December 2009
38 posts
3 tags
4 tags
“Writers fight a myriad of internal battles that are difficult to translate to...”
– - Gail Sher, One Continuous Mistake (1999)
via bibliotheque
2 tags
2 tags
4 tags
“We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our...”
– from the Dhammapada, words attributed to Gautama Buddha
translation by Thomas Byrom.
3 tags
4 tags
“The joy of life discovered by the Greeks is not a profane type of enjoyment: it...”
– Mircea Eliade.
2 tags
4 tags
“Maybe it’s a defensive maneuver on my part, but my rationale is that I don’t...”
– Russell T. Hurlburt - Psychologist Uses Snapshots in Time to Plumb Consciousness - NYT
(via wildcat2030)
3 tags
3 tags
3 tags
6 tags
“What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our...”
– Michael Shermer - Kool-Aid Psychology: Realism versus Optimism
via wildcat
5 tags
4 tags
3 tags
Lewis Thomas: The Etymology of Music.
“Music, the most enduring and influential of all our social activities comes to us from the IE (Indo-European) root men, from which we derive most of our words for using our minds and thinking. One dictionary definition of the root men is ” to think, with derivatives to various qualities and states of mind and thought,” casting the widest...
2 tags
6 tags
'a sounding into the depth of the psyche'
“The relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos. Above all, this necessity is brought about by the aggregation of so many people with such differentiated interests, who must integrate their relations and activities into a...
3 tags
5 tags
7 tags
5 tags
2 tags
4 tags
4 tags
Phonography
“At the movies, the philosopher Stanley Cavell has observed, we experience our own immortality. How else should we have become pure spirits, present but invisible. With records, one might say, we experience the immortality of others: of the human musicians whose spirits we invoke. In primitive magic the spirits whose powers are enlisted are nature spirits or the spirits of the dead. There is...
4 tags
7 tags
4 tags
7 tags
3 tags
2 tags
4 tags
Bateson on Information and Difference
“ All receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference, and all perception of difference is limited by threshold. Differences that are too slight or too slowly presented are not perceivable. They are not food for perception.
… To produce news of difference, i.e. information, there must be two entities (real or imagined) such that the difference between them can be...
2 tags
4 tags
The Etymology of Self
” The distinction between the notions of self and others must have been a subtle problem for the first makers of language, and the complexity is illustrated by the abundance and ambiguity of terms defining selfness and otherness in the IE (Indo-European) family. The necessary lessons for the construction and endurance of a human community are embedded in the words used to elaborate the...
5 tags
Sirens
” Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.
Imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the
Gold, pinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille.
Trilling, trilling: Idolores.
Peep! Who’s in the … peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze...
2 tags
4 tags
3 tags
