“Can you do that? Can you just plug in some made up thing and end up with solutions? Can you simply draw some imaginary lines and end up with a better map? You don’t expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until you discover something, something big and useful, but shouldn’t this something have to be real? Let’s jump ahead 125 years. It’s 1922 and Ludwig Wittgenstein has just published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which insists, among other things, that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Or, put another way: how you say it is how you think it. And, more dramatically: if you can’t say it, you can’t think it. And, if you can’t think it, how can you solve it?”
—Richard Siken via Harriet (via Instapaper)
March 2011
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Your blog is algebraic
There’s a first for everything. I’ve never had anything I do described as algebraic before. Thank you! Of course, I’m hoping that you’re someone who appreciates numbers and that you didn’t mean algebraic in the sense of obtuse or hard to grasp… ;)
“Only the brave should teach. Only those who love the young should teach. Teaching is a vocation. It is as sacred as priesthood; as innate as desire, as inescapable as the genius which compels a great artist. If he has not the concern for humanity, the love of living creatures, the vision of the priest and the artist: he must not teach.”
—Pearl S. Buck (via libraryland)
“Any intention of writing poetry beyond the most basic aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy. The poem always intends otherwise. At every moment, the poet must be ready to abandon any prior intention in welcome expectation of what the poem is beginning to signal. More than intending, the poet ATTENDS! Attends to the conspiracy of words as it reveals itself as a poem, to its murmurs of radiant content that may be encouraged to shout, to its muffled musics there to be discovered and conducted.”
—Dean Young– The Art of Recklessness
“I write for a general audience, I guess you could say, including those who don’t think they like poetry. Never mind that these readers may never look at my poems or go to my readings. My feeling is that if I don’t write to them and for them, choosing to speak only to literary types who are clued in, my vision as a poet will shrink. My readers, I tell myself, may not know who T. S. Eliot is or even the poetry of John Keats. But they have done their homework by living a life. My task is to speak to that life.”
—How a Poem Happens: Wesley McNair
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“When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.”
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Reminds me of a conversation I once had with Roger Robinson about “straight” writers and “ornamental” writers…
“And hopefully I will carry on, and develop it, because it is worthwhile. carry on because it matters when other things don’t seem to matter so much: the money job, the editorial assignment, the fashion shoot. Then one day it will be complete enough to believe it is finished. Made. Existing. Done. And in its own way: a contribution, and all that effort and frustration and time and money will fall away. It was worth it, because it is something real, that didn’t exist before you made it exist: a sentient work of art and power and sensitivity, that speaks of this world and your fellow human beings place within it. Isn’t that beautiful?”
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Blog | Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult | Jody Rogac Photography
I’m occasionally asked the question about my seemingly disparate interests. Tech, photography, poetry (and design, although I don’t actively practise as much these days)… I’m interested in the points of intersection, points at which a lesson/theory/process in one discipline/art can be applied to another, and what happens when you do so.
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