(Source: demosthenes2010, via maledynasty)
Product Analyst in Financial Software and aspiring Poet/Writer who is interested in merging Writing and Technology to create multifarious colors of New York City dreams.
Love Your Lemons
The great Stephen Jay Gould on creativity.
Also see E.B. White on the art of the essay.
Word of the Day: FRACTALIZE
FRACTALIZE |ˈfraktəlīz|
v. to realize everything in life is either a microcosm or a macrocosm of everything else; to suddenly understand that everything is analogous with everything else
yup i’ve been feeling this ever since placenta
Every once in a while — often when we least expect it — we encounter someone more courageous, someone who choose to strive for that which (to us) seemed unrealistically unattainable, even elusive. And we marvel. We swoon. We gape. Often , we are in awe. I think we look at these people as lucky, when in fact, luck has nothing to do with it. It is really about the strength of their imagination; it is about how they constructed the possibilities for their Life. In short, unlike me, they didn’t determine what was impossible before it was even possible.Fail Safe – Debbie Millman’s fantastic illustrated essay of timeless advice on courage and the creative life.
“Poetry is not a silent art. The poem must perform, unaided, in its reader’s head.”
— Christopher Logue (via theparisreview)
“In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.”
— May Sarton (via theparisreview)
“We’re at a point where more poetry is being written than published, let alone read, mainly because poetry has come to be considered so much as an outlet for personal feelings – the poem as the stylized mode of the journal entry. Even among poems that do get published – and there is a parallel with recent art – the emphasis on the recording of subjective experience is overwhelming.”
— Robert Rowland Smith in On Modern Poetry: From Theory to Total Criticism. And yet, William Wordsworth, one of history’s greatest poetic minds, has argued that poetry is about speaking to universal human passions. (via explore-blog)
“
They called it a “coding error”. This made it sound like they were sequestered in a bunker surrounded by black screens on which a continuous parade of figures flickered past.
Instead it was just someone using Excel on a laptop who was highlighting cells for a formula and released his index finger from the left-clicky button of his mouse too soon.
The debate has raged - well raged is a strong word, perhaps sulked? - since Monday about the significance of the calculation mistake made by Reinhart and Rogoff in their 2010 paper for the American Economic Review, Growth in a Time of Debt.
Did the conclusions about debt, growth and need for painful correction send the politicians of the world to the special cabinet to dust off the scourges?
That debate is meaningless because the last five years of economic prediction have told us one thing: No one knows anything any more and the people who say they know something know even less.
The main point to take from this debacle is the truly awesome power of Excel. Not its processing ability, just its ubiquity.
As much as oil and water, our lives are governed by Excel.
”— BBC News - The mysterious powers of Microsoft Excel (via new-aesthetic)
(via new-aesthetic)
The shaven rinds of lemon
we squeeze and stir
into our espresso,The snowfall
of sugar across berries,
custard and crust—Some last delights
among which it is easy to dream
that my fingers unbraidingYour hair by the nightstand
conceal no repercussion,
that the sweep of my palmAcross your navel
harbors no future grief.
The halved melon smells goodTo us—
we are rinsing
the reek of espresso beansFrom our hands,
we are soaking cake
in Kahlúa, and laterWe will wash that too
out of the glass dish
and the feastWill be wiped from the table
and done with.
And because everything isThis brevity,
the sound of the fork set down on
the empty plate at last,Your finger’s trace
through the devoured
pastry’s leftover creamSignaling the end
of desire, there is a place
in the unlit bedroom,There by the closed and curtained window,
where we’ll take each other
into the dark.—Gianmarc Manzione, “This Brevity”
Photography Credit Nadav Kander
Boston by Aaron Smith, Blue on Blue Ground
I’ve been meaning to tell
you how the sky is pink
here sometimes like the roof
of a mouth that’s about to chomp
down on the crooked steel teeth
of the city
I remember the desperate
things we did
and that I stumble
to the buzz of street lamps
at dusk and the crush
of leaves on the pavement,
Without you here I’m viciously lonely
and I can’t remember
the last time I felt holy,
the last time I offered
myself as sanctuary
…
I watched two men
press hard into
each other, their bodies
caught in the club’s
bass drum swell,
and I couldn’t remember
when I knew I’d never
be beautiful, but it must
have been quick
and subtle, the way
the holy ghost can pass
in and out of a room.
I want so desperately
to be finished with desire,
the rushing wind, the still
small voice
An Adventure by Louise Gluck
April 1st, 2013 The New Yorker
1.
It came to me one night as I was falling asleep
that I had finished with those amorous adventures
to which I had long been a slave. Finished with love?
my heart murmured. To which I responded that many profound discoveries
awaited us, hoping, at the same time, I would not be asked
to name them. For I could not name them. But the belief that they existed —-
surely this counted for something?
