Dowsing: watching the world wake up from history

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bless the melting pot

watching the world wake up from history

November 04, 2008

The Wall Street Journal just called it. I'm a little giddy. Everybody in my neighborhood is too. Horns honking, shouting, music. Like New Year's. I suppose it is. At the very least, it is a new age. The unthinkable has happened. A liberal Black man is going to move into the White House. About damn time. Next, a woman. Then someone gay, until the only thing that matters is your qualifications and your vision.

History. Right here. Right now.

Posted at 11:13 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Subverting the Culture

Poets, Poetry, Poetry Orgs

A Gathering of the Tribes
Since 1991, A Gathering of the Tribes has been run as an alternative arts and literary scene at the home of its executive director, Steve Cannon.
Academy of American Poets
Sponsors National Poetry Month in April and has a huge audio archive of readings, much of it available online. They even have an iPhone app!
Cave Canem
Founded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady in 1996 to remedy the under-representation and isolation of African American poets in the literary landscape, Cave Canem Foundation is a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets.
City Lore
City Lore is the co-sponsor (with Poets House) of the biennial poetry festival in downtown Manhattan showcasing the nation’s – and the world’s – literary and folk poetry traditions with special attention to poetry’s oral roots.
EMOTIVE FRUITION – Where poetry comes to life.
An interesting group that matches poets with actors for performances of their work.
Howl Festival
The annual Poetry, Theater, Performance Art, Film Comedy and Dance festival in the East Village, usually in September. Named after Allen Ginsberg’s poem.
Nuyorican Poets Cafe
Slams, literary events, readings, music, theater. Founded ca. 1973, originally as a home salon by lit professor Miguel Algarin. Old School slammin'. Don't miss it.
Poets House: A Place for Poetry
Newly renovated and fantastically beautiful: a vast library of poetry books; literary center for readings and performances.
St. Mark's Poetry Project
Started in 1966, the Poetry Project was one of the inspirations for the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. In addition to weekly readings and workshops, they hold a 24-hour poetry reading on New Year’s Day each year.
Taiku Poetry
Tanoa's Haiku an American original
The Inspired Word
Mike Geffner's biweekly showcase of fantastic poets and open mics.
The Urban Juke Joint on FaceBook
Theodora Goss: Poems
WandaLeaBrayton - poet at allpoetry

Web Comics

Dicebox
Digger by Ursula Vernon
A wombat burrows into another world full of gods and demons. No, really.
Dinosaur Comics
Dumbing of Age
A college webcomic by David Willis
garfield minus garfield
Hobo Lobo of Hamelin - Page 1
Great web design too.
Hyperbole and a Half
All of this is amazing.
Okazu
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Sluggy Freelance
Geeky weird adventures with geeky weird characters
Spera
Strong Female Protagonist
Kind of a meta comic on, well, strong female protagonists in comics
xkcd

So Nice They Named It Twice

Bridge And Tunnel Club
Bronx Architecture
And there's more here than you think.
Bronx Council on the Arts
Central Park
City Lore
Forgotten New York
Gotham Center for New York City History
Gothamist
LTVsquad.com // NYC Urban Exploration :
Manhattan Timeformations
Manhattan User's Guide
New York City Walk
500 miles of Manhattan. Every street. With pictures!
nycgo / this is new york city™
Project Rebirth
Time-lapse views of the World Trade Center site from several different vantage points. Dramatic and moving.
Sustainable South Bronx
Environmental Justice Solutions: Not a guide but a mission
The Bowery Boys | New York City History

Writers Say the Darnedest Things

Erasmus
“When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”
James Dickey
“What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”
Jessica Stern
“I will roar argon into chlorine, xenon into fluorine, all the noble gases into reactive ones My lament will terrify even the stars.”
Joan Didion
“A writer is always selling someone out.”
Ann Patchett
"Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon."
John Maynard Keynes
"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking."
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"What a commentary on our civilization when being alone is considered suspect, when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it - like a secret vice!"
Rumi
"We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust"
Kurt Vonnegut
"There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."
Wallace Stephens
"The poet is the priest of the invisible."
Seamus Heaney
"The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up, but they allow us to get to the reality of who or what we are or might be. It is a mistake to expect them to do too much, but it is a worse mistake to expect them to do too little."
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
"The only people who should use the Royal We are editors and people with tapeworms."
William Saroyan
"The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."
Amy Tan
"Story writing is a deliberate derangement of the mind."
Martial
"Someone I flattered in a book/pretends he owes me nothing. Oh the trash I have for friends."
Plato
"Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words."
Mary Oliver
"Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that."
Paul Auster
"Poetry's a beautiful thing, but it's hardly worth freezing your ass off for."
Virginia Woolf
"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."
Rainer Maria Rilke
"Let everything happen to you; beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final."
V.S. Naipal
"It's the secretions of our innermost soul that we present in our books."
John Barth
"In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has appeal, so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity..."
Mark Helprin
"I want to be a prisoner of things that make me stop still.”
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe
"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and left the room."
E.B. White
"I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult."
Steve Colman
"I feel all poets should be historians. You can't disconnect this stuff from what's going on around you."
Eudora Welty
"I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"I am persuaded that most writers, like most shoemakers, are about as good one day as the next (a point which Trollope made), hangovers apart."
George Sand
"Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness."
Rumi
"Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious."
Hafiz
"Ever since Happiness heard your name, she has been running through the streets trying to find you..."
Kurt Vonnegut
"Do you realize that all great literature — Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible, and 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' — are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?"
Neil Gaiman
"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."