H22020 Reading Diary
Scribbledehobble
I keep a notebook to collect items of interest and inspiration derived from my reading & listening. This is a curated collection of the best bits, updated monthly.
December 2020
“Gordon Lish — the enormously influential editor, writer, and teacher whom I mentioned earlier — instructed his students in a poetics of the sentence that emphasized what he called consecution: a recursive procedure by which one word pursues itself into its successor by discharging something from deep within itself into what follows. The discharge can take many forms and often produces startling outcomes, such as when Christine Schutt, in ‘The Summer after Barbara Claffey,’ is seeking the inevitable adjective to insert into the final slot in the sentence ‘Here is the house at night, lit up tall and ______.’ What she winds up doing is literally dragging forward the previous adjective, tall, and using it as the base on which further letters can be erected. The result is the astounding, perfect tallowy — the sort of adjective she never could have arrived at if she had turned a synonymicon upside down in search of words that capture the quality of light.” — Gary Lutz, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” The Believer, January 1st, 2009 | Issue Fifty-Nine
***
Are We There Yet? The Apocalypse and Your Poems with Sally Ball
The world seems to have gone so haywire that we may feel remote from certain kinds of subjects and driven forward into others: how can we think about 2030 when people are still getting sick or facing complications from COVID or families are separated in detention camps or another city is rocked by an unnecessary and fatal shooting? How can we think about anything that isn’t Everything? This is a class about intimacy and particularity in the face of overwhelm. What routes into material do poets have, where do the poetries of contemplation and outcry meet? And why are we doing it at all, writing poems? For whom?
***
I think the kind of writing and thinking people do on the internet — on news websites, on social media, in email newsletters — is like campfire light, or the light of an incandescent bulb. And that’s great! Who doesn’t like a campfire? Who doesn’t want a light in their kitchen?
That kind of light blooms wide… and fades fast.
Collimated light is different. It doesn’t scatter and diffuse into darkness.
[…]
A book is a laser beam.
[…]
There is a sense I think a lot of people share: that their contributions to social media, even if they are bit-by-bit rewarding, don’t really add up to much. A sense of all those words just… burning away, like morning mist over a pond. And: I think that sense is correct!
Collimation is available whenever you sit down to clarify your intentions and organize your material, in any medium, including, like, wood. I don’t know that the internet resists these processes, exactly… but it sure does reward the bonfires.— Robin Sloan, The Society of the Double Dagger, December 23
***
“Starting in 2017, Apple modified its iOS software at China’s behest so that devices sold on mainland China would not display the Taiwanese flag emoji (🇹🇼). At the time of writing, as protests against Chinese rule rock Hong Kong, ‘🇹🇼’ has disappeared from onscreen keyboards there, too.” — Keith Houston, The Future of Text
***
“We will never know all the things other people worry about.” — Ann Patchett, “These Precious Days,” Harper’s, January 2021 issue
***
Sturm und Drang | ˌSHto͝orm o͝on(d) ˈdraNG | (n.)—a literary and artistic movement in Germany in the late 18th century, influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and characterized by the expression of emotional unrest and a rejection of neoclassical literary norms. :: German, literally ‘storm and stress.’
***
“What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning ‘placed on top,’ ‘added,’ ‘appended,’ ‘imported,’ ‘foreign.’ Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.” — Anne Carson, The Autobiography of Red, p. 4
November 2020
Michelle was hardly oblivious to what was happening. At first she simply ignored the fuss. She stopped watching political news shows and waved off all the overeager questions from friends and co-workers about whether I planned to run. When one evening at home I mentioned the conversation I’d had with Harry, she just shrugged, and I did not press the issue.
As the summer wore on though, the chatter began to seep through the cracks and crevices of our home life. Our evenings and weekends appeared normal so long as Malia and Sasha were swirling about, but I felt the tension whenever Michelle and I were alone. Finally, one night after the girls were asleep, I came into the den where she was watching TV and muted the sound.
“You know I didn’t plan any of this,” I said, sitting down next to her on the couch.
Michelle stared at the silent screen. “I know,” she said.
“I realize we’ve barely had time to catch our breath. And until a few months ago, the idea of me running seemed crazy.”
