Albert Einstein

“Take on a large and foolish task like Noah.”

Rumi, Sufi Poet

“There are certain things that humans are not permitted to know -like what we are doing.”

William Burroughs

“The utmost reward of daring should be still to dare.”

Robert Frost

“Let’s live suddenly without thinking, under honest trees, as a stream does.”

E.E. Cummings

“The highest activity of the human being is rest.”

Thomas Merton

“In the end it is our unshieldedness on which we depend.”

R. M. Rilke

“Or do we imagine that one could, even in small ways, encounter the essence of truth, the essence of beauty, the essence of grace -without danger.”

M. Heidegger

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat.”

Robert Frost

“When I am working on a problem I thonk only of how to solve the problem, but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

R. Buckminster Fuller

“Craftsmanship, t be artistic in the final sense, must be “loving” -it must care deeply for the subject matter upon which skill is exercised.”

John Dewey

“There’s still a lot of great music to be written in C Major.”

Arnold Schoenberg

“We work in the dark. we do what we can -we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

Henry James

“It is rough enough doing any art without asking yourself every morning if your art is sufficiently aristocratic to be worth the candle or sufficiently remote to discourage all comers.”

Annie Dillard

“Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.”

Pablo Picasso

“A culture that truly grants freedom to the artist is the freedom that leaves the artist free of the necessity of justifying themselves.”

Liz Story

via Liz Story Thoughts.

by Roy Exum

posted May 18, 2010

Roy Exum

When Chris Myers was filling in for Dan Patrick on arguably the most-listened-to sports radio show in the land on Monday, he got to the “Best and Worst of the Weekend” portion of the nationwide broadcast and promptly startled his listeners.

He picked as “best” the people of Tennessee. Instead of a sports team or the Preakness winner, Chris veered from the norm by saying how thrilled he was by a huge benefit concert the country music performers had just held for the state’s flood victims. Better than that, praised the common folk who “were not standing on a rooftop trying to blame the government, okay? Instead, they helped each other out through this.”

via 5/18/2010 – Roy Exum: ‘This Is Tennessee’ – Opinion – Chattanoogan.com.

Nelle Harper Lee was born in April 1926 in Monroeville Alabama, the same small town where Truman Capote spent several years of his childhood. (Capote and Harper became best of friends as children and remained close until he died in 1984.)

Harper is the youngest of four children. She attended Huntingdon College 1944-45, studied law at University of Alabama 1945-49, and studied at Oxford University for one year. In the 1950s she worked in New York City as a reservation clerk with Eastern Air Lines and BOAC. She gave up this position in order to focus on her writing for one full year. Around that time, her father became ill and she returned to Alabama to care for him. She began dividing her time between New York and Monroeville (she still does).

In 1957 Lee submitted her manuscript for To Kill a Mockingbird to the J. B. Lippincott Company. It is well documented that she was told that her novel consisted of a series of short stories strung together, and she should re-write it. She took the criticism seriously spending the next two and half years re-writing. She hired an editor Tay Hohoff, and in 1960, when she was 34, To Kill a Mockingbird was published. The novel won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and became an international bestseller and was adapted to film in 1962. An even greater testament to the novel’s quality is the fact that it has never gone out of print—an extremely rare honor for novel.

Since then, she has published only four articles including Love–In Other Words in Vogue, and Christmas To Me in McCalls. When Children Discover America was published in 1965. She traveled to Kansas with Truman Capote to help with research for his bestseller, In Cold Blood.

In 1966, President Johnson named Lee to the National Council of Arts. She has received numerous honorary doctorates, but rarely grants interviews, or gives speeches. When asked to write an introduction to her novel on its 35th anniversary, she refused asking that her novel be spared the introduction, reminding us that the book has never been out of print and that she is alive. Indeed, she is alive and well, sharing her time between her home in New York City and Monroeville, Alabama.

via Harper Lee « Southern Literary Review.

By: Patrick Gavin

May 15, 2010 11:08 AM EDT

Jon Meacham has had the kind of charmed professional life that other journalists can only envy: Newsweek managing editor at 29, editor at 37; author of four books, the latest, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House,” awarded the Pulitzer Prize last year in biography.

