March 2010
23 posts
Symphony #1 (Petraeus)
In 1917 Hindemith was drafted. He spent most of his service as a member of a regimental band about 3 km from the front line, and was fortunate in having a sympathetic commanding officer who asked him to form a string quartet to give private concerts.
1 tag
Excerpts From Chief Seattle's Speech to Franklin...
In 1854, the United States Government aggressively offered to buy 2 million acres of land occupied by native people in the Northwest. Below is a translation of excerpts from Chief Seattle’s (Chief Sealth) reply to President Franklin Pierce in December of that year. His speech has been described as one of the most beautiful and prophetic statements on the environment ever made.
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Can’t say it is clear to me why a book titled BROOKLYN is the One Book, One Chicago book.
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Inaugurated in the fall of 2001, the One Book, One Chicago program is launched each spring and fall to cultivate a culture of reading and discussion in Chicago by bringing our diverse city together around one great book.
Reading great literature...
..and her tongue moving around inside my mouth, the very tongue that lived alone down in the darkness of her mouth and that now seemed the most promiscuous of organs. Till that moment I was wholly innocent of anyone’s tongue in my mouth other than my own. That alone nearly made me come. But the rapidity with which she had allowed me to proceed…. the tongue, which is like the body...
“I still want to be a booty call, I’d just rather be a skinny booty call...”
– Kirstie Alley on losing weight.
Not liking one of the mirrors in your house. An unwelcome guest.
“If you are between the ages of 21 and 53, you will watch this and feel like a...”
– Tom Hanks on his new war television show.
So three of them left
“Seidel had long been in my mind a figure like Clarice Lispector or Georges Simenon: someone of debated importance whose work I’d failed to investigate for no real reason. There must be a German word for this type of figure. Every reader has his own gallery of them.”
Very true. Two of mine are Louis Auchincloss and Katherine Ann Porter. But enough “German word for...
When is literature more dangerous?
That’s hard to know.
Is it more dangerous when you are young and being formed by the unreality of it, or is it more dangerous when you are old and being forced away from reality by continuing on with it.
It’s just not safe to read a book that excites you on a commuter train, surrounded by crashing bores instead of your old friends.
No delay would be long enough.
Destroyer - The Sublimation Hour
The New Middle English
DC (10:15): Sidebar-ish: Is it kind of a bummer to people who haven’t seen the all of movies that these little featurettes showing the big nominees are, in a large part, super spoiler-y?
Fat Cats Also Barred
Oscar Winners Try to Keep Whale Off Sushi Plates
Car Commercials
Why do I picture all of the top women in Hollywood (Catherine Bigelow, Sandra Bullock, etc.) driving Lincoln Navigators?
I asked her to marry me.
Her lips moved against my cheeck, as if I were a deaf child, each word a touching pressure. “You know,” she whispered, “I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket. The cop looks at me and can’t seem to write it. When they start writing me tickets, ask again.”
Leonard Michaels, from Shuffle.
It is hard, say, to cross out six different numbers on a Lotto ticket in such a way that the arrangement looks convincing. And yet the sequence that emerges after the numbers are drawn seems entirely right and credible in every way.
From Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting, Notes 1964.
In my heart I am the last Nazi
…and the poems themselves were free of political allusions, except for the odd unfortunate metaphor (such as “in my heart I am the last Nazi”), always in the context of personal relationships.
I find this line to be anything but unfortunate. From the fat daguhter Nazi in the Mendiluce clan in Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas.
Many of what seem to me the most illuminating books and movies about American media-culture … come from Canada. Saul Bellow, who was born in a Montreal suburb, says “Canada’s chief entertainment — it has no choice — is to watch (from a gorgeous setting) what happens in our country. The disaster is there’s no other show. Night after night they sit in darkness...
Images magnify the body. Television traffics exclusively in images. The NBA traffics, almost exclusively, in African-American bodies, and from the time the first slave ship pulled into the harbor, African-American bodies have been big sellers. “I propose,” as Ralph Ellison says in Shadow and Act, “that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a...
Wall Street vs: Main Street
Groner’s estate, which stemmed from a $180 stock purchase she made in 1935, was worth $7 million.
Written word devalued
I don’t know if we should be insulted or humored at the president’s feeble attempts to incorporate Republican ideas into his latest health care proposal,” Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., said in a written statement.
Snooki, from the Jersey Shore, has more substance than President Obama’s offer,” he said.
Fear was to be one of the most enduring weapons in the U.S. politician’s arsenal. In his diary in 1969, Nixon’s top aide, H.R. Haldeman, provided a succinct summary of the overall strategy: “Nixon emphasized that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes that, while not appearing to do so.” In a letter to Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon wrote, “Ike, it’s just...
