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Sun, 28 Sep 2008 16:15:03 -0700

At the wedding...
9/26/2008

Me-- wondering how to post something interesting on Stumbleupon. Honest, the dinner plates on the tray are not mine! Funny, but no one asked me to hear their confession... :)

To be serious for a moment... I am not a priest, minister, rabbi, or man (person)"of the cloth", in any sense. I respect all manner of beliefs so long as their espousal and practice brings no harm to any human being. I don't believe that there is some formula that will bring peace to this heart of mine or to any other human heart. Late in my life I found peace when I began to help others. This I mostly do when I teach (I hope!) children in NYC public schools. I feel lucky to have an awareness of some kind that has led me to believe, but not to know, that I am part of something called "being." I believe, though I do not know, that we are all part of this "being". I have been blessed in this life, and hope that when I falter some one will always remind me to count my blessings. Just being able to share these thoughts with you here is a blessing, a miracle if you will.

There is also something about human language that others much much much much smarter than me have stated or theorized. I am especially thinking about Ludwig Wittgenstein, my favorite philosopher of all, about whom I hope sometime to post what I have tried to understand. Understanding completely the meaning of another human being is impossible because no two people in the world use the same language. I believe (I am not certain that I am representing him in a way that he would find acceptable... in this way I "justify" my claim below that I will be silent about him) that Wittgenstein's meaning was somehow embodied in this latter idea. He used the term, "language games". Reading his writings and comments about philosophy and other things seem to me to be to like reading poetry. In the only major work that he published during his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (His other major work, Philosophical Investigations, along with his other works and his notebooks and transcriptions of his lectures were edited and translated where necessary, and published after his death), centered on the nature of philosophical propositions. Wittgenstein's final statement in his Tractatus was, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." I believe that I cannot speak about Wittgenstein and I hopefully will be silent except for certain intriguing biographical aspects of his life that I have read.� http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/ten.html

David Foster Wallace: Idealistic skeptic - Los Angeles Times

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 22:52:33 -0700

David Foster Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in "The Broom of the System," his 1987 debut novel; "Girl With Curious Hair," a 1989 collection of short stories; and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments" (1997). The writer was found dead Friday night in Claremont, reportedly a suicide. He was 46.His insightful, energetic writing helped transform American fiction in the 1980s.

An Appreciation
David Foster Wallace: Idealistic skeptic
By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 15, 2008 I didn't know David Foster Wallace all that well. We met a couple oftimes, and once, I interviewed him onstage at the Writers Guild Theaterin Beverly Hills. I asked him on a few occasions if he'd review for thepaper, but he said he'd had a bad experience and had sworn offreviewing for good. We shared a literary agent.

In the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election, we spent an hour or soon the phone one afternoon discussing politics, which he followed withthe rabid fascination of someone who, despite all better judgment, believed the process mattered, that somehow, somewhere, there was acandidate who might see us through. I never got a chance to discuss the current presidential race with Wallace; no one did. That'sour loss, for Wallace, who reportedly hanged himself Friday night atage 46, was an astute observer, sharp and clear-eyed, idealistic and skeptical all at once.

His 2000 Rolling Stone profile of John McCain -- reissued inJune as the slim, stand-alone volume "McCain's Promise: Aboard theStraight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of ActualReporters, Thinking About Hope" -- offers a vivid example of thisperspective. Wallace sees the campaign mechanism for what it is while still recognizing something fundamentally different, real even, about the candidate, who eight years ago was in some sense the Barack Obama of his time. Here we have a hallmark of Wallace's writing, his unwillingness to take anything at face value, the penetrating focus of his thought.

An auspicious debut
Wallac eemerged out of nowhere with the publication of his first novel, "The Broom of the System," in 1987. He was 25, a graduate of Amherst and themaster of fine arts program at the University of Arizona, and along with a handful of other then-emerging writers (William T. Vollmann,Jonathan Franzen), he helped transform American fiction in a fundamental way.

The 1980s, after all, was the era of "DirtyRealism," of small-bore, naturalistic stories in the style of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. For such writers, literature was essentially domestic, but Wallace blew that approach away. Exuberant, picaresque, cynical but also heartfelt, "The Broom of the System" hit the literary circulation system like a 450-page burst of amphetamine. It wasn't a perfect book; like much of Wallace's early fiction, it wore its inspirations -- especially that of Thomas Pynchon -- on its sleeve.

But what "The Broom of the System" did was to offer up a set of possibilities, to remind us that the novel could be expansive, that it was possible to push the boundaries, to create a larger social landscape in fiction, that it wasn't wrong to be ambitious, to use literature to get at the unknowable heart of the world.

