December 2009
13 posts
“Gift labor requires the kind of emotional or spiritual commitment that precludes...”
– Lewis Hyde—The Gift
“Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one...”
– Alice Munro
No Problem Here : The Literary Review of Canada
Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment →
astonishing. j’adore.
marriage
I just finished reading the New York Magazine cover article on marriage, which I don’t recommend. In fact it was pretty terrible. It had one good passage, toward the end:
“In psychiatry, the term “good-enough mother” describes the parent who loves her child well enough for him to grow into an emotionally healthy adult. The goal is mental health, defined as the fortitude and...
lemons
“We know what a great painting looks like while we are looking at one. Turning away, we don’t exactly forget, but our recall of the experience—how we felt, looking—starts to edit what we saw. Some details and qualities are magnified; others evanesce. With time, the picture becomes ever more ours and less the painter’s.”
Peter Schjeldahl
Can Poetry Matter?
Heart feels the time has come to compose lyric poetry. No more storytelling for him. Oh, Moon, Heart writes, sad wafer of the heart’s distress. And then: Oh, Moon, bright cracker of the heart’s pleasure. Which is it, is the moon happy or sad, cracker or wafer? He looks from the window but the night is overcast. Oh, Cloud, he writes, moody veil of the Moon’s distress. And then,...
