Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Friday, February 22, 2013
"We're All In This Together"
Check out this interview John Stewart did with financial writer Helaine Olen in regards to investment culture and its consequences:
Helaine Olen on The Daily Show.
Make sure you watch all three parts! I'm thinking hers might be a book to pick up.
Cheers,
--CQ
Helaine Olen on The Daily Show.
Make sure you watch all three parts! I'm thinking hers might be a book to pick up.
Cheers,
--CQ
Monday, February 11, 2013
Right Train / Right Time
From NPR's Picture Show Blog: 100 Words: In A Russian Arctic City.
At any point in time, we are at a confluence of sorts. That is to say, at every moment in our lives, we are taking in and processing multiple stimuli, which sounds awfully clinical, but there is a great deal of humanity at work as well. We hear the rush of the train in the distance. We feel the wind kick up dirt around our ankles on the platform. We watch a child, wide-eyed, watching the world around her then out of wonder and fear reach up for her mother's hand. We feel the softness of our clothes against our skin, but are barely, if at all, conscious of them until something's out of place. We see the numbers and hands on the clock face and it gives us a sense of order. We catch ourselves, and wonder why we're watching/thinking what we are.
The human part is what we do with it all--what we make of it. What does it all mean, man? On some level, we process no differently than a cat on the windowsill, watching the birds outside, feeling hungry. But the cat isn't going to make conjectures about the emotional state of said birds. He isn't going to wonder why he's in that particular window, watching those particular birds.
In our reading life, too, are we always at a nexus. What we've read before informs what we're reading now, and if we're reading multiple books at the same time, it's no wonder those things come to strangely (and then again, not-so-strangely) inform one another. And of course, this thinking extends well beyond the reading life to the entire artistic life, then even further to life as a whole.
I worry, in times like these, that I only make sense to myself. It's a matter of finding the right words. I feel like we all know these things, somewhere in our bones, but it's a matter of being reminded of them. Maybe that's what artists, in fact, are--The Great Reminders.
When I was an undergrad, in a poetry class we talked about Dave Etter's "A House by the Tracks." I can find neither train nor track of this poem online, so here's a snippet from me own personal hard-copy archives (Thanks, DC):
Snow falls, stops, starts again.
Santa Fe Wabash Seaboard
The freight train earth cracks in two.
Nickel Plate Nickel Plate
There are curses on the courthouse wind.
B&O L&N
South of town a farmer has been shot
by a hunter with a Jim Beam face.
Illinois Central Illinois Central
(piggyback piggyback)
. . .
I could make some very human conjectures as to why this poem has always stayed with me, but for our purposes here, suffice to say it first implanted the idea Ruefle mentions of developing consciousness coinciding with the perfect ripeness for a particular book/poem/sentence/photo/painting/moment. Etter uses passing trains to punctuate the speaker's lines, and the result is exactly what it had to be for the poem to be successful (which, as Richard Hugo would point out, is complete nonsense but also true).
The point, to which I'm always long on getting, is: sometimes, we find the Right Train at the Right Time.
Let's get back to those photos on the way to and in Vorkuta, Russia. The piece as whole, the photographer says, has a great deal to do with bearing witness to a painful past (my interpretation of his 100 words). Here, I'll enter, saying Yes, we all must bear witness to an often painful past, and that past informs our present and likely our future. The present moment is the intersection of that past with everything currently happening around us and in us, and the interplay of those things cannot help but affect what will come next.
And now, we're going to bring in The Dude. Because what isn't The Dude relevant to?
I've been reading The Dude and the Zen Master, and it has proved to be the Right Train for me at this particular moment in time, with all its connections, implications, and extensions. A good deal of what I've read so far has been about the vehicles we use to move through life (how fucking appropriate, right?). I want to share with you some passages from pages 37-39:
Jeff: So even if you're dealing with a topic that's not joyful, that's painful or sad, or whatever, if you approach it out of a joyful, generous, loving place, then everything comes out in a freer way.
And not too much later, Bernie comes in:
No matter how hard we try, situations come up that we'll want to separate from and leave behind us.
