January 2011
39 posts
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words...
– T.S. Eliot
December 2010
40 posts
Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved...
– Maurice Sendak via Catherine Campbell, Michelle. (via somethingchanged)
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Things I Want for Christmas:
1. History books. Specifically: China, unification to present; Europe, 16th cent. to present; United States, inception to 20th cent.
2. Relatedly, theological history books.
3. Every Out of Print t-shirt (okay, not every one. Not a Pride and Prejudice fan).
4. Scrivener.
5. High expectations for the coming year (not sure how you gift wrap that one).
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When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly...
– T.S. Eliot, The Metaphysical Poets.
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You don’t read Crumley for plot. You read him for his outlaw attitude,...
– Maxim Jakubowski, on James Crumley, author of the best goddamn detective novel of all time.
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We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is...
– e.e. cummings (via psychotherapy)
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December 10th
1830 Emily Dickinson is born in Amherst, Mass., where she is to spend most of her life: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” 1950 Accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm, William Faulkner avows: “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.”
- A Book of Days for the Literary Year.
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Literature is not a way of knowing reality but a kind of collective utopian...
– Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory.
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Hey, little train! We’re all jumping on
The train that goes to the...
– O Children, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
deadpresidents:
“It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.” — Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), 7th President of the United States (1829-1837), and a notoriously bad speller.
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When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an...
– James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss.
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In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne’er...
– John Keats, Stanzas.
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December 1st
1590 Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is registered for publication with the Stationers’ Company. 1663 John Dryden, 32, marries Elizabeth Howard, the daughter of the first Earl of Berkshire. She will bear him three sons. 1860 The first installment of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations is published in All the Year Round.
(from A Book of Days for the Literary Year)
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