Most Everybody

looking, listening, reading, drawing, baking - trying to learn the art of looking sideways at the world

[meaghano]

Seeing the work that is to be done, who can help wanting to be the one to do it?

Wendell Berry in What Are People For? who goes on to remind us to chill the fuck out with our scrambling. It is a line I can’t get out of my head. (via meaghano)

[mosteverybody]

'That's how you fight evil...make them know that they are important enough and strong enough to do that' - Samuel R. Delany on asking questions

[mosteverybody]

...the biographer's most valuable but perilous weapon: empathy.

Richard Holmes, reflecting on "ST Coleridge Esq, gentleman poet and Philosopher in a mist"

[mosteverybody]

For me what we are charged to do as human beings is to make our lives and the lives of others as liveable, as important, as charged as we possibly can. And so what I’d call secular redemption aims to make us, through the agency of affection, intimacy, closeness, complicity, feel like our time spent on earth is not wasted.

Richard Ford

[harkaway]

The public deserves to know if its government helped condemn men, women and children to the appalling abuses of the rendition programme – and the victims themselves deserve a long-overdue explanation.

Mrs Harkaway, ladies and gentlemen. Rock and goddam roll.

[Full text here.]

(via harkaway)

[mosteverybody]

'in a time of trouble this troubled spirit stood up for life in all its variety—its beauty and its loose ends as much as its lunacy and cruelty' - Colm Tóibín on Goya

[mosteverybody]

'we find ourselves happily besieged by humanity in all its crazy, wonderful, awful profusion' Jed Pearl on Picasso

[mosteverybody]

'The 50 Year Argument' often moved me to tears: what happens when people pay imaginative attention

[mosteverybody]

My best attempt at recreating a Shoot the Pier (Inherent Vice, p. 261): 'basically advocados, sprouts, jalapenos, pickled artichoke hearts, Monterey jack cheese, and Green Goddess dressing on a sourdough loaf that had first been sliced lengthwise, spread with garlic butter, and toasted, seventy-nine cents and a bargain at half the price'

[mosteverybody]

Michael Daves has an amazing plan to bring you not one but two great albums. You can help kickstart this here

[mosteverybody]

'You are gonna have to decide between music and this job' here

[mosteverybody]

I believe Sam and Victoria. Surely 'A Change is Gonna Come'

[mosteverybody]

'I need to lend a formal cast to the motions I so much love' - A. R. Ammons

[mosteverybody]

Saint Francis and the Sow

The bud stands for all things, even for those things that don’t flower, for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing; as Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell (1927-2014)

via

[mosteverybody]

'At war, everyone's off in his own little corner of worries and hopes and fears'

here

[mosteverybody]

'If you are interested in these teachings, then you are going to have to accept that you're never going to get it all together.'

from Pema Chödrön's report in The Wisdom of No Escape

[mosteverybody]

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud music or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman and Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash, but let there be that heavy breathing or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house and he will wrench himself awake and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together, after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies, familiar touch of the long-married, and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens, the neck opening so small he has to screw them on— and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep, his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other and smile and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body— this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.

- Galway Kinnell, 1927 - 2014