Thoughts worth expressing

Image courtesy of sxc.hu and Jenny Sliwinski of the UK

I like and recommend this brief Alan Jacobs essay that reveals (with the help of Murdoch, Orwell, and Lewis) many needful things to the reader (and that's me too): why we should read old books; why we should seek out opponents who differ from us in thinking from another age rather than the rabble-rousers from our own day; how to seek out thoughts worth expressing; and the value of coming to know "the full humanity of those who think very differently than you do."

And I wish that every person on social media who spends his or her short, golden time in bashing our obvious conservative or liberal blowhards would read and consider the essay... It might save the world a good bit of repetitive annoyance and even help keep those of us on social media (me too!) from being carried away by the stream of self-congratulatory assent one sees below our self-righteous posts attacking the much-puffed blather of celebrities, political and otherwise. Wouldn't it be interesting to focus on the ideas of better minds, perhaps not of our age or our country?

It's New Year's Day; a worthy list of resolutions could come out of the reading of this essay. And those of us who write books and keep a blog (yes, me too) might well meditate on the work of "thoughts worth expressing."

Curling up with words and cats

As child no. 2 has committed the destruction of her first snow tire and put my Corolla temporarily out of commission, I may well be driving my husband's giganteous black truck when you read this post. Soon I shall be out on another kid-ferrying trip, off to the Albany airport, where I hope in my borrowed mightiness and awe-evoking shininess that I do not bump into the mere cars and various lesser creatures on wheels. Here are a few reads while I am away, plus Maya Deren with cats!

D. G. Myers, "What Became of Literary History?"

“I don't need a library to do what I do,” Stanley Fish told Jerome McGann, showing him around the Johns Hopkins campus. All of my students are Stanley Fish. There are no libraries behind their study of literature. Seven decades after John Crowe Ransom named the movement, the New Critics have achieved what they were after. “[T]hough one may consider a poem as an instance of historical and ethical documentation,” Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren had said in Understanding Poetry, “the poem in itself, if literature is to be studied as literature, remains finally the object of study.” The syllabus of nearly every English course is little more than a series of discrete texts which can’t be read historically because no one has any literary history.

Alan Jacobs, "Writing What I Don't Know"

For me, the best prompt for a book, or even a long essay, comes when I realize two things: first, that a particular subject is fascinatingly important, and second, that I don’t know nearly enough to write about it.

Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid made the ultimate "cat video".

You've already watched the Knitted Boyfriend videos and every Maru the cat video ever made? Go back to The Private Life of a Cat.

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Marly, elsewhere:

• Thaliad's wild epic adventure in verse (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2012) here and here 
• The Foliate Head's collection of poems from Stanza Press (UK) here
• A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage from Mercer University Press (ForeWord 2013 finalist, The Ferrol Sams Award, 2012) here
• The Throne of Psyche, collection of poetry from Mercer, 2011, here
• Excerpts from my three 2012 books at Scribd.