Creatively Advancing into Novelty
Volume 2, Chapter 2, Footnote 2: Richard Chasten 1620-95: Chasten wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men, reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies, it is the other way around; magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards…
“Others, like the label Records on Ribs, have developed a model of supporting artists and raising their profile (because, isn’t that sort of what a record label should be passionate about?) that allows anyone to download new music for free, and then offers them the chance to donate what they think is appropriate for it….
In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it. The above quote comes from German educator Ernst Fischer. His view of art’s purpose and place in society closely…
You don’t need a pony to connect you to the unseeable or an airplane to connect you to the sky. Necessary it is to love to live and there are many manuals but in all important ways one is on one’s own. You need not cut off your hand. No need to eat a bouquet….
The Mikasukis back up Lost Man’s Slough was maybe the last Indins in the U.S.A. that never signed no treaty with no Great White Father. Called ’em Cypress Indins cause they hollowed dugouts out of cypress logs. Never paddled hardly but stood up in the stern, used push poles, followed water paths that in the…
“For those early writers, a trained memory wasn’t just about gaining easy access to information. It was about strengthening ones personal ethics and becoming a more complete person. A trained memory was the key to cultivating judgement, citizenship and piety. What one memorized helped shape ones character. Just as the secret to becoming a chess…
How else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely here that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in…
Nay, we honor no kings without kingdoms; nor hear the sound of harps save when the strings are plucked by hands; nor do we see a child playing in our olive grove as if he were a young olive tree. And all words must needs rise from lips of flesh, or else we deem each…
What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had that flower in you hand Ah, what then? Poem by Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Painting, Chalk…
In the good old days of Really Existing Socialism, a joke popular among dissidents was used to illustrate the futility of their protests. In the fifteenth century, when Russia was occupied by Mongols, a peasant and his wife were walking along a dusty country road; a Mongol warrior on a horse stopped at their side…