if i look back, i am lost
$LAYYYTER
Sweet Seals For You, Always
🪼
No title available
One Nice Bug Per Day
YOU ARE THE REASON
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
izzy's playlists!
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
todays bird
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
will byers stan first human second
d e v o n
noise dept.
Peter Solarz
Cosimo Galluzzi
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
tannertan36
No title available
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Morocco
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from India
seen from Guyana
seen from Malaysia
seen from Argentina
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@libbylibby
The world is violent and mercurial—it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love—love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
Tennesee Williams (via thetinhouse)
Six facts you didn’t know about yeast
Yeasts are single-celled microscopic eukaryotic organisms. They share many of thecellular processes and central biological pathways with higher eukaryotes, including humans. Studies on yeasts have provided insights into the function of specific genes and proteins, cell biology, central metabolism and basic biological processes and so are important model organisms. We decided to delve deeper into the fascinating world of yeast biology and discovered six essential facts about yeast.
Yeasts were first domesticated by humans over 10,000 years ago harnessing its ability to ferment sugars into alcohol.
Yeasts are essential for generation of some of our favourite consumer products: bread, beer, wine, and whisky.
Yeastsare invaluable in industrial biotechnology; microbial factories synthesising important, commercially valuable pharmaceuticals and chemicals.
Yeasts have evolved to live on and in other living species contributing to global microbiome diversity.
The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae was the first eukaryotic genome to be sequenced and is an important model organism for studying cell biology and diseases of higher eukaryotes, including cancer.
Some yeasts have evolved as pathogens and on a global scale cause devastating diseases in humans, animals, birds, fish, amphibians and plants.
Image credit: Dry yeast by Ranveig. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
the OUP tumblr is a wild ride, y’all
The color thesaurus, !ngrid Sundberg
you guuuuuuys
Melville House Trolls NRA Over Gun Violence | Flavorwire
The publisher is sending the fake newspapers to gun-drunk politicians like Ted Cruz. And they’ve vowed to bombard NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre with stories of gun violence each day until the book’s publication on March 22. That’s publishing as a political art. Read the full story on Flavorwire.
There are four photographs attached to this. I have chosen these images because they capture something of my fluctuating states of mind last year and into 2016, and perhaps most importantly, three...
Treat yourself to this beautiful, thought-provoking and tears-inducing blog post by one of my favorite writers on success, creativity and the anxious space.
god, what a beautiful and honest piece of writing.
Anne Carson | Decreation
Alice Notley | Alice Ordered Me To Be Made
Anne Carson | Decreation
Alice Notley | Perhaps Not For You | Songs and Stories of the Ghouls
Anne Carson | Decreation
Anne Carson | Decreation
Anne Boyer | The Society for the Destruction of Unwritten Literature
that’s my favorite work anne b did! destruction!!!!!!!!! THE FUTURE REVERSE
Mazie on instagram lately. <3
Did I reblog this already?
Jami Attenberg is my all-time favourite author on social media. I love this kind of update. I love reading about her in New Orleans. I love seeing her posts in my dash. I love how hard she loves.
Have you ever wondered what a book would look like only with punctuation? At Medium, Adam J Calhoun analyzes the punctuation in a few famous novels, complete with graphs for your viewing pleasure. For more punctuation, you could read our piece on the interrobang.
what does this even mean?
We don’t, especially in the US, want to look at poetry as something every student is capable of, because that would be dangerous to those who control the school systems. All students, regardless of their backgrounds, would realise that they are capable of speaking very well; that there are not certain individuals who control what constitutes good language. They would realise that language is not just this agreed upon set of constructed ideas, that it’s not an MLA citation or a five-paragraph essay, that everyone can create new and beautiful language. So it is very frustrating to me when people say, ‘I don’t like poetry,’ or, ‘I don’t understand it,’ because all of that seems the fault of a system that doesn’t want to give poetry its power, and that doesn’t want to give people their power either.
Dorothea Lasky, interviewed by Rebecca Tamás for Prac Crit (via bostonpoetryslam)
i’m crying
I printed up a pretty little zine for this tumblr. $15, limited edition of 50. get your copy while you still can!
you guys, ,,,
We could talk about poetry as a rope in a storm. Poetry as one continuous mantra of mental health. Poetry as the world’s biggest, longest-running workshop on how to love. Poetry as a conversation across time. Poetry as the acid-scrub of cliche. We could say that the poem is a lie detector. That the poem is a way of thinking without losing the feeling. That a poem is a way of feeling without being too overwhelmed by feeling to think straight.
Jeanette Winterson on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy for The Guardian (via violentwavesofemotion)
Last June, aspiring author Angela Thomas asked literary agent Brooks Sherman via Twitter if he considered a YA novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement acceptable to publishers. Two weeks ago, Thomas received her answer: after a heated auction among 13 publishing houses, including all of the Big Five, Donna Bray of HarperCollins’ Balzer + Bray imprint acquired Thomas’s debut novel, The Hate U Give.
Balzer + Bray Prevails in 13-House Auction for YA Debut (via rachelfershleiser)
yes!!!!
heart eyes emoji!
