Conference Tacit

• 2010-11-11

  

  Mother, you can never imagine how a battlefield looks. It sure looks horrible. Look for my picture because I helped put up the flag. Please don’t worry and write.

  - Franklin Sousley

• 2010-10-25

  

  Still tell it like it is.

• 2010-10-21

  Let no one be dissatisfied with his own,
  To despair will bring no advantage.
  No man sees what supports him…

  — Taliesin

• 2010-06-27

  

  I’ve always been more than a little frightened of Emily Dickinson. Her totemically powerful yet bewildering lines and her storied seclusion made me wary of diving in too deeply; I often suspected her sea had no floor.

  And while “Abyss has no Biographer,” that hasn’t stopped Lyndall Gordon from sounding Dickinson’s depths. Reading The Nation’s review of Lives Like Loaded Guns, though, I think my earlier feelings are still justified.

• 2010-06-20

  

  José Saramago was laid to rest today in Lisbon.

  From The Gospel According to Jesus Christ:

  Jesus is dying slowly, life ebbing from him, ebbing, when suddenly the heavens overhead open wide and God appears … His words resound throughout the earth, This is My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. Jesus realized then that he had been tricked, as the lamb led to sacrifice is tricked, and that his life had been planned for death from the very beginning. Remembering the river of blood and suffering that would flow from his side and flood the globe, he called out to the open sky, where God could be seen smiling, Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done. Then he began expiring in the midst of a dream. He found himself back in Nazareth and saw his father shrugging his shoulders and smiling as he told him, Just as I cannot ask you all the questions, neither can you give me all the answers.

• 2010-06-02

  If I wanted to, I’d write a book, but it would take some time
  Or spend my life writing poetry, thinking of words that had to rhyme

  Television Personalities, “The Painted Word”

• 2010-05-31

  Agricola had to deal with people living in isolation and ignorance, and therefore prone to fight; and his object was to accustom them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities. He therefore gave private encouragement and official assistance to the building of temples, public squares, and good houses. He praised the energetic and scolded the slack; and competition for honor proved as effective as compulsion. Furthermore, he educated the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts, and expressed a preference for British ability as compared with the trained skills of the Gauls …. And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptations of arcades, baths, and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as “civilization,” when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.

  - Tacitus, Agricola

• 2010-05-29

  Who Was That Unmasked Man?

  

  From a recent New Yorker: Adam Gopnik on the search for Jesus.

  The article examines current trends in Gospel analysis, from the blatantly evangelical to the existentially skeptical (Earl Doherty claims many Biblical references to a “Jesus Christ” are only metaphorical, with Paul serving as the concept’s chief amanuensis). The director of Starship Troopers and RoboCop has his own view, too.

  These widely ranged readings of 2,000-year-old texts brought to mind what Gertrude Stein said upon returning to her hometown after thirty years: there is no there there.

• 2010-05-23

  Freedom, Revolt, and Love

  The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.

  David Foster Wallace, at Kenyon College, in a commencement speech to the graduating class of 2005.

• 2010-05-15

  

  The Portrait Machine is a project by Carlo Van de Roer that uses a rare Polaroid device to reveal auras in portraiture.

  By ostensibly capturing some hidden essence of the sitter, the camera becomes a privileged partner in the act of creation, “bypass[ing] the control of the photographer and subject in making the portrait.”

  (pictured above: Richard Kern and Martynka Wawrzyniak)