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Terreson Profile
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To start off the game


Here is something from a Jimmy Buffet song I first heard in '88. He almost exactly quoted Samuel Clemens and then ended the song with the words, "Thanks, Mark." To me it speaks to an existential moment of truth. One I've met in so many relationships (to family, lovers, friends, and country), even online.

"Be good and you will be lonesome.
Be lonesome and you will be free.
Live a lie and you will live to regret it.
That's what livin' is to me."

(a Buffet song line.)

Here is another one. A (formerly East German) film director made a movie about East Germany's secret police, the Stazi, and how it impacted individuals, families, love relationships, and members of the police itself. In a radio interview I heard him say this: "Ideology makes people incredibly lonely."

Here is a third one, from that French beauty whose bed I sure wish I could have shared, Colette: "Death has never interested me. Not even my own."

A fourth one, my own: Poetry is neither comment, complaint, or consolation. It is the seizure and the shiver.

Shall we play?

Tere
Nov/3/2008, 8:17 pm Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
Dragon59 Profile
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Re: To start off the game


Yesterday I picked up at the Goodwill a copy of "The Expanded Quotable Einstein," ed. by Alice Calaprice. Nearly 400 pages of quips, many aphoristic. Jung would comment on the timing. You could consult this volume via bibliomancy, the art of opening to a random page as an act of divination, and find wisdom for life, and for politics, quite regularly.

"if what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, then it is science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively, then it is art."
—Uncle Albert

---
www.arthurdurkee.net
lcgallery.tv
artdurkee.blogspot.com
ruralplainsgay.blogspot.com
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Patricia Jones Profile
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Re: To start off the game


Odd that you should mention Uncle Albert, Dragon. I happened upon this quote of his last week. I had never read it before and found it very comforting...almost as if I was supposed to find it last week.

"Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit not knowing why. From the standpoint of daily life there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others, for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected. My inner and outer life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received."

~ Albert Einstein 1879-1955~

Pat

---
"Don't you worry--I ain't evil, I'm just bad".
~Chris Smither~
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Dragon59 Profile
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Re: To start off the game


"I feel myself so much a part of everything living that I am not the least concerned with the beginning or ending of the concrete existence of any one person in this eternal flow."
—Uncle Albert

---
www.arthurdurkee.net
lcgallery.tv
artdurkee.blogspot.com
ruralplainsgay.blogspot.com
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Patricia Jones Profile
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"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

~Uncle Albert

---
"Don't you worry--I ain't evil, I'm just bad".
~Chris Smither~
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Terreson Profile
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Re: To start off the game


Since we are running with Einstein here is a paraphrase of something he said.

'There are two basic views of the universe. It is either a friendly place or it is an unfriendly place.'

Tere
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Terreson Profile
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Re: To start off the game


"I should say that we might call the poet's piety a 'natural' piety, his gift being for finding the natural world not merely mechanical but hospitable to the moral Universals."

John Crowe Ransom.

Tere
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Terreson Profile
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"If you want to change the world you need to change your metaphors."

Joseph Campbell to Bill Moyers.

Tere
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"He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help."

Abe Lincoln
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"I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions."

Descartes

(is it possible to find this intriguing, admirable and hilarious, all at the same time?)
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Terreson Profile
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Re: To start off the game


Chrisfriend, I am loving your last post.

Tere
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Terreson Profile
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Re: To start off the game


Here is something Stendhal said in his "Memoirs of Egotism."

"The genius of poetry is dead, but the demon of suspicion has come into the world. I am firmly convinced that the only anti-dote for this, the only thing that might make the reader forget the eternal I of the author, is complete sincerity."

I think this is why I fundamentally stand contra the Lang Po program. Posturing about killing off the author, in my view, is the most complete form of insincerity.

Tere
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Terreson Profile
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"It is death to love a poet, be a poet, or curse a poet."

Robert Graves

Tere
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Re: To start off the game


"What has no shadow has no strength to live."

Czeslaw Milosz

"Thought is a garment and the soul's a bride
That cannot in that trash and tinsel hide:"

Yeats
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Terreson Profile
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Re: To start off the game


Proverb For A Great Scoundrel

          The fox knows many tricks,
the hedgehog only one. A good one.


Archilocus
(8th C. B.C. Greek poet)

Tere
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Terreson Profile
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Re: To start off the game


Here are two, complimenting bon mots.

"Death has never interested me, not even my own." Colette.

"Whoever says death is preferable to life is full of !@#$." An old woman in a lucid moment between brain tumor induced seizures.

Tere
Dec/21/2008, 5:56 pm Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
Patricia Jones Profile
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Re: To start off the game


A K-mart garden department ad that has been on my refrigerator door for twenty plus years:

Life is too short to wait in line.
Or to miss a sunrise or a chance to cheer.
We only have so many opportunities
to go to the park or to hear
babies laugh. We only get so many springs.
Life is too short not to notice shapes
of clouds or to ever spend a day without flowers.

