SELF INTERRUPTING THE SELF
Mary Oliver:
Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It need the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once.
BROKENIST OR STATUS-QUOIST?
It’s a commonplace these days to say that the United States is in turmoil. While many understand the primary conflict as one between progressives and conservatives and others point to conflicts within both the progressive and conservative sides as being at least as significant, Alana Newhouse, the editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, suggests a different way of looking at things.
Read moreWRITER'S BLOCK
Joan Didion:
I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
TEACHING AS THINKING IN PUBLIC
I took the long route through graduate school, taking several leaves of absence to teach in different universities.
Read moreBERTRAND RUSSELL ON DICTATORS
George Orwell:
Mr. Russell points out that the huge system of organized lying upon which the dictators depend keeps their followers out of contact with reality and therefore tends to put them at a disadvantage as against those who know the facts.
NAZIS AND SOCIALISTS (AND THE KKK)
Mildred Harnack:
The official name of the Nazi Party is the Nationalsozialisticishe Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), Mildred explains, or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, “although it has nothing to do with socialism and the name itself is a lie.