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Who you are as a poet
Guthrie Martin agrees. “So many poets I know are so concerned with MFAs and prizes and getting published, making their mark,” she said. “For me, having who you are as a poet live on isn’t about any particular poem you write or your body of work. It’s about how you inspire other people to be [...]
Where trivia and gossip pass for news…
A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying now. We will either wake from our state of induced childishness, one where trivia and gossip pass for news and information, one where our goal is not justice but an elusive and unattainable happiness, to confront the stark limitations before us, [...]
Also posted in Anthropology, Feature, Inverted Commas, Language, Politics Tagged consciousness, media, news, Politics, psychology
It’s time to embrace American royalty by Glenn Greenwald
It’s time to embrace American royalty | Glenn Greenwald
Frances Baskerville, Singing Psychic
Vital information about angels , aliens and the grassy knoll, all cleverly disguised as incredibly bad pop music.http://tinyurl.com/kv2bgd (via The Dark Engine)
McLuhan’s Wake
So what I end up saying… is…take control of your entire reality… your media, your mythic life…your practical brain are the product of what you have made it to be…or have, quite willingly, accepted programs from others. And again, don’t forget about those cute feedback loops…via McLuhan’s Wake
Also posted in Feature, Technology Tagged communication, consciousness, media, mythology, Philosophy
Willie Nelson in Jazz Country
“One of the big things that caught my attention was after he moved to Nashville in the ’60s, he and another Texan, Waylon Jennings, eventually told the Nashville people to go to hell, and they left,” says Sample, who will join Nelson in performances of the “American Classic” material in Chicago on Sept. 27 and [...]
Also posted in Feature, Music Tagged jazz, Music, willie nelson
Inverted Commas: Samuel Butler
Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. – Samuel Butler
Also posted in Feature, Inverted Commas Tagged Inverted Commas
J.G. Ballard’s Shanghai
J.G. Ballard’s experience of Shanghai was, he said, closer to the normal lives of the majority of people in the 20th century than most realize…more | via Arts & Letters Daily
Also posted in Feature, Literature Tagged Literature
Can Jazz Be Saved?
“By the same token, jazz musicians who want to keep their own equally beautiful music alive and well have got to start thinking hard about how to pitch it to young listeners—not next month, not next week, but right now.” - Terry Teachout | Wall Street Journal
JG Ballard and the lost English avant garde
“That he was a visionary is beyond question. Countless commentators have mentioned his acute insight into the psychopathology of our time and place: the world of mass media, celebrity, instant communications, electronic iconography, narcissism on a spectacular scale; the world of airport lounges, shopping malls and motorways, of pampered Western communities and endless suburbia; and [...]
Also posted in Feature, Inverted Commas, Literature Tagged ballard, Inverted Commas, Literature
Legalization and Regulation
Marijuana prohibition currently costs American taxpayers almost $42 billion a year. Compare this negative cash flow to the projected tax benefits of legalization – between $2.4 and $6.2 billion annually – and it becomes obvious why Milton Friedman and more than 500 other respected economists publicly support the legalization of marijuana. | via Reality Catcher
Also posted in Agriculture, Politics Tagged Business, economics, legalization, marijuana, Politics
Inventing a new poetry
The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. ~ Raoul Vaneigem
Also posted in Art, Business, Inverted Commas, Philosophy, Politics Tagged Inverted Commas
Understanding Duchamp
Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp takes you on a journey through the art and ideas of the most influential artist of the 20th century. Animations and interactivity make ideas come alive with an immediacy that only multimedia can provide: you can spin the Bicycle Wheel, shake With Hidden Noise, and manipulate the elaborate allegorical automata of The Bride Stripped Bare by [...]
Also posted in Art Tagged animation, Art, interactive
The relationship between textiles and computers is explicit
The relationship between textiles and computers is explicit – the punched paper cards used to program early computers are direct descendents of similar cards used to program Jacquard looms during the height of the industrial revolution, More so terms like ‘interlaced’ (among other synonyms) which describe the way pixels are weaved onto the screen, only [...]
