Latest Posts by dclcq - Page 6
Yvan Feusi - Media Overdose
There are three opponents in wrestling — the self, the other wrestler, and time. In wrestling, you are judged for your activity. How aggressively are you seeking out your opponent? How much time are you spending in a submissive position? Are you trying to get out of that position? In poetry, simply scribbling does not move the score. Eyeing the subject, circling about it, and getting ready to surge forward will not put the poem in your grasp. Busyness doesn't move the judge. Simply scribbling, biding your time, reading, is seen as idleness to the non-writer. To the writer, it is a flurry of activity. The trouble, then, is that writing a long poem suffuses idleness and activity over a sustained period. Nothing happens. Everything happens
Oliver de la Paz Six Minutes and Onward: Wrestling, Long Poems, and Time
To stray beyond the lines is to imply you are through with your visions, that you wish to join the mêlée.
Lytton Smith
As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure. There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet. It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal, because they have not yet been proved to work.
David Graeber
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
Frank O’Hara, Mayakovsky (via naranzarian)
Lightly, child, lightly. You've got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such humourless little prig. Lightly, lightly - it was the best advice ever given me.
Aldous Huxley Island (1962)
I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that - I don’t mind people being happy - but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down 3 things that made you happy today before you go to sleep”, and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position - it’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness”. Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.
Hugh Mackay (via varanine)
At times it seems we are living our lives as if we are going to write an autobiography after we're done.
- Experience
Tantra's an enormous subject and most of it, I guess, is just silliness and superstition- not worth bothering about. But there's a hard core of sense. You accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself.
Aldous Huxley Island (1962)
It is not possible deliberately to create ideas or to control their creation. When a difficulty stimulates the mind, suggested solutions just automatically spring into the consciousness. The variety and quality of the suggestions are functions of how well prepared our mind is by past experience and education pertinent to the particular problem. What we can do deliberately is to prepare our minds in this way, voluntarily direct our thoughts to a certain problem, hold attention on that problem and appraise the various suggestions thrown up by the subconscious mind. The intellectual element in thinking is, Dewey says, what we do with the suggestions after they arise. Other things being equal, the greater our store of knowledge, the more likely it is that significant combinations will be thrown up. Furthermore, original combinations are more likely to come into being if there is available a breadth of knowledge extending into related or even distant branches of knowledge.
- W.I.B. Beveridge
by Ron Terner
The Appetizer for Fuzzy
"Bart Kosko, the leading proponent of fuzzy thinking, has degrees in philosophy, economics, mathematics and electrical engineering but even in his book there is a clear-cut thesis that ties all this complex thinking together: to explore the paradigm shift from black and white to gray, from bivalence and binary (either/or) thinking to multivalence, a less simplistic but more accurate way of thinking that responds to life in matters of degree, integrating probability and ambiguity in all modes of operation. (Kosko, Bart. Fuzzy Thinking. New York: Hyperion Press, 1993.)
Fuzzy thinking demands that you increase your options. What are all the possible things or events or conditions that could occur as you explore something? You must use your imagination much more actively than usual. Fuzzy thinking comes from fuzzy math sets in which endless possibilites have been explored. So to unite fuzzy thinking with traditional logic, you need to know more, feel more and think more exhaustively.
Perhaps the word "fuzzy" is misleading for undergraduates. Gratuitous ambiguity due to laziness is not the goal, but rather an inclusion of degree, probability and ambiguity in the formulation of structures that respond to phenomena. In other words it is harder and more intellectually demanding to engage in fuzzy thinking. Kosko has a thorough understanding of traditional logic and its fallacies as well as all the specific scientific applications of fuzzy thinking.
Traditional logic, with all its artificiality, is based on language, but the irony is that the flesh of language is our bodily experience, the cries and sighs and gurgles of needs and wants that slowly grow into more complex sounds that usually connote more than they denote. Nature constantly speaks a language that is homospatial and homotemporal, layered and nonlinear in space and time, and this language still resides in our subconscious world of dreams. While expository writing necessitates so-called logical, grammatically correct sentences that grow into coherent, well-developed paragraphs integrated by a thesis, this type of writing should not exclude the multivalent nature of experience, of our bodies, our dreams and our environments. Clarity in expository writing is important so you must redefine words in the context in which you are using them but it's okay to struggle with solutions, to end with answers and to obfuscate a cause-effect relationship with a provocative "what if?" "
- Julia L. Keefer
We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway (via scribnerbooks)
