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

We all know nationalist cultures are boring.

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

Well, it's Ninth and Hennepin

All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes

And the moon’s teeth marks are on the sky

Like a tarp thrown all over this

And the broken umbrellas like dead birds

And the steam comes out of the grill like the whole goddamn town’s ready to blow

And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos

And everyone is behaving like dogs

And the horses are coming down Violin Road and Dutch is dead on his feet

And all the rooms they smell like diesel

And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here

And I’m lost in the window, and I hide in the stairway

And I hang in the curtain, and I sleep in your hat

And no one brings anything small into a bar around here

They all started out with bad directions

And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear

One for every year he’s away, she said

Such a crumbling beauty

Ah, there’s nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won’t fix

She has that razor sadness that only gets worse

With the clang and the thunder of the Southern Pacific going by

And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet

Till you’re full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin

And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen

And I’ve seen it all

I’ve seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train

• Tom Waits, “9th & Hennepin,” one of my favorite poems, which came to mind today when I crossed 9th Street, while driving down Hennepin, in downtown Minneapolis.

...until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned...until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation...until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes...until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race...until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.

- Halie Selassie, in an address to the United Nations, 1963.

I thought we could all use the reminder.

What if this eclipse somehow just didn’t happen? It would be even more terrifying for us than the eclipse was to people a thousand years ago. Suddenly, some very hard questions would need to be asked. Unrest; scientists, facing an incredulous public, desperately search for the moon, finally discovering that 60 years ago a researcher (the fourth of five listed authors of a widely-cited paper on the computer modeling of lunar orbital mechanics) incorrectly translated a punch-card into COBOL, because the process is mind-numbing, nothing like the life of the astronaut he wants to be, but anyway, in his distraction, he introduced a small, but compounding error. In the mean time we’ve burned down all the universities for nothing, all the scientists are in hiding, we’re all chain smoking and using computers to bludgeon livestock. The pope’s army is marching on the space station, and the caliph’s call echoes through Valles Marineris...

It's a turn-around jump shot it's everybody jump start it's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts medicine is magical and magical is art think of the Boy in the Bubble and the baby with the baboon heart.

We nuh concern with who hawking / When dem spit can't reach where we walking.

The world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish.

Just reading that you can imagine a little bit of how hard it must have been for Wallace to operate day in and day out with an awareness of the world this raw and difficult and intimate. I never met him, but miss this man sooooooo much.

You should distrust any language that uses the same word for libre and gratis.

yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore...where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire...

All "direct" persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity.

(Quick tip: want to read all kinds of great classic lit eBooks for free? Head over to Project Gutenberg.)

I'm hangin' out with the street people / They've got it down / Hangin' out with the street people / Driftin' from town to town / Who's gonna work, make the economy grow / If we all hang out in the street / Well I don't know, and I don't care / Just as long as it ain't me

History, really, is fiction - not because it is made up of invented facts, for the facts are real, but because in the organization of those facts there is much fiction.

It is the storyteller... who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that survivors must have — otherwise surviving would have no meaning... This is very, very important... Memory is necessary if surviving is going to be more than just a technical thing.

What prophecy actually is is not that you actually know that the bomb will fall in 1942. It's that you know and feel something that somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. And maybe articulate it in a hint — a concrete way that they can pick up on in a hundred years.

Is a sermon most off putting when delivered from the pulpit of a cathedral or a street corner?

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

• Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise”

There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

Communication is, precisely, the avoidance of sincerity in order to reach agreement.

Places and people are like things: both made of memories and meaningful to us in the same way: we construct ourselves in our conversations with them.

We can prevent reading: but in the decree that forbids reading there will still be read something of the truth that we would wish never to be read

But what if everything that is to happen has already happened, and only the consequences are playing themselves out?

Poets are set against the world because they cannot accept that what there seems to be is all there is.

Is the engineer an artist? Good question. My favorite quote:

It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.

• via Nautilus