June 2010
Youth
by W.S. Merwin
Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for or what to call you I think I did not even know I was looking how would I have known you when I saw you as I did time after time when you appeared to me as you did naked offering yourself entirely at that moment and you let me breathe you touch you taste you knowing no more than I did and...
David Foster Wallace's Kenyon commencement speech... →
lettyt:
monsterbeard:
thisislobster:
Yes, this is true. It’s now available for purchase.
FINALLY!
*Although I think this should be free and probably support pirating it.
This speech, which I haven’t actually heard out loud yet but will will will, is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read, and I must admit I’m only a nonfiction DFW fan, so I didn’t even start reading it as a...
a bright wall in a dark room.: Boogie Nights... →
I’M A STAR, I’M A STAR, I’M A STAR.
by Elizabeth Wilcox
When Boogie Nights came out, I was 14 years old, a freshman in high school. You can imagine what the 9th-grade locker-room talk about the movie was. From snatches of overheard conversations about Dirk Diggler (or, almost more often,…
“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born...”
– Pearl S. Buck
This, exactly.
June on the West Coast - Bright Eyes
If a song...
“Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.”
– W.H. Auden
Exploring Music's Hold on the Mind (New York... →
“There’s a neurologist in Boston, Gottfried Schlaug, who uses music therapy to return some language to stroke victims. He has them learn simple phrases by singing them. This has proved more effective than having them repeat spoken phrases, the traditional therapy. Schlaug’s work suggests that when the language part of the brain has been damaged, you can sometimes recruit the part that...
a note on originality:
In the second century B.C., Terence said, “There’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before.”
Ten years ago tonight, possibly at this very moment, my heart was a nervous wreck. I knew she’d say yes, that wasn’t what worried me. But I wanted it to be a moment we would always remember, something magical, the kind of thing your kids one day ask you to tell them about over and over again. The kind of thing that made her parents realize just how grown up and serious I was about...