Pat

---
"Don't you worry--I ain't evil, I'm just bad".
~Chris Smither~
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Katlin Profile
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I came upon this William Stafford poem online. It's one I like and hadn't read in a while:
 
A Ritual To Read To Each Other
 
If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

 
To read the rest, go here:

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-ritual-to-read-to-each-other/
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Terreson Profile
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Oh, I do enjoy this thread. The citations say as much about the recorder as they say about the source, telling us all what is important to each of us.

Studs Terkel is a hero of mine. Old school liberal who always puts me in mind of Carl Sandburg.

So Studs is having conversation with a married couple who, in concert, say they are against unions and liberals. Studs turns to the man and asks, "Does your job require you work more than eight hour days?" The man says, "No." Studs replies, "You have the unions to thank for that." He then turns to the woman and asks, "Do you vote come election time?" The woman says that she does. Studs replies, "You have liberals to thank for that."

It is true, you know. Without the labor movement there would be no eight hour work day, no notion of workers rights. In '00 and again in '04 conservatives showed the extent to which they are willing to go to disenfranchise voters.

Tere
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Katlin Profile
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I was looking for a Hemingway quote this morning that a friend mentioned to me. I couldn't find it, but I did find many others:

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/ernest_hemingway.html
 

Last edited by Katlin, Jan/3/2009, 12:24 pm
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Terreson Profile
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Katfriend, thanks. These are really good. For me at least they go to the core of Hemingway's essential stance. His was fundamentally a heroicly tragic vision. It is like, for him, in the end humanity must lose the last battle(s), but it can't matter, since, all that matters is how well you comport yourself on the battlefield(s).

There is a part of me that feels in my gut he was right. I got an old poem about Hemingway in which I portray him as a sensitive trapped in a strong man's body. Maybe I'll show it sometime. Thanks again.

Tere
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ChrisD1 Profile
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Kait,

I've been a fan of Stafford for a long time but
never seen this poem. Thanks. Last 3 lines of that second strophe. Wow..."a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break..."

and Terkel and Hemingway, nice to be reminded of these guys.

Chris
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Terreson Profile
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Yah. What Chrisfriend says about the Stafford line. So easy and quick to sever in a moment's pique what likely took years to establish. Trust and friendship. That is what comes through for me, at least.

Tere
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Terreson Profile
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When you are young magic moments come naturally, quickly upon the heels of each other, and you tend to take them for granted.

The older you get the less frequently your magic moments appear. You wonder why until it finally comes to you. You have sinned against nature. Whether the world is too much with you, your office, your responsibilities, your name, or yourself. And your sin against nature amounts to this: you let yourself get wiser.

The only antidote is unwisdom.

Terreson
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Terreson Profile
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Down in the Atchafalaya, and duck hunting, Boudreaux says to Big Dawg, "what you tinkin about?" Big Dawg stops, then says, "Why, I'm tinkin about women." After another measured pause with both boys stepping out of their pirogue for the duck blind, Boudreaux says, "Why you want to go do that? They just go'in to give you the blues."

Tere
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GaryBFitzgerald Profile
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Just to keep things from getting a little too depressing:



Boudreaux, a Cajun highlander from Rapides Parish in central Louisiana,
was an older, single gentleman, who was born and raised a Baptist,
living in South Louisiana.
 

Each Friday night after work, he would fire up his outdoor grill and
cook a big steak.
 

Now, all of Boudreaux's neighbors were Catholic... and since it was
Lent, they were forbidden from eating meat on Fridays. The delicious
aroma from the grilled steaks was causing such a problem for the
Catholic faithful that they finally talked to their priest.
 

The priest came to visit Boudreaux, and suggested that Boudreaux convert
to Catholicism. After several classes and much study,
Boudreaux attended Mass...and as the priest sprinkled holy water over
him, he said, "You were born a Baptist and raised a Baptist, but now you
are Catholic."
 

Boudreaux's neighbors were greatly relieved, until Friday night arrived,
and the wonderful aroma of grilling steak filled the neighborhood. The
priest was called immediately by the neighbors and, as he rushed into
Boudreaux's yard, clutching a rosary and prepared to scold him, he
stopped in amazement and watched. There stood Boudreaux, clutching a
small bottle of water which he carefully sprinkled over the grilling
meat, and chanted: "You wuz born a cow, and you wuz raised a cow, but
now you is a catfish."
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ChrisD1 Profile
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Good ones, you guys.

Chris
Jan/8/2009, 2:35 pm Link to this post Send Email to ChrisD1   Send PM to ChrisD1
 
Terreson Profile
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Got the immediate chuckle, Gary. Good on you.

Big Dawg he go pick up Boudreaux at the bus station. Boudreaux now famous because he travel the world. He get to Nashville, Jacksonville, Brownsville. Big Dawg he say to Boudreaux, "Boudreaux, what you know now?" Boudreaux he say, "I know two tings. The world is full of squirrels and you got to relate." Then Boudreaux pause, he go quiet. Big Dawg say, "And what else you know?" Boudreaux say, "No matta what you do, Big Dawg, take hold of the situation my the smooth handle."

Tere
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GaryBFitzgerald Profile
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Re: To start off the game


Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Last edited by GaryBFitzgerald, Jan/14/2009, 10:43 pm
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