“Yep.”
“But given everything that’s happened, I feel like we have to give the idea a serious look. I’ve asked the team to put together a presentation. What a campaign schedule would look like. Whether we could win. How it might affect the family. I mean, if we were ever going to do this—”
Michelle cut me off, her voice choked with emotion.
“Did you say we?” she said. “You mean you, Barack. Not we. This is your thing. I’ve supported you the whole time, because I believe in you, even though I hate politics. I hate the way it exposes our family. You know that. And now, finally, we have some stability … even if it’s still not normal, not the way I’d choose for us to live … and now you tell me you’re going to run for president?”
I reached for her hand. “I didn’t say I am running, honey. I just said we can’t dismiss the possibility. But I can only consider it if you’re on board.” I paused, seeing that none of her anger was dissipating. “If you don’t think we should, then we won’t. Simple as that. You get the final say.”
Michelle lifted her eyebrows as if to suggest she didn’t believe me. “If that’s really true, then the answer is no,” she said. “I don’t want you to run for president, at least not now.” She gave me a hard look and got up from the couch. “God, Barack … When is it going to be enough?”
Before I could answer, she’d gone into the bedroom and closed the door.
[…]
Why would I put her through this? Was it just vanity? Or perhaps something darker—a raw hunger, a blind ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of service?
— Barack Obama, A Promised Land, pp. 69–71
***
“I doubled the orange rind and the nuts both. This consistent with a life given to excess.” — F. Carl, comment on a NYT Cooking Cranberry Nut Bread recipe, 3 years ago
***
“Tomorrow the air all around the country will be full of the scent of abundance, or at any rate, that is what we aspire to.” — Adrienne Celt, Love Among the Lampreys, Thanksgiving Eve 2020
***
“Five years after Colbert bonded with Biden, that worldview, and that understanding of loss, helped define Biden’s campaign, as well as Colbert’s show. Empathy and intelligence were the sling and stone the host used against Trump’s Goliath-size spiritual vacancies: ‘It’s the Christianness of it, but it’s also the Catholicness of it. Joe matches the moment because the moment is about loss. But loss is not the same thing as defeat.’” — “‘Look At What We Love. It’s on Fire’: Stephen Colbert on Trump Trauma, Leadership, and Loss,” by Joe Hagan, Vanity Fair, Holiday 2020 Issue
October 2020
dybbuk dyb·buk | \ ˈdi-bək (n.) — a wandering soul believed in Jewish folklore to enter and control a living body until exorcised by a religious rite
***
Delusion is a perfect state. It is not an error; it cannot be confused with a mistake, which is involuntary. It is a deliberate construction conceived to deceive the very person who has constructed it. A pure state, maybe the purest of all the states that exist. Delusion, like a private novel, like a future autobiography. — Ricardo Piglia, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years, p. 13
***
When I was younger, I could be an iconoclast. And as I got older, I started to have empathy. And it’s hard to tear down people and make fun of people because you kind of feel bad about it. So it’s harder for me to be an iconoclast or, you know, a critic now than it used to be. — Steve Martin, The New Yorker Festival 10/07/20
***
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt officially instituted Columbus Day in 1934, but the idea for the holiday rose in the 1920s, when the Knights of Columbus tried to undercut the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan by emphasizing the role minorities had played in America. In the early 1920s, the organization published three books in a “Knights of Columbus Racial Contributions” series, including The Gift of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois. They celebrated the contributions of immigrants, especially Catholic immigrants, to America with parades honoring Christopher Columbus. The Knights of Columbus were determined to reinforce the idea that America must not be a land of white Protestant supremacy.
