"Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.
...Humans mate with beings who challenge their supremacy. They have conflict between mates, not because thier communication is inferior to ours, but because they commune with each other at all."
Xenocide, Orson Scott Card
.
.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
All Quiet on The Western Front
"Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades--words, words, words, but they hold the horror of the world." Erich Maria Remarque
"It will be like this too. If I am lucky, when the war is over and I come back here for good. I wil sit here just like this and look at my room and wait. I feel excited; but I do not want to be, for that is not right. I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, mameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait." pg 151
"It will be like this too. If I am lucky, when the war is over and I come back here for good. I wil sit here just like this and look at my room and wait. I feel excited; but I do not want to be, for that is not right. I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, mameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait." pg 151
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Highlights from Savannah
Jen Library- I don't have a picture yet, but there is a Jen Library. How cool is that!! This is the link for all you non-believers... Jen Library and a better picture of the sign on Flickr.
We saw the original metal film canister from Troop Beverly Hills (one of my favorite childhood movies) at Leopold's.
Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) owns half the town. literally. and we are thankful, because they are who helped spur/finance the restoration of the town.
St. John's Cathedral was pretty. No docent led tours of it :( The Baptismal font was GIGANTIC.
Originally, Catholicism wasn't allowed in Georgia, but they had an Anglican church and an Episcopalian church...and TWO African churches. They also had a John Wesley statue.
I love the large oaks that you can walk under, and the moss hanging off them. It's beautiful! Brittany said "You just like it because it's Spanish moss." hahaha.
Everything our tour guide said was "_____ is the 1st/oldest__________ in America/Georgia."
We visited the only Gothic Architecture style Synagogue in America. It was a little disconcerting. I kept thinking I'd see a stain glass window depicting Jesus or a station of the cross. The congregation is the 3rd oldest Jewish congregation in America.
She-crab soup!!!!!!!!
Rum Bisque Ice Cream!!!!!!
I'd almost like to come back to Savannah and just spend the whole week eating at every restaurant. That might get a leeetle expensive.
so Flannery O'Connor...
-according to our tour book, the house was only open on the weekends, so you can imagine my surprise and delight when it was open when we showed up!!
1. She started calling her parents by their first names when she was SIX.
2. She stopped playing with dolls when she was FOUR.
3. She wrote in her books at a young age, on the title page. "splendid first read" or "not a very good book"
4. The only fairy tales she liked were Grimm's.
5. She had a pet chicken that she taught to walk backwards.
http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=28819
and then she was on film for it!
6. She quit going to children's Mass and started going to adult latin Mass at age 6. When her school teachers found out, they told her parents she should be at the children's Mass, and Flannery said "I won't let the church dictate which service I go to!"' She was the only child in the adult latin Mass.
7. She didn't like other kids, but her mom forced her to have play dates.
8. She didn't care to spell right. About each of her classes she said "I would have gotten 100, but they marked me down for my spelling." On her report card that they showcased, spelling was her worst grade, 78, and algebra was her best! ha.
9. Her house was super skinny!!! But it had a fabulous door with multicolored glass.
10. She made her "friends" read her books out loud, or her writings out loud. That was her favorite activity, and she often made them reread parts she liked.
11. The tour guide said we should read her books out loud, because that's how she wrote them, saying all the words out loud while writing them down.
12. The bed set that her parents got when they were married was two tiny pine beds. They almost looked child sized. eeek. Later, their cousin Katie bought them a real bed.
ok. that's all :)
Highlights from the beach include:
My brother getting stung by a sting ray.
Catching 56 sand dollars.
The children that are so precocious and talk to strangers, i.e. me.
Running into one of my sister's college friends! (She knew he was on the island, but there are 12 miles of beach, what are the odds?!)
The white sand blowing over the hard wet sand like snow flurries
Kicking a soccer ball WITH the wind. It went faster than we could run! eeek.
The 230498309248 families getting their family pictures taken on the beach every night wearing all white. Really, it's only 10-15 families, but gracious me, it seems like an epidemic.
If you have never read "I am the Cheese" by Robert Cormier, you should.
ok. that's really all.
