#foolishoptimism

[mitchellkriegman]

#foolishoptimism #thingsgoingwrong https://www.instagram.com/p/B2CbvfoFaZ8/?igshid=1vk4k2awq3uqb

[manarnia]

Arka Knows His JKR

arka: i want to read the other book

arka: the one that's like, bird dead or something

arka: robin egg

arka: bird book

arka: detective bird

arka: by like john kenneth galbraith

[guillaume-en-egypte]

foolishoptimism replied to your post:myrrhman replied to your post:i finally ordered a...

infinite jest isn’t hard to read, it’s just an arduous chore to read. which, I think, is part of the point.

i LOVE arduous chores

[guillaume-en-egypte]

foolishoptimism reblogged your photo:

what a good pile of books. read Boethius.

fine gosh!!! after i read the castle though

[guillaume-en-egypte]

foolishoptimism replied to your post:I can’t go to our schools philosophy club for most...

come speak at my philosophy club about zizek and pussy riot

okay sure, travel and hotel are paid for i assume

[getbackinthewagonwoman]

I'm slightly obsessed with how hella cute this picture is. Fucking dope as shit.

[tramampoline]

I'm not at all in the least the type of person to call people "cute" and I'm not hitting on you but: dang how do you keep all the babes off of you all the time you cutie

IDK

BABES AINT INTEREWSTED????

IM TOO CUTE, I THINK

IM PERFECT

 I INTIMIDATE THE BABES

[valerie2776]

last semester a prof had us read a talk by robert frost called "education by poetry" (which is really education by metaphor) for the first day of class and parts of it have stuck in my mind ever since

"There is the enthusiasm like a blinding light, or the enthusiasm of the deafening shout, the crude enthusiasm that you get uneducated by poetry, outside of poetry. It is exemplified in what I might call "sunset raving." You look westward toward the sunset, or if you get up early enough, eastward toward the sunrise, and you rave. It is oh’s and ah’s with you and no more. But the enthusiasm I mean is taken through the prism of the intellect and spread on the screen in a color, all the way from hyperbole at one end—or overstatement, at one end—to understatement at the other end. It is a long strip of dark lines and many colors. Such enthusiasm is one object of all teaching in poetry. I heard wonderful things said about Virgil yesterday, and many of them seemed to me crude enthusiasm, more like a deafening shout, many of them. But one speech had range, something of overstatement, something of statement, and something of understatement. It had all the colors of an enthusiasm passed through an idea.

I would be willing to throw away everything else but that: enthusiasm tamed by metaphor. Let me rest the case there. Enthusiasm tamed to metaphor, tamed to that much of it. I do not think anybody ever knows the discreet use of metaphor, his own and other people’s, the discreet handling of metaphor, unless he has been properly educated in poetry. Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct."

"But as I say, there is another way to come close to poetry, fortunately, and that is in the reading of it, not as linguistics, not as history, not as anything but poetry. It is one of the hard things for a teacher to know how close a man has come in reading poetry. How do I know whether a man has come close to Keats in reading Keats? It is hard for me to know. I have lived with some boys a whole year over some of the poets and have not felt sure whether they have come near what it was all about. One remark sometimes told me. One remark was their mark for the year; had to be—it was all I got that told me what I wanted to know. And that is enough, if it was the right remark, if it came close enough. I think a man might make twenty fool remarks if he made one good one some time in the year. His mark would depend on that good remark. The closeness—everything depends on the closeness with which you come, and you ought to be marked for the closeness, for nothing else. And that will have to be estimated by chance remarks, not by question and answer. It is only by accident that you know some day how near a person has come."

the speech kind of breaks down at the end (like all metaphor!) and i don't think that part is as good when he starts getting into the particulars of different kinds of beliefs but overall his points ring very true to me and it is all totally about "the closeness with which you come"