Practice and Meditation

October 28, 2008
By James

Most of the time, “going to practice” means doing repetitive, tiring, difficult work to get what you really want: a win at your next game, an excellent piano recital performance, a better race time.

Ballet Theatre kids after a particuarly grueling run through.

For me - as an artist - going to practice entails repetitive, tiring, difficult work because I love it.

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Around the Block

October 27, 2008
By Ryan


The worst thing about being a writer is not being able to write. I mean being physically incapable of writing.

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Art Out of Reach

September 16, 2008
By James

Nobody goes to watch live dance anymore.

I mean, it’s difficult enough to find the time and money to catch a 7:15 movie, let alone a dance show that will only happen once or twice a year. At let’s be honest: there’s a lot of really poor dancing to be seen, and watching it is like going to a bad movie - you know you’re not going back to ever see that one again. And sometimes: it’s just too hard to understand. It’s music you’ve never heard on any of your five radio stations. Funny costumes - tutus? It’s hard to take in what’s important - why is there no instant replay? And how can you really appreciate it when it looks like they’re not working that hard?

Sometimes dance - and other art - pushes people away because only an elite few understand it. But that, to me, isn’t very good dance.

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Angels in the Digital Age

September 12, 2008
By Ryan

Light is crazy.

Is it a particle? A wave? Both? It has no mass, but can't escape a black hole's pull. I read a Wired article a while back about a scientist who shot light beams into a box and slowed them down to 15 MPH ... and then stopped them completely.

Some friends of mine and I played with light on a recent mini-road-trip up the coast. We didn't slow it down or anything, but we did create some pretty cool images.

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Neruda and Translation

August 30, 2008
By Bret

Now and then, I get in the mood to read poetry.

It doesn't happen frequently, and my knowledge of poetry is minimal, so I definitely can't claim to be an expert or even an enthusiast. However, I did get an urge to read poetry about a month ago, and I picked up the copy of the bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda's Odes to Common Things that I was given for Christmas last year.

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QUOTES

P.D. James on Modernity and Tradition

"We live in an age notable for a kind of fashionable silliness and imbued with a restless desire for change.

It sometimes seems that nothing old, nothing well-established, nothing which has evolved through centuries of experience and loving use escapes our urge to diminish, revise or abolish it.

Above all every organisation has to be relevant—a very fashionable word—to the needs of modern life, as if human beings in the twenty-first century are somehow fundamentally different in their needs and aspirations from all previous generations.

A country which ceases to value and learn from its history, neglects its language and literature, despises its traditions and is unified only by a common frenetic drive for getting and spending and for material wealth, will lose more than its nationhood; it will lose its soul."

--P.D. James, from “Through All the Changes Scenes of Life: Living with the Prayer Book”

Later Wittgenstein on Philosophy

"When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it."
--Ludwig Wittgenstein (via Fors Clavigera)

Dare Greatly

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

--Theodore Roosevelt, from his speech "Citizenship In A Republic"

Humility in the wrong place

"What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed....

...the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

–G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy

Make No Little Plans

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us."
–Daniel Burnham, architect of Chicago, quoted in Charles Moore, Daniel H. Burnham: Planner of Cities, II:147. (via Christ is Deeper Still)

Borges on Short Stories


“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”
–Jorge Luis Borges, from the preface to Ficciones

Strickler on Top Ten Lists

See full post for Yancey Strickler’s 2005 taxonomy of top ten music lists, as cited here.

Berry on Writing Poetry


“Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.”
–Wendell Berry, from How to be a Poet

Twain (?) on History


“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
—Attributed to Mark Twain

Lewis on God's Glory


“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
–C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Merwin on Writing


“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write”
—W.S. Merwin, Opening the Hand