Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle' →

“…because it’s worth plowing through”

“‘I have seen the world spirit’, not on horseback, but on wings and without a head…”

Now every flower stem swings a censer chain
And every flower gives incense to the night.
Sounds, perfumes circle in the evening light.
Turning in languorous waltz, again, again;

And every flower gives incense to the night …
The violin trembles like a soul in pain.
Round goes the languorous waltz again, again,
The sky is like an altar, vast and bright.

The violin trembles like a soul in pain,
A sorrowing soul, that fears the unknown night.
The sky is like an altar, vast and bright.
In its own darkening blood the sun lies slain.

A sorrowing soul, that fears the unknown night,
Draws from shining past what dreams remain.
Though in its darkening blood the sun lies slain,
Your memory, like a monstrance, brings me light.

— Evening Harmony by Charles Baudelaire (translation by Naomi Lewis)

…it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.

— T.S. Eliot (from The Metaphysical Poets)

When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

— T.S. Eliot (from The Metaphysical Poets)

Foggy, Foggy Dew

When I was a bachelor, I liv’d all alone
I worked at the weaver’s trade
And the only, only thing that I ever did wrong
Was to woo a fair young maid.
I wooed her in the wintertime
And in the summer, too
And the only, only thing that I did that was wrong
Was to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.

One night she came to my bedside
When I was fast asleep.
She laid her head upon my bed
And she began to weep.
She sighed, she cried, she damn near died
She said what shall I do?
So I hauled her into bed and covered up her head
Just to keep her from the foggy foggy dew.

So, I am a bachelor, I live with my son
and we work at the weaver’s trade.
And every single time that I look into his eyes
He reminds me of that fair young maid.
He reminds me of the wintertime
And of the summer, too,
And of the many, many times that I held her in my arms
Just to keep her from the foggy, foggy, dew.

I wander—
Stamping through the muck made
Of many other minds like mine.

As Prophesied: The Death of Materialism →

“Though the book is brief its claims are big. Nagel insists that the mind-body problem ‘is not just a local problem’ but ‘invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.’ If what he calls ‘materialist naturalism’ or just ‘materialism’ can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life.”

Elizabeth Eaton “Connie” Converse (1924-?) was a singer-songwriter who was active in New York City in the 1950s. She disappeared in 1974, after writing goodbye letters to her friends and family, and has not been heard from since. Her music has recently been rediscovered from tape recordings and an album How Sad, How Lovely was released in March 2009.

An addiction of mine lately.  If you haven’t listened to Connie Converse, please do.

Helen Vedler on Writers and Artists at Harvard →

“We are eager to harbor the next Homer, the next Kant, or the next Dickinson. There is no reason why we shouldn’t expect such a student to spend his or her university years with us.”

A very young Kate Bush.

And I would marry Carrie Mulligan.