I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding.
“Imagine a poet who could deal with the experience of Jack Kerouacbut with too much intelligence to limit himself to the road. You don’t have to imagine him. He exists. He has many skills, all of them beautifully bright, and on occasions when he looks into the abyss they take him safely over it,” said Turner Cassity of Moran’s poems.
The belief that some forms of social organization generate greater power, including military power, than others is at the heart of Hegel’s concept of the end of history — and was taken up by Francis Fukuyama. Liberal capitalist democracy, Fukuyama argues, promotes a better mix of solidarity and individualism, of dynamism and stability than societies organized in any other way can do.
That may or may not be true, and there is more than one model of liberal capitalist democracy from which to choose. Nevertheless, it seems clear that no serious grand strategist can afford to ignore the relationship between the internal situation of a state and the economic, political and even moral constitution of a society and its ability to sustain itself in international life.
Heredity is nothing but stored environment.-Luther Burbank, born on this date in 1849
... “Backbone” is unquestionably a God-concerned story: The case study references religious mystics who performed various acts of bodily abuses on themselves as a way of acting out God’s will, and one of the questions “Backbone” opens is whether this sort of extreme action is a clinical or a spiritual act.
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, born on this date in1906
Amanda Hocking is 26* years old. She has 9 self-published books to her name, and sells 100,000+ copies of those ebooks per month. She has never been traditionally published.
The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.- Karl Rahner, born on this date in 1904
The members of Westboro Baptist Church have no pity. More and more in our culture, I fear, we are at the mercy of people who have no pity.
Home from World War II, I landed a job with the Herald Tribune and found myself in the same room–the vast and grimy city room–with the giants who first put that boyhood dream in my head. They were a mixed bag of mavericks and oddballs, unsurprised by human oddity. Nobody gave it a second thought when Lucius Beebe, the legendary fop, who covered “café society,” arrived for work in midmorning wearing a derby, a bespoke suit, a magenta shirt and a white silk tie, or when the absent-minded music editor Francis D. Perkins, who often smoked his pipe upside down, started another paper fire in his wastebasket. We were a community held together by the common purpose of our daily voyage.
His poisonously funny little picture books — deadpan accounts of murder, disaster and discreet depravity, narrated in a voice that affects the world-weary tone of British novelists like Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett — established him as the master of high-camp macabre.
The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.- William Carlos Williams, who died on this date in 1883
The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.- Georg Cantor, born on this date in 1845
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.- Tom Wolfe, born on this date in 1931
Tomorrow I shall be sixty-nine, but I do not seem to care. I did not start the affair, and I have not been consulted about it at any step.- William Dean Howells, born on this date in 1837