***
“We put up statues and celebrate holidays to honor figures from the past who embody some quality we admire. But as society changes, the qualities we care about shift. In the 1920s, Columbus mattered to Americans who opposed the Ku Klux Klan because he represented a multicultural society. Now, though, he represents the devastation of America’s indigenous people at the hands of European colonists who brought to North America and South America germs and a fever for gold and God. It is not ‘radical activism’ to want to commemorate a different set of values than we held in the 1920s.” — Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American, 10/12/20
***
“Toni Morrison had a very strong feeling about [the responsibilities that writers have to the real people in their lives]. She said a person has a copyright on their own life, and it shouldn’t be available to other people for fiction. She didn’t do it, she would never do it.” — Sigrid Nunez, The Creative Independent, 10/12/20
***
“In the past, hope was mostly a feeling for me, something that came unbidden from within. Now, hope is more of a verb, more of an action that I take with my hands, sending texts, writing letters, putting seeds into the ground. So many seeds, in so many places, with the hope that some will grow.” — Adrienne Celt, Love Among the Lampreys
***
🎧
“Everyone will eat a meal relatively soon and can immediately participate in the reversal of climate change.” — Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather, (19:10, II. How to Prevent the Greatest Dying)
***
Let me take a shot in the dark: Have you ever read the cultural critic Raymond Williams?
I don’t think so.
He had this idea of how every era has what he called a structure of feeling, which is basically the way that people experience the times in which they live. And in the past you’ve written about how J.F.K.’s assassination and 9/11 fundamentally altered our understanding of the world. Will the pandemic change our structure of feeling?
Absolutely. The question is how will it change? When we are finally able to live, so to speak, normally again, which is probably a long way off, how will we think back upon the pandemic? Are we going to continue to be affected by it? I think we have to be in some way. We may feel enormous relief, but for many people, it’s going to be difficult to return to what we might term as ordinary. I don’t know how that’s going to feel. I hope that it’s mainly a sense of rediscovered freedoms. You want to go to a movie. You want to go to a museum and eat in a restaurant. Those ordinary things are going to seem extraordinary.
— NYT: David Marchese interviews Don DeLillo, Oct 11 2020
September 2020
“The Lying Life of Adults is not an epic, a fable, or a romance like the novels Giovanna’s mother proofreads. It is not a bildungsroman or Künstlerroman in the way the quartet is. It is a novel of disillusionment, as the literary critic Georg Lukács once described the category: a novel that strips away its young protagonist’s major social relationships to elevate her interiority to ‘the status of a completely independent world.’ From its origins in Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, the genre explores an individual’s struggle to adapt private fantasies and illusions to an outer world hostile to them. The word Ferrante uses to describe this feeling of discordance is estraneità: ‘extraneousness,’ ‘noninvolvement,’ or, as Ann Goldstein beautifully translates it, ‘estrangement.’” — Merve Emre, The Atlantic
***
“We are in the middle and the end is not in sight. We are waiting, which is among most people’s least favorite thing to do, when it means noticing that you have taken up residence in not knowing. We are in terra incognita, which is where we always are anyway, but usually we have a milder case of it and can make our pronouncements and stumble along.” — Rebecca Solnit
***
“No one knows what they’re breathing these days. We don’t know, breath to breath, quite how to keep safe.” — Adrienne Celt, Love Among the Lampreys
***
“If Donald Trump possessed a soul, a trace of conscience or character, he would resign the Presidency. He will not resign the Presidency.”
[…]
“It is a painful thing to say, but the evidence assaults us daily: Trump is a miserable human being.” — David Remnick, “Bob Woodward on a Nightmare Presidency,” The New Yorker, September 10, 2020
***
“In the past month, new rituals have emerged, some more ceremonial than others, first in response to the pandemic — using masks, gloves, wipes, alcoholic gels and tonics — and now to the fires. The rituals have begun converging. We now monitor the air-quality index, consulting it like the weather, multiple times a day.” — Anna Wiener, California Chronicles: “The Crisis in the Skies of San Francisco,” The New Yorker, September 11, 2020
***
“American exceptionalism was founded on cooperation — between the rich and the poor, between the governors and the governed. From the birth of the nation, the unity across economic classes and different regions was a marvel for European observers, such as St. John de Crèvecoeur and Alexis de Tocqueville. This cooperative spirit unraveled in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to the first ‘Age of Discord’ in American history. It was reforged during the New Deal as an unwritten but very real social contract between government, business and workers, leading to another age of prosperity and cooperation in postwar America. But since the 1970s, that contract has unraveled, in favor of a contract between government and business that has underfunded public services but generously rewarded capital gains and corporate profits.