2.
The next night brought the same thought,
this time concerning poetry, and in the night that followed
various other passions and sensations were, in the same way,
set aside forever, and each night my heart
protested its future, like a small child being deprived of a favorite toy.
But these farewells, I said, are the way of things.
And once more I alluded to the vast territory
opening to us with each valediction. And with that phrase I became
a glorious knight riding into the setting sun, and my heart
became the steed underneath me.
3.
I was, you will understand, entering the kingdom of death,
though why this landscape was so conventional
I could not say. Here, too, the days were very long
while the years were very short. The sun sank over the far mountain.
The stars shone, the moon waxed and wanted. Soon
faces from the past appeared to me:
my mother and father, my infant sister; they had not, it seemed,
finished what they had to say, though now
I could hear them because my heart was still.
4.
At this point, I attained the precipice
but the trail did not, I saw, descend on the other side;
rather, having flattened out, it continued at this altitude
as far as the eye could see, thought gradually
the mountain that supported it completely dissolved
so that I found myself riding steadily through the air —-
All around, the dead were cheering me on,
the joy of finding them obliterated
by the task of responding to them —-
5.
As we had all been flesh together,
now we were mist.
As we had been before objects with shadows,
now we were substance without form, like evaporated chemicals.
Neigh, neigh, said my heart,
or perhaps nay, nay —- it was hard to know.
6.
Here the vision ended. I was in my bed, the morning sun
contentedly rising, the feather comforter
mounded in white drifts over my lower body.
You had been with me —-
there was a dent in the second pillowcase.
We had escaped from death —-
or was this the view from the precipice?
It came to me one night as I was falling asleep
that I had finished with those amorous adventures
to which I had long been a slave. Finished with love?
my heart murmured. To which I responded that many profound discoveries
awaited us, hoping, at the same time, I would not be asked
to name them. For I could not name them. But the belief that they existed —-
surely this counted for something?
2.
The next night brought the same thought,
this time concerning poetry, and in the night that followed
various other passions and sensations were, in the same way,
set aside forever, and each night my heart
protested its future, like a small child being deprived of a favorite toy.
But these farewells, I said, are the way of things.
And once more I alluded to the vast territory
opening to us with each valediction. And with that phrase I became
a glorious knight riding into the setting sun, and my heart
became the steed underneath me.
3.
I was, you will understand, entering the kingdom of death,
though why this landscape was so conventional
I could not say. Here, too, the days were very long
while the years were very short. The sun sank over the far mountain.
The stars shone, the moon waxed and wanted. Soon
faces from the past appeared to me:
my mother and father, my infant sister; they had not, it seemed,
finished what they had to say, though now
I could hear them because my heart was still.
4.
At this point, I attained the precipice
but the trail did not, I saw, descend on the other side;
rather, having flattened out, it continued at this altitude
as far as the eye could see, thought gradually
the mountain that supported it completely dissolved
so that I found myself riding steadily through the air —-
All around, the dead were cheering me on,
the joy of finding them obliterated
by the task of responding to them —-
5.
As we had all been flesh together,
now we were mist.
As we had been before objects with shadows,
now we were substance without form, like evaporated chemicals.
Neigh, neigh, said my heart,
or perhaps nay, nay —- it was hard to know.
6.
Here the vision ended. I was in my bed, the morning sun
contentedly rising, the feather comforter
mounded in white drifts over my lower body.
You had been with me —-
there was a dent in the second pillowcase.
We had escaped from death —-
or was this the view from the precipice?
Stirring TED talk by Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of Crazy Love, on why domestic violence victims don’t leave and the psychological trap disguised as love that keeps the vicious cycle going.
Hmmmm…this is what my poem muscle is about
“We live in a society where romantic love is idealized: if we search long enough, we will find “the one,” the soulmate who is perfect for us, who will grow and change at the exact same rate we do, who loves us exactly as we are and never expects us to change, who always wants us sexually, never has bad breath or gets grouchy, and is perfectly desirable in every way. We expect our partner to fully meet us on an intellectual, physical, sexual, and spiritual basis; to be our lover, best friend, a companion, confidante, confessor, therapist, and family, all rolled into one. This sets up monumental expectations which all of us invariably fall short of.”
—
Complement with Elizabeth Gilbert on what a soulmate is and isn’t.
(via explore-blog)Lurve this
The Poetry Foundation | Record-a-Poem on SoundCloud
“Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words,” said Edgar Allan Poe.
April is National Poetry Month. The Poetry Foundation is encouraging you to participate. Record your favorite poem or find some to read here. Submit to their SoundCloud group at https://soundcloud.com/groups/record-a-poem.
We want to hear your voices!
