"Spirit of my silence, I can hear you." Sufjan
link to song here
Reading Room
Links (no more than one per day) of what I have most enjoyed reading (and sometimes listening to). -- Etan Kerr-Finell ...
Latest posts
"Seems like as good a time as any, to believe in the land of plenty." Bonny Light Horseman
song link here
Worshiping the Idol of Productive Output - Etan Kerr-Finell
Today is a bit of an outlier. Normally I share something I have read each day, but today I am sharing an essay I wrote recently. Thanks for reading, Etan -- AI and Creative Work, or Worshiping the Idol of Productive Output 1. In Jewish thought idol worship is primarily problematic and forbidden because it is a misnaming. It attributes credit inaccurately. There is no crocodile that controls the…
NYC Grocery store update
link here
" Dont be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time?" Ruefle
If your teachers suggest that your poems are sentimental, that is only the half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Dont be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time? Mary Ruefle
"she cannot take you seriously (sorry) for you are but a girl to her, despite your babies and shows and lovemaking and all of that. You are just a girl playing at life." Ruefle
If you are young and you are reading this, perhaps you will understand the gleam in the eye of any woman who is sixty, seventy, eighty, or ninety: she cannot take you seriously (sorry) for you are but a girl to her, despite your babies and shows and lovemaking and all of that. You are just a girl playing at life. You are just a girl on the edge of a great forest. You should be freighted but…
"red-eyed white mice wearing kimonos are kneeling at a low desk transcribing a book, while off in the corner naked black mice are devouring the pages of a previously transcribed book." - Ruefle
It reminded me of a nineteenth-century Japanese drawing I had once seen - Mice transcribing a book, by Kawanabe Kyosai - in which red-eyed white mice wearing kimonos are kneeling at a low desk transcribing a book, while off in the corner naked black mice are devouring the pages of a previously transcribed book. Mary Ruefle - My Private Property link to image here
“Do people like us read too many books about people like us?“
“Do people like us read too many books about people like us? “ From The Lisbon Traviata, Act II. Thank you to Tim Dunn especially and please check out the show if you are in the hudson valley. link here
"No image can replace the intuition [of being]" Bergson/Ruefle
No image can replace the intuition [of being], but many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized. Henri Bergson via Mary Ruefle
" Why did he promise me / that we would build ourselves / an ark all by ourselves / out in back of the house?"
WS Merwin