But if you are going somewhere else, let me say this much: At least change the boat and the oars. Say I get to the other side, what do I do? Well, I got here thanks to this beautiful boat with this set of oars, so I'll just hold on to them and carry them wherever I go. Isn't that weird? Now I've got the burden of carrying around whatever got me here.
Holy fuck. Mind = Blown.
But I knew this. I've learned it before. And I'm always having to relearn it.
Be reminded of it.
The toppled train car on the way to Vorkuta, surrounded by the bones of the people who built the tracks.
My own not-so-beautiful, rickety boat full of holes I'm always scrambling to patch with what feels like limited resources, surrounded by miles and miles of open water.
Why would we choose to carry these things with us? Because it's so damn hard to let go. We like to hold on to what got us here, safe and familiar, and we could go through our lives without ever having to learn how to use a new vehicle.
Then, we break down. And we end up staying in one place.
So do we abandon the things that got us here? Maybe in some cases, for our survival, we have to. We can't carry the falling-to-pieces boat over the mountains by ourselves, stopping every few feet to pick up the scraps and place them back in the hull. I'll fix it, we tell ourselves. You'll see. One day, I'll be able to fix it.
Maybe what we really need to do when the boat is falling apart is let it go, let it rest beside the water we just crossed and find another way of moving through the next part of our journey, where we may need a train or car or bike. Or maybe, just our own two feet. And a friend to talk with, with whom to kill the time. Maybe once it's off our backs, we can stop seeing only the splinters and holes. We can see it for essentially all it is--what got us to where we are now. It needn't be more than that.
I don't know if all of this would have meant what it means to me if certain things weren't swirling in my atmosphere. Then again, maybe we're always at the perfect ripeness, the right state of consciousness, to find the meaning we need to:
We just have to be reminded of it.
So/ Erie Lackawanna
--CQ
At any point in time, we are at a confluence of sorts. That is to say, at every moment in our lives, we are taking in and processing multiple stimuli, which sounds awfully clinical, but there is a great deal of humanity at work as well. We hear the rush of the train in the distance. We feel the wind kick up dirt around our ankles on the platform. We watch a child, wide-eyed, watching the world around her then out of wonder and fear reach up for her mother's hand. We feel the softness of our clothes against our skin, but are barely, if at all, conscious of them until something's out of place. We see the numbers and hands on the clock face and it gives us a sense of order. We catch ourselves, and wonder why we're watching/thinking what we are.
The human part is what we do with it all--what we make of it. What does it all mean, man? On some level, we process no differently than a cat on the windowsill, watching the birds outside, feeling hungry. But the cat isn't going to make conjectures about the emotional state of said birds. He isn't going to wonder why he's in that particular window, watching those particular birds.
In our reading life, too, are we always at a nexus. What we've read before informs what we're reading now, and if we're reading multiple books at the same time, it's no wonder those things come to strangely (and then again, not-so-strangely) inform one another. And of course, this thinking extends well beyond the reading life to the entire artistic life, then even further to life as a whole.
I worry, in times like these, that I only make sense to myself. It's a matter of finding the right words. I feel like we all know these things, somewhere in our bones, but it's a matter of being reminded of them. Maybe that's what artists, in fact, are--The Great Reminders.
When I was an undergrad, in a poetry class we talked about Dave Etter's "A House by the Tracks." I can find neither train nor track of this poem online, so here's a snippet from me own personal hard-copy archives (Thanks, DC):
Snow falls, stops, starts again.
Santa Fe Wabash Seaboard
The freight train earth cracks in two.
Nickel Plate Nickel Plate
There are curses on the courthouse wind.
B&O L&N
South of town a farmer has been shot
by a hunter with a Jim Beam face.
Illinois Central Illinois Central
(piggyback piggyback)
. . .
I could make some very human conjectures as to why this poem has always stayed with me, but for our purposes here, suffice to say it first implanted the idea Ruefle mentions of developing consciousness coinciding with the perfect ripeness for a particular book/poem/sentence/photo/painting/moment. Etter uses passing trains to punctuate the speaker's lines, and the result is exactly what it had to be for the poem to be successful (which, as Richard Hugo would point out, is complete nonsense but also true).
