleep safe till tomorrow.

The Bears are abroad!
The Eagle is screaming!
Gold against blue
Their eyes are gleaming!
Sleep!
Sleep safe till tomorrow.

The Sisters lie
With their arms intertwining;
Gold against blue
Their hair is shining!
The Serpent writhes!
Orion is listening!
Gold against blue
His sword is glistening!
Sleep!
There is hunting in heaven—
Sleep safe till tomorrow.

From Laurie Sheck’s Notebook

The light of the world we live in: neon, frenzied, traffic lights, marquee lights, ambulance light, high crime lights, television screens, their flickering, and strobe lights, headlights. This quickness.
_________________

If one had no belief in human goodness, in tenderness, or any hope for it, could one feel terror?
_________________

If I am watching the 11 o’clock news and there is a person on the screen suffering, mutilated, grieving, whatever, and that person doesn’t feel real to me, or only real in the most cursory and fleeting of ways, aren’t I participating in the violation and degradation of that person? Poetry is subversive in that it stands in opposition to vicarious, distanced watching, to spectatorship and morbid curiosity.

From The Wire

Omar Little (Michael Kenneth Wiliams):