~ Machiavelli
The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. — Neil Gaiman
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together. — Margaret Atwood
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning. — Maya Angelou
I learned patience, perseverance, and dedication. Now I really know myself, and I know my voice. It's a voice of pain and victory. — Anthony Hamilton
Sir Roger Scuton: Last days of a giant | Mark Dooley | The CriticDuring our last weekend together, I watched in silent grief as he began to rise ‘above the wind of contingency that blows through the natural world’. In a way, he had already passed through the window of our empirical world to that ‘other sphere’ about which he had so often wrote so beautifully and persuasively.
He was dying, yet he was also rising to assume the transcendental standpoint which, he believed, was the answer and the solution to every form of pseudoscience. Whether it was aiding dissidents in Communist Czechoslovakia or abandoning the academy for a life of farming and writing, Scruton had always given concrete expression to his ideals. In his own life, he had always given witness to what he believed in and resolutely fought for. And now, as he approached the end, he was showing us how to transcend suffering by finding meaning in it. ‘I not only learned things about the world, but I absorbed them to the point where they became part of who I am,’ he said. One of those things was the deep mystery at the heart of each person – the fact that we are in the world but not of it.
Difficult Conversations Worksheet By Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen, Northern Illinois University, Human Resources Services
“Every Difficult Conversation consists of Three Conversations: * The What Happened? Conversation * The Feeling Conversation * The Identity Conversation *”
Assange was meeting his lawyer. He didn't know there were microphones in the room
Julian Assange's conversations, including legally privileged meetings with Australian lawyers Geoffrey Robertson, Jennifer Robinson and Melinda Taylor, were secretly recorded inside his London embassy home.
Does artistic merit cancel wickedness? Can the art be considered separately from the artist? Surely not. To appreciate the work of Rembrandt, for instance, is to see and to feel something of him, and in my case to feel a strong personal liking across the centuries.
Woman charged over alleged $9 million fraud syndicate targeting Thai-Australian communities
On Friday morning, police arrested the woman and seized 15 pairs of high-end shoes, designer handbags, mobile phones and electronic devices from a unit in Strathfield South.
'Ignoring it doesn't solve the problem': Mother posts story of son's relentless bullying to Facebook
Quaden Bayles's mother posted a video of her distraught son after relentless bullying, which has now been viewed millions of times, prompting an outpouring of support from "all around the world".-
Bumblebees can create mental imagery, a ‘building block of consciousness’, study suggests abc.net.auFossil-Fuel Production May Be Responsible For Much More Atmospheric Methane Than Scientists Thought BloombergFrance Shuts Down Oldest Reactors, But Nuclear Power Still ReignsAgence France-Presse
“Look, reader, though I do not know you, I love you so much that if I could hold you in my hands, I would open up your breast and in the centre of your heart I would make a wound and into it I would put vinegar and salt, so that you might never rest again, and would live in continual anxiety and endless longing.”
– Unamuno, Life of Don Quixote and Sancho
“The unhealed wound pressures the individual into seeking a cure, to be in constant, passionate pursuit of authentic existence. Climacus’ “continual striving” is Unamuno’s “endless longing.”
– Jon B. Stewart, Kierkegaard and Existentialism
‘With Kafka everything was permeated by his terror of contact. His pain was in the intellectual sphere; he portrayed the battle of ideas, of conflicting feelings. He found himself on a hopeless search for the closeness of others, he dreamt of a community, a reprieve, a reconciliations and constantly he had before him the unattainable, the impossible,’
Peter Weiss, Leavetaking and Vanishing Point, p.246
With the news that an English translation of the second volume of Peter Weiss’s three-volume The Aesthetics of Resistance is finally in sight comes a personal reminder that I must make a further attempt to scale the first volume.
In preparation I’m reading Ian Hilton’s monograph, Peter Weiss: A Search for Affinities. It’s part of a small set I’ve started collecting of Oswald Woolf’s Modern German Authors series, which also include monographs on Ilse Aichinger, Peter Handke, Gottfried Benn and Johannes Bobrowski, all writers of interest.
It seems from the essays in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs that Gerald Murnane is a writer that writes for his own pleasure and necessity. Murnane describes himself as a technical writer who is compelled to find words to explore the contours of his thoughts, a phrase he finds in Herbert Read’s English Prose Style, explaining that it “is a magical phrase for me. It has helped me in times of trouble in the way that phrases from the Bible or from Karl Marx probably help other people.”
My reading is obsessive by nature, often sending me into what is now a frequent pattern of reading a writer until exhausting all available work, reading some secondary material and, in some cases, reading the books that they acknowledge as influences. An earlier version of my reading self read Barley Patch nine years ago and, though I recall appreciating Murnane’s evident pleasure at playing with language, the book failed to trigger the sort of obsession I’ve experienced with Virginia Woolf, Dante, J. M. Coetzee, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Denton Welch, Christa Wolf, or Clarice Lispector. Triggering such an obsession required, firstly, for me to be the reader I am today, and secondly the essays in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs.
What I find in Murnane’s essays is not just a writer that inspires a reader to reflect on existential questions, part of why I read what I read, but also a writer that opens blissful landscapes where I find colossal, quiet spaces. Murnane describes his own discovery of such spaces in discovering Jack Kerouac’s On The Road: “The book was like a blow to the head that wipes out all memory of the recent past. For six months after I first read it I could hardly remember the person I had been beforehand. For six months I believed I had all the space I needed.” It is from experiences like this that my love of literature comes, why I discover ecstatic spaces from human beings that I am never likely to meet, but considers companions in navigating this often ghastly world around me.
Gerald Murnane’s Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs
This interview with living legend Roger Angell, whose writing first appeared in the New Yorker in 1944 and is still writing for them at the age of 99, is full of gems like this one, when he interview Benny Goodman as a high schooler:
Then in high school, at Pomfret, I tried out for the school newspaper, and one of the first people I interviewed was Benny Goodman. I was fourteen or fifteen, and I went to the Madhattan Room, at the Hotel Pennsylvania, where he was playing, and one of the people there was S.J. Perelman, a young humor writer my mother knew, and he knew Benny Goodman.I asked Benny Goodman if I could interview him, and he said, “Come to my hotel room tomorrow, at one in the afternoon.” So I went up at one and rang his bell and rang it and rang it, and then he came to the door wearing his jockey shorts and his eyeglasses, very sleepy. I’d woken him up. My lede on the story was “Great bandleaders get to sleep late.”
And this one, about Joseph Mitchell:
The thing about Joe Mitchell is that he knew everything. No subject escaped him, from James Joyce to horse breeding, backcountry life, culture. A.J. Liebling, his close friend and colleague, resented this. So one day Liebling is wandering around Sixth Avenue — it still had the elevated track — and there was a little taxidermy shop under the subway, and he goes in and finds a little set of bones. The owner says, “These are very interesting. They’re the bones of a young male opossum, which has a bone in its penis.” Liebling buys this collection of bones for six dollars and brings it over to the office wrapped up in a paper bag. Mitchell is typing. Liebling knocks on the door, comes in, unwraps the package, and puts it on the table. Mitchell looks at it and says, “Pecker bone of a young male opossum — anything you want to know about that?”