It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies…

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It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

David Foster Wallace, quoted in Greg Carlisle’s Liverpool Keynote Address on David Foster Wallace - Consider David Foster Wallace Conference, University of Liverpool, July 29-30, 2009

William Shatner Reads Palin’s Speech as Poetry

video
rcoleman:

William Shatner reads Palin’s speech as poetry (via @davehyndman):

And getting up here I say it is the best road trip in America soaring through nature’s finest show. Denali, the great one, soaring under the midnight sun. And then the extremes. In the winter time it’s the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty, the cold though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs?
And then in the summertime such extreme summertime about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter than just some months ago, than just some months from now, with fireweed blooming along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing and carving and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins. It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future.

See also the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld and the Clinton/Lewinsky Poetry Under Oath.

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

All these different kinds of fantastic music you hear today - course it’s all…

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All these different kinds of fantastic music you hear today - course it’s all guitars now - used to hear that way back in the old sanctified churches where the sisters used to shout till their petticoats fell down. There ain’t nothing new. Old soup used over.

The primary source is the book Louis Armstrong: A Self Portrait, but I first read it yesterday in the excellent-so-far How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music.