Category Archives: Quotations

Things people said.

Old English “Kennings”

Posted on January 5, 2019 by JMN

s3.amazonaws.com/libapps/accounts/35417/images/sutton_hoo_bigger.jpg There are ways of expressing feeling in the Old English kennings that do not exist in the formal English of today. Even if I were to dream up some delicious new portmanteau here — some melding of “history,” “poignant” … Continue reading →

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Spot On

Posted on January 4, 2019 by JMN

i.pinimg.com/236x/af/0a/5e/af0a5e1f54ce7bd39bdacda274b78d97–iris-murdoch-irish-people.jpg Dame Iris Murdoch had been a philosophy don at Oxford before she became a novelist, and as far as I was concerned, her philosophy of life was spot on, as someone in a British novel might say. (Susan Scarf … Continue reading →

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Muriel Spark

Posted on December 21, 2018 by JMN

Perhaps it is that particular literary quality, her poet’s rigorous understanding of what another modernist, D. H. Lawrence, called “the jump of words along the line”—when set against the easy-to-read “Miss Jean Brodie,” with its mass-market appeal—that has confused her … Continue reading →

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*Affectedly Quaint

Posted on December 18, 2018 by JMN

Following Dr. [Donald] Knuth’s doctrine helps to ward off moronry. He is known for introducing the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance of writing code that is readable by humans as well as computers — a notion that nowadays … Continue reading →

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Adrienne Rich

Posted on December 12, 2018 by JMN

http://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/books/review/adrienne-rich-essential-essays-selected-poems-1950-2012.html I don’t mean to claim some instant, magic woke-ness upon reading these books. But Rich offers me a powerful and necessary reminder of the continuous self-reflection required to fight ignorance — one’s own and others’. We need to reread … Continue reading →

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“Something Like America”

Posted on December 10, 2018 by JMN

http://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/books/review/political-poetry.html Wordsworth’s description of “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is sometimes cited as shorthand for what poets refer to as the lyric “I,” the poet’s vehicle for private, meditative reflection. So what becomes of the lyric “I” if poems are not … Continue reading →

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Truth in Fiction

Posted on December 8, 2018 by JMN

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/dec/08/nicola-sturgeon-rachel-kushner-in-conversation-fiction-politics-prison My job, fundamentally, is all about people and it’s the individual stories that give me a sense of the issues I need to use my position to influence or change. That’s why I see reading fiction as an indispensable … Continue reading →

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Profound Word Funk Unlocked

Posted on December 7, 2018 by JMN

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/dec/07/earl-sweatshirt-some-rap-songs-review Beats-wise, it’s a little like one of Madlib’s Medicine Show mixes, where grainy, sample-driven productions blurt like a haunted radio searching for a frequency in the past. Soul, funk and disco samples are cut up with blunt safety scissors, … Continue reading →

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Hello, Non-America

Posted on December 6, 2018 by JMN

nyti.ms/2DZufmq The WASP virtues … included a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety — a cosmopolitanism that coexisted with white man’s burden racism but also sometimes transcended it, because for every Brahmin bigot there was … Continue reading →

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Slumber

Posted on December 6, 2018 by JMN

http://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/shirin-neshat-political-art.html The art world seems to have closely adopted and followed the ideological footprints of the larger global economy of the past three decades, increasingly participating in the orgy of the creation of wealth and its narrow distribution. But now … Continue reading →

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