npr:
Internet’s over, people. Maurice Sendak just won.
Higher praise there could not be. —Wright
An illustration from Outside Over There, my favourite Maurice Sendak book and one of my favourite books of all time.
06/10/1928 - 05/08/2012. That is not enough.
“First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive. Try to get all these things in one person and have him come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing, because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done.” — Ernest Hemingway
Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison - Just for paying a few bills! That's out of proportion. Lots of folk live on their wits: Lecturers, lispers, Losels, loblolly-men, louts- They don't end as paupers; Lots of folk live up lanes With fires in a bucket, Eat windfalls and tinned sardines- they seem to like it. Their nippers have got bare feet, Their unspeakable wives Are skinny as whippets - and yet No one actually starves. Ah, were I courageous enough To shout Stuff your pension! But I know, all too well, that's the stuff That dreams are made on: For something sufficiently toad-like Squats in me, too; Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck, And cold as snow, And will never allow me to blarney My way of getting The fame and the girl and the money All at one sitting. I don't say, one bodies the other One's spiritual truth; But I do say it's hard to lose either, When you have both.
“
7th grade girl: Are we watching a movie today?
7th grade boy 1: No, of course not. You see that screen? It’s on for no reason. She just likes to waste electricity. It’s a hobby of hers.
7th grade boy 1 (to his friend): You waste air.
[Awkward silence]
7th grade boy 1: MROOARGHHH!
[Laughter]
7th grade boy 2 (still laughing): You waste…you waste air, and…you waste shelter! You waste electricity, air, shelter, and everything else!
”
“I wish to own only the warmth
of your skin
the sound your thoughts make
reverberating off the coldness
of my loss
to love you purely
as I love trees and
the quiet sheens and
colors
of my house
my heart is full
of charity
of fair play
although on other
occasions
it has been acknowledged
I am a thief.”
— Alice Walker, “Thief,” from Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems
These are my grandparents, Roro and Pawpaw. Today is their 60th wedding anniversary!
“About sympathy for example—we can do without it. The illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes of every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you—is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.” — Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill”
On Being Blog: Calvin and Hobbes: Math Is a Religion -
Happy Pi Day, everyone :)
Trent Gilliss, online editor
Some good clean humor to start the day, direct from one of my favorite comic strips via a tweetmeme.
For those who can’t easily read the word bubbles, a transcript:
First frame
Calvin: You know, I don’t think math is a science. I think it’s a…
46/365 of Solstice to Solstice to Solstice -
This is an excerpt from a more extensive collection I’m working on. Hearty thanks to the Eunoia Review for showcasing it today.