The remainder of this appreciation is available at: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-wallace15-2008sep15 ,0,6321434.story

laurazmartins blog - StumbleUpon

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:20:50 -0700

Lovely pages, rendered with a sensitive touch... thank you...

"...To the sea, to the sea
To the open arms of the sea"

"Unchained Melody"

Oh, my love
My darling
I've hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time
And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?

I need your love
I need your love
God speed your love to me

Lonely rivers flow
To the sea, to the sea
To the open arms of the sea
Lonely rivers sigh
Wait for me, wait for me
I'll be coming home
Wait for me

Oh, my love
My darling
I've hungered, hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time
And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much
Are you still mine?

I need your love
I need your love
God speed your love to me

--Hy Zaret, Lyrics
--Alex North, Music

http://www.artshole.co.uk/arts/artists/01dec06/Bryony%20Smith/Woman-in-White-3.jpg

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:34:48 -0700

Woman in White
by Bryony Smith

Coffee for Mister Mondrian: Photo by Photographer Floriana Barbu - photo.net

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:33:02 -0700

One lump or two?
"Coffee for Mister Mondrian" by Floriana Barbu
Love this!

An Interview with Simone Weil

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:59:03 -0700

"An Interview with Simone Weil"
Documentary film directed by Julia Haslett

An excellent website profiling a documentary film about the life of the philosopher, and rarest of human beings.

From the pages of the website:
"Background

In her short life, Simone Weil (1909-1943) fought in the Spanish Civil War, worked as a machine operator and farm laborer, debated Trotsky,taught high school students and union members, and was part of the French Resistance.

From an early age growing up in a secular Jewish household, she demonstrated a keen sense of empathy for the suffering of others. This was matched only by her penetrating intelligence and powers of attention. At nineteen, she entered the prestigious Ecole Normale -- the only woman in her class and the tops corer on the entrance exam. Throughout her life, she advocated for the poor and disenfranchised in France and for colonized people around the world, bravely organizing and writing on their behalf. A consummate outsider, who never lost her distrust of ideologies of any kind, at 34,Simone Weil left behind a body of work that fills fifteen volumes and establishes her as a brilliant political, social, and spiritual thinker.

In her writings, she analyzed power and its dehumanizing effects, outlined a doctrine of attention and empathy for human suffering, argued for the importance of universal education, and critiqued Stalinism long before most of the French left-wing. She was a revolutionary who questioned the value of revolutions. She believed intellectual work should be combined with physical work, and that theories should evolve from close observation and direct experience. And, after three mysticalexperiences, she began grappling with religious faith, its role inhuman history, and the shortcomings of organized religion. Her best known works, all published posthumously, are Gravity & Grace,Oppression & Liberty, Waiting on God, and The Need for Roots, the last of which was a plan for post-war France written in 1943 for the Free French government.

Her ideas have influenced countless individuals, including Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, and Czeslaw Milosz. The New York Times has described her as "one of the most brilliant and original minds of twentieth-century France." But without a doubt her biggest advocate was Albert Camus who played a major role in getting her work published after the war. He even made a pilgrimage to her writing room before leaving for Stockholm to receive the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet, despite these luminary supporters, Simone Weil is a little-known figure, practically forgotten in her native France, and rarely taught in the United States or else where. Very slowly, however, that is starting to change. The noted author Francine du Plessix Gray recently published a biography of her.And Columbia University held a Weil conference not long ago that looked at her work from a number of new angles."

http://www.linestreet.net/background.html

It is also well to note, that Simone Weil's brother, Andr�, was one of the leading mathematicians of the 20th Century: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Weil.html

http://gallery.photo.net/photo/3624272-lg.jpg

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:26:51 -0700

"Un Paseo Por Las Nubes"
by Saul Santos Diaz

Abram Arkhipov - Visit

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:13:17 -0700

"Visit" (1915)
by Abraham Archipov

Claudiaangels blog - StumbleUpon

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:19:39 -0700

"Just do it" -- Claudiaangel
What may I say about this stumbler except that heaven is in her eyes? ... thank you ...

AmericanBrandys blog - StumbleUpon

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:04:13 -0700

The enigma, the mystery, the endless spiral, the puzzle, the uncertainty, the circumlocution, the intractable nature, the stirring intensity, the maelstrom, the caffeine lurking looking-for-a-victim property, the clockwise or counterclockwise motion (depending upon whether one is above or below the equator) nature, the event horizon, the golden ratio, the stirred but not shaken occasion, the addictive leitmotif, the drowning surface tension, the Fibonacci aftertaste, the bewildering epiphany, the sleepless dream of a cup of coffee ...

Thanks to AmericanBrandy's hospitality
for an enjoyable visit.
Interesting blog!