John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings
A good deal of this book is nonsense, which I think Cage himself knew (“I don’t give these lectures to surprise people, but out of a need for poetry.”), but then again, I like nonsense, especially if it’s the right kind of nonsense. (Kay Ryan once said “nonsense is extremely close to poetry… nonsense operates by rules.”) And, in fact, like his music, a lot of these lectures were composed with rules, Cage using chance operations to compose them. (“I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / that is poetry.”)
The book begins with this wonderful thought:
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.
Those three sentences alone could change your life. (Read them again.)
Or this one:
It is not irritating to be where one is / only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
This sentence, too:
We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we are alive to use them.
Here’s his story of visiting a “sound-proof” chamber:
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
Cage sprinkled the book with little stories and Zen parables, “playing the function that odd bits of information play at the ends of columns in a small-town newspaper.” These are my favorite parts of the book. Here’s one:
After a long and arduous journey a young Japanese man arrived deep in a forest where the teacher or his choice was living in a small house he had made. When the student arrived, the teacher was sweeping up fallen leaves. Greeting his master, the young man received no greeting in return. And to all his questions, there were no replies. Realizing there was nothing he could do to get the teacher’s attention, the student went to another part of the same forest and built himself a house. Years later, when he was sweeping up fallen leaves, he was enlightened. He then dropped everything, ran through the forest to his teacher, and said, “Thank you.”
That’s another big lesson with Cage: if you want to hear something, you’ve gotta keep your mouth shut. If you keep your mouth shut, things will happen. Elsewhere, outside the book, he told a similar story about his own life:
[O]ne day I got into [a cab] and the driver began talking a blue streak, accusing absolutely everyone of being wrong. You know he was full of irritation about everything, and I simply remained quiet. I did not answer his questions, I did not enter into a conversation, and very shortly the driver began changing his ideas and simply through my being silent he began, before I got out of the car, saying rather nice things about the world around him.
Here’s another favorite of mine, about dumpster-diving:
George Mantor had an iris garden, which he improved each year by throwing out the commoner varieties. One day his attention was called to another very fine iris garden. Jealously he made some inquiries. The garden, it turned out, belonged to the man who collected his garbage.
A story about Arnold Schoenberg and his eraser:
I was studying with Schoenberg one day as he was writing some counterpoint to show the way to do it, he used an eraser. And then while he was doing this he said, “This end of the pencil is just as important as the other end.”
It’s a lot easier to “get” Cage when you know a little bit about Zen Buddhism. (A good book that explores this is Where The Heart Beats.)
I like how much Cage talks about boredom:
[T]he way to get ideas is to do something boring. For instance, composing in such a way that the process of composing is boring induces ideas. They fly into one’s head like birds.
This is an idea he got straight from Zen:
In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.
He said when your ears are “in connection with a mind that has nothing to do, that mind is free to enter into the act of listening, hearing each sound just as it is…”
I like how he describes art as “a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.”
This play, however, is an affirmation of life — not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
His fascination with the I Ching and chance operations led him to emphasize that not-knowing is one of the keys to making art.
when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing
He quotes Robert Rauschenberg:
I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.
And:
There is a reduction of the ego that is essential to doing the work:
Some more parables. About freedom:
Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression “free as a bird,” Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, “You know? They’re not free: they’re fighting over bits of food.”
On standing in line:
Standing in line, Max Jacob said, gives one the opportunity to practice patience.
Probably not for everyone, but a very interesting read.
Filed under: my reading year 2016
This is a fantastic bit of recapping from an incredible writer - this entire post is worth reading. Who knew John Cage was such an aphorist? Also worth checking out: This episode of the TDLR Podcast: #21 - There Is No Such Thing As Silence, in which PJ talks to Larry Larson, who created an incredible app based on Cage’s 4′33″.
11 Beautiful Poetry Collections By Women Poets – a fun list from @bustle with books by Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Tracy K. Smith, Robin Coste Lewis, Ada Limon, Robin Beth Schaer, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and more.
Sarah Nicole Prickett
Videodrome, the titular t.v. show in the Cronenberg film, is set in a red room of pain, of murder, of torture cum porn. A room known by any other colour would not make the pain half as real. “Red is the great clarifier,” said Diana Vreeland, who called her red-papered, red-carpeted living room “the garden in hell.”
http://websafe2k16.com/FF0033
Did one of two hundred and sixteen colours for Web Safe 2k16, a very hot project by Ben Sisto, Jo Livingstone, and Joe Bernardi. Read them all—I’m jealous about the Pitta Snakes one.
Do you guys know about Websafe2k16?
Starting on February 16, 2016, 216, the website features a daily post from a range of writers, each writing 216 words inspired by a colour in Lynda Weinman’s Web Safe colour palette. These pieces all have to do with associations of the early days of the Internet. More information about the project can be found here: http://www.bensisto.com/web-safe-2k16/
I’m in love with the idea of this and with the product. Each piece is exactly the right length, constrained in exactly the right ways, saturated to the point where the colour of the screen floods your eyes and gives you afterimages, long after you’ve clicked away.