So it was not without a certain schadenfreude that the media world seemed to take special relish in what turned out to be what his friend Sally Quinn called “a week from hell,” for Meacham some days short of his 41st birthday.

What set all the piling on in motion was the news that the Washington Post Company, Newsweek’s parent since 1961, was putting the magazine up for sale, having concluded that “despite heroic efforts on the part of Newsweek’s management and staff, we expect it to still lose money in 2010″ and “it might be a better fit elsewhere.”

Next, Tom Shales, the Post’s acerbic TV critic, dispensed with Meacham’s new PBS show, “Need to Know,” with a critical review, and followed up with even nastier comments in an on-line chat on the paper’s website:

Need to Know: Do you think part of the problem with the show is that Jon Meacham is kind of a pompous guy?

Tom Shales: Pompous? yes. And dreary.

But that only starts to get at the kind of nastiness directed at Meacham in the media world. While many of the lobbed spitballs were aimed at Newsweek (“The [conventional wisdom] is that, if the Washington Post Company … couldn’t make it work, then Newsweek doesn’t have much of a future,” said media critic Howard Kurtz during an interview with Meacham), some used the opportunity to offer blunt, personal critiques of Meacham, who declined to comment for this article.

Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff — well known for unleashing his sharp tongue at media personalities — called Meacham “a perfect example of media insularity and self-congratulation.” Then Friday he berated him some more for turning the magazine “ into a middle-brow thumb sucker, reminiscent of Norman Cousins’ Saturday Review — a magazine that went belly up several generations ago” and said he should have been replaced long ago by New York magazine’s editor, Adam Moss.

The New York Times’ David Carr said, “[B]eyond helping its editor, Jon Meacham, get on television and sell some books, it hard to tell what the brand is really worth at this point.”

New York University’s Jay Rosen, another frequent critic of most media institutions, has been equally critical of Newsweek on his Twitter feed, so much so that Newsweek actually took him on directly.

“Jesus, Jay, did

via Jon Meacham’s ‘week from hell’ – POLITICO.com Print View.

Watch essayist, farmer, poet, and conservationist Wendell Berry, whose work often reflects religious and moral ideals and who spoke on May 4, 2010 at the Arlington Public Library in Virginia. Here he responds to a question about cheap oil and how it allows us to live. He says the issue is one of ignoring limits, and he calls the recent Gulf of Mexico oil spill “news from the world” in noisy response to the way we have gone after oil and mineral resources.

via Wendell Berry: “Now We’re Hearing from the World” | Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Published Wednesday, May 26, 2010

“Thought is neither instant nor noisy … It thrives best in solitude, in quiet, and in the company of the past, the great community of human experience. That recorded experience is essential whether one hopes to re-assert some aspect of it, or attack it.”

— Wallace Stegner

I suspect Stegner’s quote was introduced by Wendell Berry’s “Standing by Words.” I suppose one could go on line and get an immediate answer. What matters to me is the quote.

Finding solitude is easy enough these days for me at my age but for the young at heart solitude is sitting in front of a screen or having a cell phone connection or texting. I must admit my niece’s daughter, Franny, showed me how to text a line when I spent a night with them. That was my last text message. They don’t seem to work on “land-lines” and what a hideous name that is. It sounds like something out of the 18th Century.

I’m preparing to do a reading next week for some kindergarten kids in Rochester if I can find the school. They will be listening to “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein. I remember bringing it downstairs and placing it on the bookshelf and the other night I went to get it and it wasn’t there. Finally on my third or maybe fourth search there it was with the little red apple falling from the tree to the little boy waiting below. Now I just need to find the school. I have a napkin sketch map to go by. This could be a challenge.

The grief of humidity slid into town Sunday, something we don’t look forward to in spring. Fortunately the humidity slipped back out of town before morning which was a relief to all. Mello and I spent some porch time watching traffic pass by and a few walkers.

Lydia, our daughter, called from a political doings, a post doings and said she couldn’t find her car that she had parked before the event. She continued to talk until she found it and then said she might be coming by to spend the night if she couldn’t find Susie.

