Archives for November 2006

“Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

“There was something dangerous and remorseless in her optimism.”

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

This week the Museum of the Moving Image in New York begins a Jacques Rivette retrospective. The bloggers at The House Next Door have been doing a fantastic job over the last week or so of prefacing the series with a cascade of links to stories, interviews, and critical considerations of the French director, whose 1974 movie C

Little lit quiz to ponder over your coffee this morning. Whose work is the subject of the following quotation?

“It has always been hard for me to think of extraordinarily handsome people ever being very intimate with one another.”

“I have come to the resolution never to write for the sake of writing, or making a poem, but from running over with any little knowledge and experience which many years of reflection may perhaps give me–otherwise I will be dumb. What Imagination I have I shall enjoy, and greatly, for I have experienced the satisfaction of having great conceptions without the toil of sonnetteering. I will not spoil my love of gloom by writing an ode to darkness; and with respect to my livelihood I will not write for it, for I will not mix with that most vulgar of all crowds the literary. Such things I ratify by looking upon myself, and trying myself at lifting mental weights, as it were. I am three and twenty with little knowledge and middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages, but that is nothing.”

“In a rain forest in Borneo the realities are so different. The popular cause is simply life and the reigning prejudice is death. Words are dust and without them we shall probably all find out what kind of men we are.”

So the Rachel Ries show Friday night was a lot of fun, though far shorter than I would have liked. There were highlights: despite forgetting to bring along her banjo, Ries soldiered on and performed on guitar one of my favorite of her songs, a simple but brilliant little song-poem about falling in love with a place. That place would be Valentine, NE, which sits on the Nebraska map like a trap–like an engraved invitation for someone to write a bad earnest or bad ironic song about it. Thank goodness, then, that in this case a greatly gifted songwriter took the bait. To wit: