‘Organizing’ is really just an ugly way of saying ‘drawing connections’.
Justin Wehr. Currently enjoying my masculine booklet. Get’em while they’re hot.
Tag: quotes
It takes no work to fall in love. It takes real work to rise to a real and lasting friendship.
Andrew Sullivan. I find so much good stuff in Ben Casnocha’s Delicious feed.
The fact that a place is out of fashion, forgotten or not yet on the map doesn’t make it less interesting, just more itself.
Paul Theroux. Reminds me of one of my early tumble quotes:
Good travel writing contends honestly and openly with presumptions of who is traveling and why… and it does not treat local people as though their lives were just incidental, conveniently or inconveniently producing conditions for others’ escapism.
Related: authenticity, cultural neutrality.
What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking… All of this is really American.
Andy Warhol. (via) See also Warren Buffett on our similar American lives. Also, I love my America tag.
People just wait for you to grow up and do the right thing. They’re just waiting for you to participate in the improvement of your life as a human being. When are you going to do it?
The greatest audience comment ever recorded is, I think, a remark overheard at a performance of Ernst Krenek’s Second Piano Concerto at the Boston Symphony in 1938. A Boston matriarch responded to Krenek’s twelve-tone discourse by saying, ‘Conditions in Europe must be dreadful.’
I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly.
This just in: Neuroimaging researchers discover the area of the brain responsible for overinterpreting scientific results.
@MattTheGr8. My previous post made me remember this. Genius.
It might reasonably be said that all art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.
You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing. That is my subject.
Carolyn Kizer (via theparisreview)
IT’S AMAZING WHAT SOME SLEEP WILL DO FO A MUTHA FUKA!!
@LIL JON. Yep.
Before we learned to tell stories, we learned to read them. In other words, we learned to track. The first letter of the first word of the first recorded story was written–“printed”–not by us, but by an animal. These signs and symbols left in mud, sand, leaves, and snow represent proto-alphabets. Often smeared, fragmented, and confused by weather, time, and other animals, these cryptograms were life-and-death exercises in abstract thinking. […] The notion that it was animals who taught us to read may seem counterintuitive, but listening to skilled hunters analyze tiger sign is not that different from listening to literature majors deconstruct a short story. Both are sorting through minutiae, down to the specific placement and inflection of individual elements, in order to determine motive, subtext, and narrative arc.
John Vaillant in his excellent book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. Great storytelling and lots to learn about tigers and Russia. I also liked this bit:
Evidence suggests that the reason tigers and their kind continue to capture our attention is because, over time, this has proven the most effective way to prevent them from capturing us. Maybe this is why it is impossible not to wonder what Markov and Khomenko saw and felt in their last moments–an experience so aberrant and alien to us, and yet strangely, deeply familiar: there is a part of us that still needs to know.
When I was younger I developed what I called the Baseball Theory of life. At that point the average life expectancy was something like 72 years. If you divide that by nine, it’s eight years an inning. Once you turn 32 you’re in the top of the fifth inning. At 36 you’re in the bottom of the fifth. It’s an official game at that point. You can’t mess around any more.
Chris Jones of Esquire (via dontdrinkfromthecarton)
If you inspire people to make things, it just makes them love you all the more.
I have one of those food-chopper brains that nothing comes out of the way it comes in.
The Baroque is that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its possibilities and borders on its own caricature.
My strategy can be reduced to two rules: 1) Find a way to make it fun and 2) If that fails, find a way to do something else.
Self-control is really just the art of making the future bigger.
I think painters and sculptors react to music, more naively, in a sense, because their politics are a lot different from our politics. It’s very hard for one composer to listen to another composer without somehow bringing his own mind-set to the music he’s listening to. It’s not that it’s impossible. And that’s only natural, whereas someone in another art field is going to listen to it very naively, in a sense (you hope), and that’s a worthwhile, unbiased opinion. Ultimately, it’s a naive opinion that rules the roost.
Mark Larson 