Monday morning she was sleeping on the couch not far from Mello. She said when waking Mello up she only faced a few barks when she arrived. Mello appears to be mellowing. Then Lydia was back on her way to Rochester for another event in the world of politics.

I think we need younger politicians these days. Perhaps there should be term limits. Politicians, at least at the Federal level just seem to be nesting in office. There was mention the other day of a recent graduate of Pepperdine University Law School. The article said, “A law degree used to be a ticket to the good life. But in this economy, debt-burdened law school grads scramble for a job — any jo

via Austin Daily Herald | Solitude’s meaning varies.

I’ve never been a fan of the Kindle. I like real books. I like the smell of old pages, of new pages, I like to write in the margins, fold my corners and go back and read those excerpts again. I like giving away books and take pride in the weight of books I have to transport whenever I move, as if carrying around a heavy trophy of knowledge. Basically, I’m a nerd. So when contemplating my reading options when I go to Kazakhstan, I came to the conclusion that when I’m only limited to transporting 100 lbs, books aren’t the best investment .

I decided that the Kindle was a smart choice because it’s lightweight, I could preload books before I move and the environmental footprint that I was concerned about before would be offset since I wouldn’t have books shipped all the way to Kazakhstan.

While doing research for my job, I found that universities are testing pilots that distribute textbooks through the Kindle.

This makes a lot of sense considering:

- this would take out the printing costs, which means lower costs for students – it would save paper and unneeded weight in your backpack

- updates in textbooks wouldn’t mean thousands of books being disposed of or recycled

- no worries about being able to sell back your books for the fraction that you bought them for…or being stuck with a book you can’t sell back but don’t have the heart to dispose of (recycle)

While digging deeper, I found that the carbon emitted over the life of the device is offset after the first year of use. According to an article from the New York Times, “in 2008, the U.S. book and newspaper industries combined resulted in the harvesting of 125 million trees, not to mention wastewater that was produced or its massive carbon footprint.”

“The report asserts that printed books have the highest per-unit carbon footprint — which includes its raw materials, paper production, printing, shipping, and disposal — in the publishing sector. “In the case of a book bought at a bookstore,” Ms. Ritch said, Cleantech’s measurement “takes into account the fossil fuels necessary to deliver to the bookstore and the fact that 25-36 percent of those books are then returned to the publisher, burning more fossil fuels.”

via To Kindle or not to Kindle? « Limited Prerogatives.

November 22, 2009

One of my favorite books each year is the newest edition of the New Stories From the South series from Algonquin Books. Though I got the 2009 volume a while back, I have only recently had a chance to look at it, but there was plenty to enjoy and appreciate, including stories by favorites including Jill McCorkle, Elizabeth Spencer, George Singleton, and Wendell Berry. But it was a couple of other things that stood out to me at first encounter. First, this year’s guest editor is Madison Smartt Bell, who’s not just a fine writer (obviously) but also a fine reader and editor. (I’ve used his book Narrative Design in my fiction workshop the last few times I’ve taught it, and it’s simply brilliant.) In his introduction here, Bell draws on his visits to New Orleans — both pre- and post-Katrina — to consider what’s happening to (what’s already happened to) the South and to Southern literature. He writes that

via Short Takes: “New Stories From The South” « Art & Literature.

Jon Meacham sheds new light on President Jackson, an important but often overlooked figure in American history

By Charity Vogel

NEWS STAFF REPORTER

Jon Meacham is a very busy man. Busier than you. Busier than me. “He’ll only have about 10 minutes with you,” an assistant in his New York City office warns, before putting Meacham on the phone.

This is one day after Meacham’s staff calls to tell you that the appointment you originally had to speak with him needs to change—something shifted in his complicated appointment book—and shortly after you learn Meacham is running late from his morning and will need to cram the scheduled interview into half the time.

Better talk to him now, though, because give him a minute and Meacham—a journalist and historian who is both editor of Newsweek magazine and a best-selling author —will be off to his next commitment. There’s a laundry list to choose from: the religion blog he writes for the Washington Post; his contributing editor duties at Washington Monthly magazine; his frequent TV appearances as a political commentator; and his networking with pols, presidents and the powerful—including Barack Obama, who wrote a cover story on Haiti for Newsweek a few weeks ago.

