Bret's Cultural Consumption

October 19, 2008
By Bret

Reading:

Recent:

  • The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
  • Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
  • Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities by Ian Stewart
  • A Day at El Bulli by Ferran Adria
  • a few books which have slipped my mind...

Current:

  • Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino
  • Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon

Nightstand: (subject to change at any moment)

  • The Complete Fairy Tales by George MacDonald
  • Looking for Calvin and Hobbes... by Nevin Martell
  • Tinkers by Paul Harding

Listening:

  • Didn't It Rain by Songs: Ohia
  • both albums by Bifrost Music
  • Christmas albums by Over the Rhine, Sufjan Stevens, etc.
  • lots of music at www.lala.com and www.spinner.com

Watching:

  • Old seasons of Scrubs
  • Star Trek (the new one)
  • Whatever Natalie wants to watch (recently: Curious George, Charlie Brown Christmas)

Et Cetera:

  • Taking care of sick little girls
  • Working longish hours on work projects
  • Holiday traveling and relaxing time with family

QUOTES

Humility in the wrong place

"What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed....

...the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

–G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy

Make No Little Plans

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us."
–Daniel Burnham, architect of Chicago, quoted in Charles Moore, Daniel H. Burnham: Planner of Cities, II:147. (via Christ is Deeper Still)

Borges on Short Stories


“It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”
–Jorge Luis Borges, from the preface to Ficciones

Strickler on Top Ten Lists

See full post for Yancey Strickler’s 2005 taxonomy of top ten music lists, as cited here.

Berry on Writing Poetry


“Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.”
–Wendell Berry, from How to be a Poet

Twain (?) on History


“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
—Attributed to Mark Twain

Lewis on God's Glory


“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”
–C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Merwin on Writing


“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write”
—W.S. Merwin, Opening the Hand