We saw the original metal film canister from Troop Beverly Hills (one of my favorite childhood movies) at Leopold's.
Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) owns half the town. literally. and we are thankful, because they are who helped spur/finance the restoration of the town.
St. John's Cathedral was pretty. No docent led tours of it :( The Baptismal font was GIGANTIC.
Originally, Catholicism wasn't allowed in Georgia, but they had an Anglican church and an Episcopalian church...and TWO African churches. They also had a John Wesley statue.
I love the large oaks that you can walk under, and the moss hanging off them. It's beautiful! Brittany said "You just like it because it's Spanish moss." hahaha.
Everything our tour guide said was "_____ is the 1st/oldest__________ in America/Georgia."
We visited the only Gothic Architecture style Synagogue in America. It was a little disconcerting. I kept thinking I'd see a stain glass window depicting Jesus or a station of the cross. The congregation is the 3rd oldest Jewish congregation in America.
She-crab soup!!!!!!!!
Rum Bisque Ice Cream!!!!!!
I'd almost like to come back to Savannah and just spend the whole week eating at every restaurant. That might get a leeetle expensive.
so Flannery O'Connor...
-according to our tour book, the house was only open on the weekends, so you can imagine my surprise and delight when it was open when we showed up!!
1. She started calling her parents by their first names when she was SIX.
2. She stopped playing with dolls when she was FOUR.
3. She wrote in her books at a young age, on the title page. "splendid first read" or "not a very good book"
4. The only fairy tales she liked were Grimm's.
5. She had a pet chicken that she taught to walk backwards.
http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=28819
and then she was on film for it!
6. She quit going to children's Mass and started going to adult latin Mass at age 6. When her school teachers found out, they told her parents she should be at the children's Mass, and Flannery said "I won't let the church dictate which service I go to!"' She was the only child in the adult latin Mass.
7. She didn't like other kids, but her mom forced her to have play dates.
8. She didn't care to spell right. About each of her classes she said "I would have gotten 100, but they marked me down for my spelling." On her report card that they showcased, spelling was her worst grade, 78, and algebra was her best! ha.
9. Her house was super skinny!!! But it had a fabulous door with multicolored glass.
10. She made her "friends" read her books out loud, or her writings out loud. That was her favorite activity, and she often made them reread parts she liked.
11. The tour guide said we should read her books out loud, because that's how she wrote them, saying all the words out loud while writing them down.
12. The bed set that her parents got when they were married was two tiny pine beds. They almost looked child sized. eeek. Later, their cousin Katie bought them a real bed.
ok. that's all :)
Highlights from the beach include:
My brother getting stung by a sting ray.
Catching 56 sand dollars.
The children that are so precocious and talk to strangers, i.e. me.
Running into one of my sister's college friends! (She knew he was on the island, but there are 12 miles of beach, what are the odds?!)
The white sand blowing over the hard wet sand like snow flurries
Kicking a soccer ball WITH the wind. It went faster than we could run! eeek.
The 230498309248 families getting their family pictures taken on the beach every night wearing all white. Really, it's only 10-15 families, but gracious me, it seems like an epidemic.
If you have never read "I am the Cheese" by Robert Cormier, you should.
ok. that's really all.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Communication
This is just a funny little quote from That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis which I read a couple months ago... (of course, it is also a gross generalization)
"The cardinal difficulty," said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, 'Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' The female for this is, 'Put that in the other one in there.' And then if you ask them, 'in where?' they say, 'in there, of course.' There is consequently a phatic hiatus."
"The cardinal difficulty," said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, 'Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' The female for this is, 'Put that in the other one in there.' And then if you ask them, 'in where?' they say, 'in there, of course.' There is consequently a phatic hiatus."
Saturday, May 28, 2011
For Whom the Bell Tolls- Quotes
There were a couple of my favorite quotes from Ernest Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls...
"Why do you speak in English?" Pablo asked.
"I don't know," Robert Jordan said. "When I get very tired sometimes I speak english. Or when I get very disgusted. Or baffled, say. when I get highly baffled I just talk English to hear the sound of it. It's a reassuring noise. You ought to try it sometime."
"What do you say, Ingles?" Pilar said. "It sounds very interesting but I do not undersand."
