Life is rough in Dallas right now. They’ve got no district attorney, no quarterback, and they’re about to have no police chief. The city leads the nation in income inequality by neighborhood. In the poorer of those neighborhoods, stray dogs roam the streets in packs. Tent cities for the homeless spring up almost as soon as they’re closed. But on Monday, Dallas City Council took a step to address one burning civic issue: the proliferation of Little Free Libraries that people have enjoyed putting up in their yards, so neighbors can take and share books with each other.
Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches. Check out the bestseller list for April 1935 or August 1978 if you don’t believe me. Originality is partly a matter of having your own influences: read evolutionary biology textbooks or the Old Testament, find your metaphors where no one’s looking, don’t belong. Or belong to the other world that is not quite this one, the world from which you send back your messages. Imagine Herman Melville in workshop in 1849 being told by all his peers that he needed to cut all those informative digressions and really his big whale book was kind of dull and why did it take him so long to get to the point. And actually it was a quiet failure at the time. So was pretty much everything Thoreau published, and Emily Dickinson published only a handful of poems in her lifetime but wrote thousands.
Where would this train of logic lead? How many other associations to which students belong might be judged, with equal or greater plausibility, to be hostile to Harvard’s ‘values of non-discrimination’? What of the undergraduate who joins a lobbying organization that opposes gay marriage or one that combats affirmative action programs in higher education? Is membership in the Republican Party less an affront to 'our deepest values’ than membership of the Fly? How about the Daughters of the American Revolution—or the Roman Catholic Church? We are not the first to notice the alarming implications of the new policy. Students have already asked us if they should hide their religious and political affinities if they hope someday to receive Harvard’s support. How can they be confident that a fellowship nominating committee will not hold their religious or political convictions against them, if these might run afoul of Harvard’s 'values’?
[gallery] blue-electrode:
How to get married, although a woman, or, The art of pleasing men
by a Young Widow (1892).
[gallery] Princeton University Press has posted online all the images from Roger Penrose’s new book Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. A thought experiment: view all the illustrations in order — but only the illustrations — and then try to summarize the story they tell. A string-theory version of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
[gallery]
[gallery] discardingimages:
announcing angel‘Emerson-White Book of Hours’ (detached leaf), Ghent ca. 1480
LA, J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 60, recto
[gallery] Making ink from car exhaust
[Geoffrey Hill] always was, of course, a Christian poet, and much of his poetry is about wrestling with his faith (or more specifically, wrestling with aspects of himself, with depression and despair specifically conceived in terms of sin), a set of beliefs and attitudes I did not share. He was also, I suppose, what we might call a politically ‘conservative’ writer (although actually I think Hill’s politics were quite complicated and more idiosyncratic than the tag 'conservative’ implies), although I was not, and am not. But then, Coleridge was also very much both a Christian writer and, in his later life, a political conservative, and there seems to me actual merit, quite apart from my personal enjoyment, in reading him against the grain. from a position, like mine, that does not share many of those assumptions. I don’t mean in order to critique those attitudes, but on the contrary to try to read them in good faith. But writers like Coleridge, and I think Hill, need to be rescued from readers who identify too strongly with the positions they are dramatising.
[gallery] World’s highest bridge nears completion. Watch the video at the link, if you like vertigo.
