The New York Times is as pernicious as FOX News if not more so. It clads middle-brow stupidity in an ass’s skin of cultured intellectualism, and tarts up the short-sightedness of self-satisfaction to look like thoughtful analysis.
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Both suspending and engaging the senses,
Both preceded and followed by flowers,
He penetrates the gates of all dwellings.
Child’s arm holding the eye’s vascular tissue
Via biomedicalephemera:
Specimen prepared by Bernardus Siegfried Albinus, ca. 1730. Currently on display in the Anatomy Hall of Museum Boerhaave, in the city of Leiden, The Netherlands.
Photograph by [Astropop], 2009, All Rights Reserved.
Submitted by Thee Naluark.
My indebtedness to books and men is so great that it would be impossible to enumerate them here. While all sources have been laid under tribute, special obligation is felt to many monographs and intensive studies.
When you talk to yourself, you talk to the things
and of the things that are so bitter,
no other conversation is possible;
both bear death, both end blind.Here the east sings and the west sinks pints,
fruit explodes with ripeness,
ooze from palm and rubber tree,
even the orchid runs with individual justice.You all over, you once again open to all,
the final hour, and you soar and soar,
then one more song, and you sink, transfixed,
you know existence, and you hold your peace.—Gottfried Benn, from “Despair”
Art Credit Zdravko Mandic
Via theparisreview
Only, whilst the subject of each commoner emotion passion-whirled may be distinguished by flashings of the eye, by terror-striking tones of voice, and by the vehement fervour of the man’s whole being, so he who is inspired by temperate and harmonious love will wear a look of kindlier welcome in his eyes; the words he utters fall from his lips with softer intonation; and every gesture of his bodily frame conform to what is truly frank and liberal. Such, at any rate, the strange effects now wrought on Callias by love. He was like one transformed, the cynosure of all initiated in the mysteries of this divinity.
But for a book to stand like an island out of the sea of the unwritten it must acknowledge its own bounds, and turn inward from them, and look into the labyrinth.
Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage
Words and phrases turn into mechanical incantations that evoke predictable responses from similarly educated minds. Yes there is meaning here, but it is not precise meaning in the sense of a true literary culture. Instead it is a vague fog of sentiment and intention that shrouds every spoken word. It is more expressive than the vocalizations of some of our animal cousins, but not by much.
Cocoon above! Cocoon below!
Stealthy Cocoon, why hide you so
What all the world suspect?
An hour, and gay on every tree
Your secret, perched in ecstasy
Defies imprisonment!An hour in Chrysalis to pass,
Then gay above receding grass
A Butterfly to go!
A moment to interrogate,
Then wiser than a “Surrogate,”
The Universe to know!
E.D.