Also posted in Inverted Commas, Science, Technology Tagged nature, Technology
Poetry Animations
Poetry Animations via YouTube
They don’t count and they have no number words
A small group of hunter/gatherers living in the Amazon rain forest is overturning some fundamental assumptions about the mind. Although linguists have long believed that counting and having words for numbers are basic, if not innate, to human cognition, the Pirahã people in Brazil have no words to express numerical concepts such as “one,” “two,” [...]
Also posted in Anthropology, Language, Science Tagged cognition, linguistics, Word
Fake Eyelash Alphabet
Fake eyelash alphabet. Just when you think people can’t come up with weirder things… via I Love Typography
Also posted in Art, Design Tagged typography
Christoph Niemann Napkin Illustrations
Illustrator Christoph Niemann blogs, with quirky napkin illustrations, about a passion we all share: coffee . via NYT| Quipsologies
Also posted in Art Tagged coffee, illustration
The Human Typewriter Project
The Human Typewriter Project. Exactly what you think it is. via Quipsologies
Also posted in Art, Literature Tagged typewriter, typography, writing
50 Criterion Collection DVD Covers
Fifty hand-picked covers from the Criterion collection, which does its own original designs, miles apart from the commercial DVD covers. via Kottke via Quipsologies
The Sucker Bait Called Hope
Consequently, we’ve not had universal health care for the common good. We have never enjoyed the benefit of universal higher education, because collectively we cannot agree that it is in the common good for all citizens to be equally free from ignorance. We pay the price of that at every turn … in the lack [...]
Also posted in Business, Politics Tagged branding, economics, education, health care, marketing 2 Comments
I’d rather write bad
I wrote bad because writing good definitely did me no good. (Dorothy Porter, Australian Humanities Review)
Since when do words belong to anybody?
“The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told the poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Writers don’t own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? ‘Your very own words,’ indeed! And who are you?” (‘Cut-Ups [...]
Some Thoughts about Remaking Language
Graffiti, as it has evolved in the last 30 years or so, is not living up to its potential. Instead of aggressively reproducing its own internal code like a machine that has gone out of control and keeps banging its head into the same wall over and over again, the graffiti community should break out [...]
Also posted in Language Tagged graffiti, street art
Final Cut: The Selection Process for Break, Blow, Burn
For decades, poetry has been a way of losing money for trade publishers. Then Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn became a hit. Why? via Arion | Arts & Letters Daily
Also posted in Books, Poetry Tagged paglia, publishing
The Uses of Adversity
It’s one thing to argue that being an outsider can be strategically useful. But Andrew Carnegie went farther. He believed that poverty provided a better preparation for success than wealth did; that, at root, compensating for disadvantage was more useful, developmentally, than capitalizing on advantage. via Malcolm Gladwell | The New Yorker
Kubrick on education
“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” - Stanley Kubrick via [...]
Also posted in Film, Inverted Commas Tagged education, quotes
Like Mother, Like Son
Did you know that William S. Burroughs’ mother was an author too? Graham Rae furnishes an inspired analysis of Laura Lee Burroughs’ writings on the art of flower arranging. The three tomes, sponsored by Coke (the company, not the drug), offer glimpses into her and therefore her son’s world. Read Like Mother, Like Son and [...]
Also posted in Art, Literature Tagged Books, flower arranging, Laura Lee, William Burroughs
On or off the cushion
The direct recognition of your true nature is available in every instant, on or off the cushion, whether you meditate or not… via Pointing to the Moon
Also posted in Inverted Commas, Philosophy Tagged awareness, consciousness, meditation
Poetry Brothel Seducing Many New Yorkers
With dimmed lights, lace, and masks, the Poetry Brothel is anything but a conventional poetry reading, and maybe that’s why it seducing so many New Yorkers. NY1′s Stephanie Simon filed the following report on a new kind of poetry party that is downright risqué. via NY1
Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism
I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet. No one can dispute the scale or reality of this vast connectivity. What’s uncertain is, what is it? Is this global web of computers, [...]
Also posted in Science, Technology Tagged environment, Social Sciences, Superorganism
remix my lit