The faculty member
who complains the most
about the towering ignorance
of students today
is always the same faculty member
who hits reply-all
on every
fucking
message.
Notes on Creativity
Taken on the first bike ride of the year.
Kelpie
Kelpies are supernatural water horses that haunt Scotland’s lochs and rivers. They appear as a lost pony, often grey or white, and entice people to ride on their backs before taking them down to a watery grave.
via culloden battlefield
A boy, his dog, and their nap.
Somehow, in our culture, we’ve tacitly agreed to accept art as something less, something inessential; a weird thing a freaky few of us do, over in a corner; a sort of quaint paper-swan-making. But it seems to me that art is actually the most high-level thing the human mind can do; that the “brain on art” is at its most capacious and generous and dynamic; that the artistic mode of thought was given to us in order to guide us to higher ground in difficult times, to enable us to get better at empathy and truly complex thinking.
Being involved in art (whether as producer or recipient) reminds us, ritually, that this spacious part of our mind exists, that we are not meant to be (merely) beings in opposition to each other, fighting for limited resources, but are brothers and sisters at heart, capable of knowing one another’s experiences, and feeling genuine sympathy for one another. Art instructs us in how to get into that spacious mindset, and how to abide there.
-George Saunders, February newsletter
Quote
Hell was a place of remembering, each beautiful moment passed through the mind’s eye until it fell to the ground like a rotten mango, perfectly useless, uselessly perfect.
HOMEGOING, Yaa Gyasi
Quote
But it’s old news now. Once it would have been a year’s worth of news. But news right now is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff.
From Autumn by Ali Smith (via emilystjohnmandel)
Single Sentence Poem: Harakiri at the Book Club
When they asked me why there were so many
post-apocalyptic books and movies nowadays,
an answer popped into my head,
so I let it out into the air—
What if it’s wish fulfillment?
What if some part of us is sick to death
of the world and fantasizes
about clearing the deck?—
and it was met with silence,
until a woman said, Not me,
and then they were all saying, Not me, either,
I don’t think anyone, How sick
would you have to be, etcetera,
so maybe I am wrong,
but I think the mere fact that I proposed this answer
to a book club of Trustees and Visitors
who could snuff out my job like a candle
tells you everything you need to know
about how some of us
must have a death wish.
photo credit: ladies altered book club by elke glendenning
Via Flickr.
(Source: https://www.flickr.com/)
Single sentence poem #3: 2/10 DID NOT ENJOY WOULD NOT RECOMMEND
Some students don’t like
any damn thing at all—
not the reading,
not the mind-clearing technique you made them try,
not your stupid face,
and especially not your stupid attendance policy
(Like, why do I even have to be there? We’re just
going to do stupid stuff, anyway.)
—and you know this,
but still, sometimes
it wears you the fuck out,
because you love this stuff,
which makes you extra stupid,
because who has time to love a story
when you’ve got fifteen million other things
to do for other classes that are more important
than this one, so stop asking me to slow down, Professor,
it’s annoying, and you’re irrelevant to the real world and
goddammit,
you just made me late
for my next stupid class,
which has an even stupider
attendance policy
than yours.
photo credit: Brock Whittaker photography | flickr creative commons
Ross Love
“I love the random things that might happen (in Ross Hall),” says a kid in the Butler Collegian. “[L]ike someone, for some reason, dumps a can of shredded chicken into the shower, so once the drain clogs, a little piece of chicken bumps against your foot.”