While this new neoliberal contract has, in some periods, produced economic growth and gains in employment, growth has generally been slower and far more unequal than it was in the first three postwar decades. In the last twenty years, real median household income has stagnated, while the loss of high-paying blue-collar jobs to technology and globalization has meant a decline in real wages for many workers, especially less educated men.
As a result, American politics has fallen into a pattern that is characteristic of many developing countries, where one portion of the elite seeks to win support from the working classes not by sharing the wealth or by expanding public services and making sacrifices to increase the common good, but by persuading the working classes that they are beset by enemies who hate them (liberal elites, minorities, illegal immigrants) and want to take away what little they have. This pattern builds polarization and distrust and is strongly associated with civil conflict, violence and democratic decline.” — Jack A. Goldstone & Peter Turchin, Noēma Magazine
***
“…the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space”. — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
***
“Is social media actually making us better informed? Maybe a better question to ask is: How can social media systems better incentivize informedness?” — Julie Zhukov, The Looking Glass
***
“Much of early life seems to be about isolating our strengths and leaning into them. It’s increasingly difficult as we get older to voluntarily become a novice again. The ego simply doesn’t like to be humbled. But there’s also a kind of grace in being a mistake-prone beginner.” — Josh Radnor, Grace of the Beginner
***
“I mentioned to my friend Brenda once how silly I felt picking up the guitar at forty-two and she said the very best thing she possibly could have said in response. ‘But just think: when you’re seventy-two you’ll have been playing for thirty years.’” — Josh Radnor, Grace of the Beginner
***
THE MAN IN BOGOTA
“The police and emergency service people fail to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains on the ledge — though not, she threatens, for long.
“I imagine that I am the one who must talk the woman down. I see it, and it happens like this.
“I tell the woman about a man in Bogota. He was a wealthy man, an industrialist who was kidnapped and held for ransom. It was not a TV drama; his wife could not call the bank and, in twenty-four hours, have one million dollars. It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive.
“Listen to this, I tell the woman on the ledge. His captors made him quit smoking. They changed his diet and made him exercise every day. They held him that way for three months.
“When the ransom was paid and the man was released, his doctor looked him over. He found the man to be in excellent health. I tell the woman what the doctor said then — that the kidnap was the best thing to happen to that man.
“Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.” — Amy Hempel
***
“All those miles and days had been across a houseless, speechless desolation: rock, ice, sky, and silence: nothing else, for eighty-one days, except each other.
the standout feature is its series of colons, which for me creates a kind of near-equivalency, or else a series of ratios between three distinct descriptions of the crossing of the Ice, so that the sentence’s logic offers three units that progress, for me, sum up the crossing of the Gobrin glacier. According to Genly, it was:
a houseless, speechless desolation OR MORE CONCRETELY rock, ice, sky, and silence OR MORE EMOTIONALLY nothing, for eighty-one days, except each other.
If I’d written that sentence myself, at the height of my minimalist-trained McCarthy worship, I might have left out Le Guin’s two colons, losing much of the logic even as I kept the images:
All those miles and days had been across a houseless and speechless desolation of rock and ice, sky and silence. Nothing else for eighty-one days except one another.
My version is clearly inferior, to both my ear and my intellect, as I’ve removed a lot of Le Guin’s poetry, as well as her suggestion of a thought turning and progressing that the colons give the original. In fact, my training in punctuation, if adhered to too closely, would have prevented me from even thinking the thoughts she so precisely renders onto the page, much less writing them so well.”
— Writing Exercises from Matt Bell, Exercise #8: Punctuation as Thought
***
🎧
“Our alarm systems are not built for conceptual threats.” — Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather (43:29, I. Unbelievable)
August 2020
“The sound of the respirator function of [Darth] Vader’s mask was created by Ben Burtt using modified recordings of scuba breathing apparatus used by divers. The sound effect is trademarked in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office under Trademark #77419252 and is officially described in the documentation as ‘The sound of rhythmic mechanical human breathing created by breathing through a scuba tank regulator.’”