It’s all in a day’s work for Meacham, who turned 40 last year, and who took a few minutes — 16, to be precise — out of his jam-packed agenda to talk to The Buffalo News about his latest book, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.”

The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography last spring, is the February selection of The News’ Book Club. At 483 pages in the paperback edition, it makes for a substantial dip into the country’s history, for one of Western New York’s grayer and drearier reading months.

Why Jackson?

Let Meacham’s explanation as to why he chose the nation’s polarizing seventh president as a book subject serve as an answer for the Book Club’s purposes, as well.

“He’s an incredibly important figure who is overlooked,” said Meacham, his thick Southern accent revealing his Tennessee roots. “He’s a lunatic. So he’s intrinsically interesting.”

Perhaps the lunatic part is overstatement, but Meacham stands by his assessment of Jackson as a fascinating and significant president. In “American Lion,” he presents a d

via Book Club: ‘American Lion’ sheds new light on Andrew Jackson : Life : The Buffalo News.

(AP) — MCT REGIONAL FEATURES

By Reviewed Tom Eblen

The Lexington Herald-Leader, Ky.

(MCT)

Feb. 7–Reading Wendell Berry is like having a conversation with a friend — an old friend whose wisdom makes you want to do nothing more than hush and listen.

That’s how I felt, snowbound last weekend, reading Berry’s new collection of essays, Imagination in Place. Berry reflects on writers he has known or admired and the role that a sense of place played in their lives and work.

Place has special significance to Berry, as he explains in the book. After sojourns on each coast, Berry and his wife, Tanya, and their two children returned to his native Henry County in 1964. They bought a farm along the Kentucky River near Port Royal, which became the Port William of his fiction.

”I believe I can say properly that my fiction originates in part in actual experience of an actual place: its topography, weather, plants, and animals; its language, voice and stories,” Berry writes.

He has farmed and written in that place for 45 years. Along the way, he has become perhaps the nation’s most eloquent advocate for time-honored agrarian values that are attracting new appreciation in the 21st century after being dismissed during much of the 20th.

These 15 essays, written from 1993 to 2009, have been published previously, most in The Sewanee Review. Berry fans might appreciate them most for the insights they offer into his own development as a writer.

Berry writes about being a graduate student at Stanford under Wallace Stegner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 30 books, most of which were set in the American West.

”The fact is that at the time I did not understand him as an influence, and the reason was that at the time I did not know what kind of influence I was going to need,” he writes. “At the time I wanted only to be a writer; beyond that, I had little self- knowledge, and not an inkling of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to do it.”

In other essays, Berry writes of Donald Hall and his New England; of James Still and Gurney Norman and their Eastern Kentucky; and of Hayden Carruth, whose poetry was rooted in Vermont, where he lived for many years.

There are essays of literary criticism, and remembrances of departed literary friends, including James Baker Hall, a classmate of Berry at the University of Kentucky and later a colleague when they both taught English there.

These pieces include the flashes of wisdom that Berry’s fans cherish, such as this description of his first visit to an Eastern Kentucky strip mine in 1964 with Norman, who was then a newspaper reporter in Hazard: “It had never occurred to me that people could destroy land with an indifference that perfectly matched the capability of their technology.”

And then there is this wonderful critique of literary “realism” that focuses only on the dark side of life: “Why should one read a book that is programmatically more depressing than the news?”

Although much in these essays celebrates the warmth and humanness of life, Berry also does some of what he does best: hold up a mirror to modern society and make observations of blinding moral clarity.

”We have pretty much made a virtue of selfishness as the mainstay of our economy, and we have provided an abundance of good excuses for dishonesty,” he writes. “Most of us give no thought to the state of nature as the context of our lives, because we conventionally disbelieve in natural limits.”

Imagination in Place is the latest example of why Wendell Berry is not only a Kentucky treasure, but an American treasure.

Reach Tom Eblen at (859) 231-1415 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 1415. Read and comment on his blog, The Bluegrass & Beyond, at Kentucky.com.

_____

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