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Wednesday Words
Photographer Lorna Crozier What of the blind photographer? The one who measures distance by the warmth of the sun on her eyelids, the one who hears the picture and snaps that sound when you hear only silence, the one who lists fourteen colors of the rain. You imagine her cloaked and hooded in a black cloth, a photographer from long ago who grew images like lichen on glass and copper, her fingers running over the plates as if they spoke to her in Braille. There are days when you blind yourself with too much longing. Light is tactile then. With its many hands it washes the dullness from your skin,…
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Quoted
I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” — Malcolm X
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Reading Watching Listening
Reading… Nox by Anne Carson. It’s for the dissertation. It’s not the first time I’ve read it. It’s interesting, and occasionally beautiful, but it’s long, and cumbersome, and my personal desire to not be working on this project right now is probably interfering with my ability to objectively evaluate any of the works I’m (supposed to be) writing about. Watching… The most recent seasons of Arrow, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow. At this point, Legends is the only one that I’m particularly interested in, but they are just interconnected enough that I feel obligated to keep watching the others. BUT I read an article about casting changes for the new seasons of a bunch of…
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Wednesday Words
East Coker T.S. Eliot V So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years — Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres — Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined…
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Quoted
…it’s become a mantra for me and our family that, win or lose, it’s important to “get caught trying.” Whether you’re trying to win an election or pass a piece of legislation that will help millions of people, build a friendship or save a marriage, you’re never guaranteed success. But you are bound to try. Again and again and again. — Hillary Clinton, in What Happened
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Reading Watching Listening
Reading… What Happened by Hillary Clinton. It’s important. Watching… Good Girls Revolt. Fantastic writing. Kickass costumes. This show will make you want to stand up for something. And that is just about the most important thing these days. Listening… The The Is Us soundtrack. It’s so good. So. Good. For a show that makes me cry every single episode, the soundtrack makes me oddly happy. Plus, I’ve been waiting years for a new song from Mandy Moore, and she kills it on her cover of “Willin'”
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Wednesday Words
When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be John Keats When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love — then on the shore Of the wide…
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Quoted
There is such a place as fairyland – but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth, they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they…
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Wednesday Words
In the Drawing Room How they’re all around us, these gentlemen in chamberlain’s dress and jabots, like a night growing ever darker around its Order Star, implacably, and these ladies, slight and fragile, yet made large by their dresses, one hand in their laps, small, like a tiny dog with its collar: how they’re around us all: around the reader, around the peruser of these bibelots, of which several remain their property. Tactful, they let us live life undisturbed as we conceive it and as they fail to understand it. They wanted to blossom, and blossoming is being beautiful. But we want to ripen, and this means being dark and…
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Quoted
When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars. — Vincent Van Gogh