***
“The ‘you’ that the narrator in The Remains of the Day, for instance, addresses — that ‘you’ isn’t the reader. In all these books, I like the idea of the narrator addressing a ‘you’ because their perspective is so small that they can’t imagine they’re addressing anybody outside of their very small world. And so: Stevens is a butler; the ‘you’ he addresses is another butler, or at least another house servant or some sort who lives in this world of serving in country houses. What the reader is doing is kind of eavesdropping on this conversation between this butler and another butler. That’s the effect I want to give.” — Kazuo Ishiguro
***
“No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a ‘natural ability’ at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding The WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, ‘I don’t take any responsibility at all.” — Ed Yong, “How Did It Come to This?” The Atlantic, August 3, 2020
***
“I had a writing teacher who helped me get to the heart of tension years ago and I want to share her simple approach for infusing tension into your stories. She explained to me that every story and every scene in every story needed to have three elements in order to produce conflict and therefore interest.
Those three things: Want, Because, But.
When we’re talking about stories, this usually refers to your heroine. They need to want something; they need a reason for wanting it; and there needs to be an obstacle that makes achieving it difficult and therefore interesting.” — Chantaie Allick, Adventures in Storytelling
***
🎧
Samuel Beckett — In Our Time, BBC Radio 4
(22:09)
“I think one of the reasons for the success of [Waiting for Godot] is that this is written at a moment at which big historical things are — as they do today — are impacting on ordinary people’s lives and this is a play about what ordinary people do in the face of those enormously world-historical kinds of suffering. How do they pass the time?” — Steven Connor, Professor of English at the University of Cambridge
(37:31)
“At the end of Waiting for Godot, one of the character’s, Estragon’s, trousers fall down because he takes the bit of rope out to hang themselves. And Beckett heard the trousers in the production — he wasn’t there for this in Paris — the trousers hadn’t fallen all the way down and he’s anguished by this. He writes a letter saying, ‘It’s imperative the trousers must fall down to the ankles!’ And this was the way in which he directed his plays: what mattered were the details.” — Steven Connor
***
“William Vollmann would say he likes to go back and work a sentence over until it explodes like a kernel of popcorn. You have the kernel and when the popcorn pops it has all these ridges and surfaces to it that weren’t there until the proper amount of pressure and heat was applied.” — Blake Butler
***
titration (n.) ti·tra·tion | \ tī-ˈtrā-shən — : a method or process of determining the concentration of a dissolved substance in terms of the smallest amount of reagent of known concentration required to bring about a given effect in reaction with a known volume of the test solution
***
For context, the USPS handles almost half of the world’s total mail and delivers more than the top private carriers do in aggregate, annually, in just 16 days.
The Postal Service has no official motto. Nope, it’s not this phrase: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
Those words are engraved on the front of the James A. Farley Post Office in New York City, set in stone by the architectural firm that built it. The phrase is taken from an ancient book by the Persian historian Herodotus and refers to messengers in the Persian Empire.
But we approve of the sentiment.
***
“You learn these lessons over and over again. In a project that flexes across a dozen degrees of digital freedom, nothing feels as good as a decisive constraint.” — Robin Sloan
***
“Florence’s family, the indefatigable nicknamers, had called him the Seal, and he did have a seal’s sleek head and soft eyes, and a circus seal’s air of jauntily seeking applause. The more he was liked, and the more he was exploited, the more he was himself. It was only when he entered his darkened bedroom that he had to improvise an artificial way of thinking and behaving.” — A Fairly Good Time and Green Water, Green Sky (New York Review Books Classics) by Mavis Gallant
***
“[Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Hamid’s Exit West] fit into the category that the Stanford professor and critic Ramón Saldívar calls ‘speculative realism’ — literature that deploys the fantastic in the process of turning ‘away from latent forms of daydream, delusion, and denial, toward the manifold surface features of history.’” — Jia Tolentino, “How The Memory Police Makes You See,” The New Yorker, November 06, 2019
June/July 2020
“It’s funny how the world rhymes.” — Robin Sloan
***
“Often depicting physical and psychological traumas as extreme as any in the tragedies, but finding their ways via magic, miracles and divine interventions to endings as prone to betrothals and family reunions as those of the comedies, Shakespeare’s late plays speak at once of mature sophistication and of second childhood.” — Michael Dobson in LBR
***
“Thinking of Abernathy watching that launch, I understood it as the zenith of American pain: that you should be, in the same breath, denied your rights, assured of your smallness, and awarded front-row tickets to combustive, deafening glory.” — Kathleen Alcott
***
amanuensis (n.) aman·u·en·sis | \ ə-ˌman-yə-ˈwen(t)-səs — one employed to write from dictation or to copy manuscript
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maieutic (adj.) ma·ieu·tic | \ mā-ˈyü-tik — relating to or resembling the Socratic method of eliciting new ideas from another
***
“He shook his head as he said this, and winked at me, a sad, almost involuntary wink, as though he were seeking some kind of accomplice in his sadness.” — “Sevastopol” by Emilio Fraia in The New Yorker, Dec 16 2019
***
INTERVIEW: What has this pandemic confirmed or reinforced about your view of society?