The point, to which I'm always long on getting, is: sometimes, we find the Right Train at the Right Time.
Let's get back to those photos on the way to and in Vorkuta, Russia. The piece as whole, the photographer says, has a great deal to do with bearing witness to a painful past (my interpretation of his 100 words). Here, I'll enter, saying Yes, we all must bear witness to an often painful past, and that past informs our present and likely our future. The present moment is the intersection of that past with everything currently happening around us and in us, and the interplay of those things cannot help but affect what will come next.
And now, we're going to bring in The Dude. Because what isn't The Dude relevant to?
I've been reading The Dude and the Zen Master, and it has proved to be the Right Train for me at this particular moment in time, with all its connections, implications, and extensions. A good deal of what I've read so far has been about the vehicles we use to move through life (how fucking appropriate, right?). I want to share with you some passages from pages 37-39:
Jeff: So even if you're dealing with a topic that's not joyful, that's painful or sad, or whatever, if you approach it out of a joyful, generous, loving place, then everything comes out in a freer way.
And not too much later, Bernie comes in:
No matter how hard we try, situations come up that we'll want to separate from and leave behind us.
But if you are going somewhere else, let me say this much: At least change the boat and the oars. Say I get to the other side, what do I do? Well, I got here thanks to this beautiful boat with this set of oars, so I'll just hold on to them and carry them wherever I go. Isn't that weird? Now I've got the burden of carrying around whatever got me here.
Holy fuck. Mind = Blown.
But I knew this. I've learned it before. And I'm always having to relearn it.
Be reminded of it.
The toppled train car on the way to Vorkuta, surrounded by the bones of the people who built the tracks.
My own not-so-beautiful, rickety boat full of holes I'm always scrambling to patch with what feels like limited resources, surrounded by miles and miles of open water.
Why would we choose to carry these things with us? Because it's so damn hard to let go. We like to hold on to what got us here, safe and familiar, and we could go through our lives without ever having to learn how to use a new vehicle.
Then, we break down. And we end up staying in one place.
So do we abandon the things that got us here? Maybe in some cases, for our survival, we have to. We can't carry the falling-to-pieces boat over the mountains by ourselves, stopping every few feet to pick up the scraps and place them back in the hull. I'll fix it, we tell ourselves. You'll see. One day, I'll be able to fix it.
Maybe what we really need to do when the boat is falling apart is let it go, let it rest beside the water we just crossed and find another way of moving through the next part of our journey, where we may need a train or car or bike. Or maybe, just our own two feet. And a friend to talk with, with whom to kill the time. Maybe once it's off our backs, we can stop seeing only the splinters and holes. We can see it for essentially all it is--what got us to where we are now. It needn't be more than that.
I don't know if all of this would have meant what it means to me if certain things weren't swirling in my atmosphere. Then again, maybe we're always at the perfect ripeness, the right state of consciousness, to find the meaning we need to:
 |
| on the cover of The Dude and the Zen Master |
We just have to be reminded of it.
So/ Erie Lackawanna
--CQ
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Signs of Order: Kertész and Ruefle
 | |
| Art Fair Participant Reading, Washington Square, NY, 1977 |
Browse more work by André Kertész here: Bulger Gallery.
And check out this essay by poet Mary Ruefle, which makes for a good companion to Kertész's photos: Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World.
Here's a snippet:
Is there a right time to read each book? A point of developing consciousness that corresponds with perfect ripeness to a particular poet or novel? And if that is the case, how many times in our lives did we make the match? I heard someone say, at a party, that D. H. Lawrence should be read during one's late teens and early twenties. Since I was nearing thirty at the time, I made up my mind never to read him. And I never have. Connoisseurs of reading are very silly people. But as Thomas Merton said, one day you wake up and realize religion is ridiculous and that you will stick with it anyway. What love is ever any different?
Silly and sticking with it,
--CQ
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
I'm Leaving Tomorrow, but I Could Leave Today
In keeping with this week's theme (read: obsession).
But I know that you know,
--CQ
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