After-Orts #59
Publishing poetry is like dropping a rose petal off the rim of the Grand Canyon and anticipating the echo. It’s Dante-esque in the purity of its hopelessness.
— David Godine, in a charming interview in The Boston Globe,
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/11/18/arts/qa-with-david-godine-about-godine-fifty-press-he-founded-publish-books-that-matter-people-who-care/
The practice of “land acknowledgment”— preceding a fancy event by naming the Indigenous groups whose slaughter and dispossession cleared the land on which the audience’s canapés are about to be served—… is what you give when you have no intention of giving land. It is like a receipt provided by a highway robber, noting all the jewels and gold coins he has stolen. Maybe it will be useful for an insurance claim? Anyway, you are not getting your jewels back, but now you have documentation.
— Graeme Wood, in The Atlantic, Nov.28, 2021
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/against-land-acknowledgements-native-american/620820/
Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture.
— Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics and Ethics, in Existentialists and Mystics
Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics