For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application -- why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
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Was all this bloodshed and deceit - from Columbus to Cortes, Pizarro the Puritans - a necessity for the human race to progress from savagery to civilization? Was Morison right in burying the story of genocide inside a more important story of human progress? Perhaps a persuasive argument can be made - as it was made by Stalin when he killed pesants for industrial progress in the Soviet Union, as it was made by Churchill explaining the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, and Truman explaining Hiroshima. But how can the judgement be made if the benefits and losses cannot be balanced because the losses are either unmentioned or mentioned quickly?
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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I must acknowledge an interest, or rather a dismay, in discussing this 'family memoir,' for from experience and observation I have come to regard the American Nuclear Family in the last 50 years as the enemy of individual determination, of personal autonomy--in short, as a disease.
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Most Americans don't have any idea how well the Department of Agriculture protects the grower at the expense of the consumer. When a chemical is banned from use, a farmer or livestock operator who has the chemical in stock has a choice: either to lose money by disposing of the product, or to use it and take the risk of getting caught breaking the law. How severe is that risk? Well, if you use a banned product in your cattle feed, you have to face the prospect that the government is going to inspect one out of every 250,000 carcasses. They will test this carcass not for all banned substances, but just for a small fraction of them. And even if they detect some residue of a banned substance, and even if they're able to trace the carcass to the ranch that produced it, the guilty rancher is likely at most to receive a stern letter with a strongly worded warning. I never met a rancher who suffered in any way from breaking any regulation meant to protect the safety of our meat. The whole procedure is, in short, a charade.
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M-O-T-H-E-RM is for the million things she gave me,O means only that she's growing old,T is for the tears she shed to save me,H is for her heart of purest goldE is for her eyes, with love-light shining,R means right, and right she'll always be,Put them all together, they spell MOTHER,A word that means the world to me.
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M-O-T-H-E-R M is for the million things she gave me, O means only that she's growing old, T is for the tears she shed to save me, H is for her heart of purest gold; E is for her eyes, with love-light shining, R means right, and right she'll always be, Put them all together, they spell MOTHER, A word that means the world to me.
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Emile Zola was a poor student at his school at Aix. We are all so different largely because we all have different combinations of intelligences. If we recognize this, I think we will have at least a better chance of dealing appropriately with many problems that we face in the world.
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Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.
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A chronicle is very different from history proper.
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The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned.
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The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -- henceforth? -- the subject to which you are condemned. The first thought is this: fear. I cannot write because I am afraid. Of what?
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Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.
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Father, whom I murdered every night but one, That one, when your death murdered me,
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Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
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Alas, so all things now do hold their peace: Heaven and earth disturbed in no thing:...
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When in the sea-light every early game Was played with love and, if death's waters came,...
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I thank those who were good enough to say something pleasant about the incoming administration, for I am glad to get it now. I heard of the ma...
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The improved American highway system isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson's nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.
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Two months dead, I wrestle with your name Whose separate letters make a paltry sum That is not you.
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Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?
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Quit thinking that you must halt before the barrier of inner negativity. You need not. You can crash through...whatever we see a negative state, that is where we can destroy it.
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'What domestication and human 'help' (read slavery) does to animals. From Taoism: 'A carefree band of horses galloped spiritedly around the hills and meadows. They dined on green grass and drank clear water form cool streams. Living freely, naturally and contentedly. Along came a horse-trainer named Polo. He captured the unsuspecting horses, declaring, 'I know what is best for them.' He bridled the horses, decorated them with cheap ornaments, gave them numbers. Then he made them perform in public. They were forced to trot about in precise formation to the crackling commands of a whip. The once-carefree horses turned into mechanical performers tired, sick, afraid...'
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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Family farmers are victims of public policy that gives preference to feeding animals over feeding people. This has encouraged the cheap grain policy of this nation and has made the Beef Cartel the biggest hog at the trough.
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After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space -- to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.
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by and by, the cause of my disease Gives me a pang that inwardly doth sting,...
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Life is like a blanket too short. You pull it up and your toes rebel, you yank it down and shivers meander about your shoulder; but cheerful folks manage to draw their knees up and pass a very comfortable night.
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Most people...find a disorientating mismatch between the long-term nature of their liabilities and the increasingly short-term nature of their assets.
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The terrible immoralities are the cunning ones hiding behind masks of morality, such as exploiting people while pretending to help them.
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