Any day is a good day when you learn about a new cool person: may I present Grandma Gatewood, born today in 1887, the first woman to solo hike the Appalachian Trail

”Pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in merchants’ houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, literature, in the younger generation...my holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and...freedom.”

• Anton Chekhov

“Only the fruits of thought and artistic creation justify man's presence in the world.”

- Sergio Pitol, _The Art of Flight_

Top notch wisdom in tonight’s baseball telecast: “Don’t play to prove the haters wrong, play to prove the fans right.”

I’ll go and stay a while, and all the folks I meet they’ll say, “You won’t stay long, you got them travellin' feet, you’ll soon be long-gone, ‘cause boy, you got the rest of the world blues.”

• Electric Light Orchestra, “Birmingham Blues”

As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

• physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in this fascinating article: Do Our Questions Create the World

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan.

-Joseph Brodsky, in his opening remarks as US Poet Laureate, 1991.

Surprise wisdom from a World Cup TV commentator:

The true history of the world is the history of great conversations.

I was born in the rain on the Pontchartrain, underneath the Louisiana moon. I don’t mind the strain of a Hurricane, they come around here every June. The high black water, the devil’s daughter, she’s hard, she’s cold, and she’s mean, but nobody taught her it takes a lot of water to wash away New Orleans.

• Levon Helm, “Hurricane”

Now, I understand, my privilege means giving up all claims on life as the casual, criminal thing it sometimes is, in favor of a horizon in whose cursive recesses we may sometimes lie concealed because we are part of the pattern.

• John Ashbery, “Try Me! I’m Different”

If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get off the couch, move.

• Anthony Bourdain (rest in peace)

We live longer / but less precisely / and in shorter sentences / We travel faster, farther, more often, / but bring back slides instead of memories

• Wislawa Szymborska, “Nonreading”

I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe—but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry—poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs—is how the world works. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song.

• David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

Boundaries, after all–of custom, of language, of what is and is not permitted–not only function to keep others out but also keep those inside from expanding.

• Elena Poniatowska in interview, “The Art of Fiction No. 238,” The Paris Review No. 224 (Spring 2018).

Democracy does not mean you will never have corrupt politicians. Democracy is what you do when you discover the mayor is stealing the people's cash.

- Jan Budaj, one of the organizers of the 1989 Slovakian Velvet Revolution, speaking to the New York Times on current protests in the country.

Well raise another round boys and have another glass be thankful for today knowing it will never last still let's leave the world laughing when our eulogies are read may we all get to heaven before the devil knows we're dead.

- Turnpike Troubadours, "Before the Devil Knows We're Dead"

In pursuing the objective to generalize theoretical models we must ask ourselves whether greater detail in formulating the contributing processes is warranted by truncation errors, by sensitivity of the results to detail, by the resulting increase in computational complexity and time, and by ignorance of the way these processes really work.

- Joseph Smagorinsky. "General Circulation Experiments with the Primitive Equations: I. The Basic Experiment." Monthly Weather Review, 91.3 (1963): 99–164.

Chance is not simply a matter of choosing, but the result of that which might have happened anyway.

- Laszlo Krasznahorkai, from "Downhill on a Forest Road," in The World Goes On

To rule forever, it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call...Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line...through the midst of a People,— to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,— 'tis the first stroke.— All else will follow as if predestined, unto War and Devastation.

- Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

Q: What things bore you?

Roberto Bolaño: The empty discourse of the Left. I take for granted the empty discourse of the Right.

• From an interview with Monica Maristain for Playboy Magazine, republished in Between Parenthesis as “The End: Distant Star.”

In the distance is the gloom of the end of days, when the sun calls home its wandering rays, when all of the iron has gone to rust, and every living thing has turned to dust. There won't be anyone left to float your boat, they all went to high ground while their vessels still float, they scream God's will but you know it's a lie, by your own book it says by fire next time; the golden eggs cracked open, and there was nothing inside. Cast all dispersions build a levee of lies. I can see it comin': bite down on the leather, and close your eyes, there's nothin' to be done that can turn the tide. The money in your eyes has left you blind. You'll be the one drownin' when it's swimmin' time

 

• Shovels and Rope, “Swimmin' Time”

If I had to hold up the most heavily fortified bank in America, I'd take a gang of poets. The attempt would probably end in disaster, but it would be beautiful.

- Roberto Bolaño, in "THE BEST GANG," (January 1999 - April 2000), Between Parenthesis

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

- Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space

We all know nationalist cultures are boring.

- Dany Laferriere is amazing in this Paris Review interview.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

 

• Umberto Eco