"Nothing," Robert Jordan said. "I said 'nothing' in English."
"Well then, talk Spanish, " Pilar said, "It's shorter and simpler in Spanish."
"Let me finish, you mule," Pilar said to him. "He teaches Spanish to Americans. North Americans."
"Can they not speak Spanish?" Fernando asked. "South Americans can." (16.171-2
"Why do you speak in English?" Pablo asked.
"I don't know," Robert Jordan said. "When I get very tired sometimes I speak english. Or when I get very disgusted. Or baffled, say. when I get highly baffled I just talk English to hear the sound of it. It's a reassuring noise. You ought to try it sometime."
"What do you say, Ingles?" Pilar said. "It sounds very interesting but I do not undersand."
"Nothing," Robert Jordan said. "I said 'nothing' in English."
"Well then, talk Spanish, " Pilar said, "It's shorter and simpler in Spanish."
"Let me finish, you mule," Pilar said to him. "He teaches Spanish to Americans. North Americans."
"Can they not speak Spanish?" Fernando asked. "South Americans can." (16.171-2
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners
Quotes on Writing and Art from Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners.
The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.
And if the student finds that this is not to his taste?
Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibilty. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us. Usually the artist has to suffer certain deprivations in order to use his gift with integrity. Art is a virtue of the practical intellect, and the practice of any virtue demands a certain asceticism and a very definite leaving-behind of the niggardly part of the ego. The writer has to judge himself with a stranger's eye and a stranger's severity. The prophet in him has to see the freak. No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.
I think it is usually some form of self-inflation that destroys the free use of a gift. This may be the pride of the reformer or the theorist, or it may only be that simple-minded self-appreciation which uses its own sincerity as a standard of truth. If you have read the very vocal writers from San Fran, you may have got the impression that the first thing you must do in order to be an artist is to loose yourself from the bonds of reason, and thereafter, anything that rolls off the topic of your head will be of great value. Anyone's unrestrained feelings are considered worth listening ot because they are unrestrained and because they are feelings.
St. Thomas called art "reason in making." This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, this is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artistst uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth.
If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.
The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.
And if the student finds that this is not to his taste?
Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibilty. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us. Usually the artist has to suffer certain deprivations in order to use his gift with integrity. Art is a virtue of the practical intellect, and the practice of any virtue demands a certain asceticism and a very definite leaving-behind of the niggardly part of the ego. The writer has to judge himself with a stranger's eye and a stranger's severity. The prophet in him has to see the freak. No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.
I think it is usually some form of self-inflation that destroys the free use of a gift. This may be the pride of the reformer or the theorist, or it may only be that simple-minded self-appreciation which uses its own sincerity as a standard of truth. If you have read the very vocal writers from San Fran, you may have got the impression that the first thing you must do in order to be an artist is to loose yourself from the bonds of reason, and thereafter, anything that rolls off the topic of your head will be of great value. Anyone's unrestrained feelings are considered worth listening ot because they are unrestrained and because they are feelings.
St. Thomas called art "reason in making." This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, this is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artistst uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth.
If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Willa Cather Quotes
These were some of my favorite parts from her book, Death Comes for the Archbishop.
pg 289 Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
On Death pg 267 "...You should not be discouraged; one does not die of a cold." The old man smiled. "I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived."
On Farming and Wilderness pg 273 He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost the lightness, that dry aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.
On the Death Bed pg 288 He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories. He remembered his winters with his cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building of his Cathedral. He was soon to have done with the calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible. Sometimes, when M or B came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life- some part of which they knew nothing. When the occasion warranted he could return to the present. But there was not much present left; ....only the minor characters of his life remained in present time.
pg 289 Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
On Death pg 267 "...You should not be discouraged; one does not die of a cold." The old man smiled. "I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived."
On Farming and Wilderness pg 273 He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost the lightness, that dry aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.
On the Death Bed pg 288 He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories. He remembered his winters with his cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building of his Cathedral. He was soon to have done with the calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible. Sometimes, when M or B came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life- some part of which they knew nothing. When the occasion warranted he could return to the present. But there was not much present left; ....only the minor characters of his life remained in present time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)