TOLENTINO: That capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult; that the internet is a weak substitute for physical presence; that this country criminally undervalues its most important people and its most important forms of labor; that we’re incentivized through online mechanisms to value the representation of something (like justice) over the thing itself; that most of us hold more unknown potential, more negative capability, than we’re accustomed to accessing; that the material conditions of life in America are constructed and maintained by those best set up to exploit them; and that the way we live is not inevitable at all.
[…]
…in quarantine I’ve been aware of the intellectual stagnation that comes when you stop physically seeking out and experiencing new things. There’s a loss that comes from not meeting strangers, not doing things just for the hell of doing them, not having everyday avenues of discovery and surprise.
[…]
Like, I think there’s some portion of white people who are going from awkwardly saying “African-American” to awkwardly saying “BIPOC,” people who were “taught to treat everyone equally” and are now being taught to verbally negotiate their own whiteness better — but who are still enmeshed in white communities, their affective habits altered a little but their enacted priorities still the same.
[…]
INTERVIEW: Where did we go wrong? Like, what was the exact moment?
TOLENTINO: I don’t mean to be glib, but when the colonists laid claim to Native American land.
[…]
INTERVIEW: What’s one skill we should all learn while in quarantine?
TOLENTINO: How to make someone feel loved from a distance.
***
“The conspicuous appearance of a real-life brand in an unfamiliar fictional world is a shortcut to a sense of naturalism. It ruptured and repairs the story world almost simultaneously. […] It tells the viewer that they’re still on Earth while avoiding any stilted exposition.” — Why Is This Interesting?
***
“I envy writers with a routine — and I live with one. I don’t know what my husband’s new novel is about, but sometimes he’ll knock on my door and ask me to enact something so he can describe it better, which is fun. At the end of the day we have dinner together.” — Camille Bordas
***
“You woke up at home and some of you worked or looked for work all day at home, and tonight you’ll be at home again, all of us safest at home. It’s going to be that way for a long time to come. And it’s hard not to think of James Baldwin, and a line of his from Giovanni’s Room, about how home is perhaps no longer a place, ‘but an irrecoverable condition.’” — Sam Sifton, NYT At Home, 07.15.20
***
“The essence of the nonviolent life, he wrote, is the capacity to forgive — ‘even as a person is cursing you to your face, even as he is spitting on you, or pushing a lit cigarette into your neck’ — and to understand that your attacker is as much a victim as you are. At bottom, this philosophy rested upon the belief that people of good will — ‘the Beloved Community,’ as Mr. Lewis called them — would rouse themselves to combat evil and injustice.” — NYT Editorial Board, “The radical resistance of John Lewis”
***
“In bestowing the honor in a White House ceremony, Mr. Obama said: “Generations from now, when parents teach their children what is meant by courage, the story of John Lewis will come to mind — an American who knew that change could not wait for some other person or some other time; whose life is a lesson in the fierce urgency of now.” — Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times, “John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80”
***
palanquin (n.) pa·lan·quin | \ ˌpa-lən-ˈkēn — a covered litter for one passenger, consisting of a large box carried on two horizontal poles by four or six bearers. :: origin late 16th cent.: from Portuguese palanquim, from Oriya pālaṅki, based on Sanskrit palyanka ‘bed, couch’
***
“And I guess I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” — Tom Waits on NPR’s Fresh Air ca. 2002
