Category: Blog

 Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard.

Biblioklept

http://Cate Blanchette Courts Failure

“I look for the great noble failure, I think, at this point in my life,” says Blanchett. “When I began reading the script [for TÁR], I fortunately have a 26-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. And I had to look up every term until, after about the third page, I put it away, and I went, ‘There’s an incredible rhythm happening here. And, in fact, I don’t need to know any of this.’ I found a subterranean connection that I still don’t understand fully. Maybe I don’t ever want to understand it; I just want the reverberations to be with me forever.”

Once,
years ago,
I called my opthamologist’s office
for an appointment.

which one are you? queried the appointments nurse

uh, how many of me are there? I parried

Well! I have right here FIVE from in the Metro Area!

You do realize, I intoned, That
if any two of us happened to be
in the waiting room at the same time
the universe will explode . . .

Oooooh! she cooed. You’re a Trekkie!

It was true.
My roommate at the time
made us watch 3 straight hours of Trekkia
every weekday-night,
Original, TNG, DS9,
on some independent channel in DFW

On weekends I went home to my family,
then drove back early-early.

One Monday, just as I pulled into the office parking lot,
a song that resonated with my grinding commute
came on like thunder,
first rimshot shocks setting the beat,
then Wagnerian violin scraping like Valkeries
so I sat in my car till the storm passed

He was big.
For years I traded on the Goodwill he created
for my benefit, joking,
Just treat me like any other customer; no special treatment . . .
but then some teenage cashier
looked at me peevishly confused, said Wha?
My name, I explained, is a celebrity.
She said, I don’t know who that is.

Now I get emails from this service
that will notify me when I am cited
in academic literature
(5000 times, so far!),
if only I would subscribe,
like-in-some-degree
to the bogus Who’s Who solicitations
I used to get.

Which one am I?
I’m always the other one.
Another one.

Rejection, not acceptance, defines writing life.

Oh, well, my nose wrinkles at this Pep-Talk POV . . . .

I prefer the Idea of Failure as unsuccessful tests of Theory
advanced into the Marketplace of Ideas,
where there is the satisfaction of the conviction and enterprise
despite the underwhelming reception

and not for nuthin’ . . . 

i myself may not get past the pay-wall, but you might . . .

“What a good actor–a real actor–is always trying to do is very difficult, almost impossible, so most of the time we fail. Most of the time I fail. Because what I’m after is perfection, truth, reality: Truth in art. This is exceedingly rare. It’s very, very hard to achieve and overwhelming to maintain. So I fail a lot. But if I keep reaching for that perfection, that connection to the script, to the actors, to the audience, I’m becoming a better actor. I’m growing. I’m doing the right work. If you find someone who claims they are always satisfied, always good, a professional who hits the marks, you are not looking at an actor. I’m not going to say what you’re looking at, but it’s not an actor. It’s not an artist. I’m going to say it: What you have is a performer. I am not a performer.” –Kim Stanley/Interview with James Grissom/1992/Photo of Stanley from the 1958 film “The Goddess”

via Silent Lotus

At the start of his latest book, “In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility,” the philosopher Costica Bradatan notes without chagrin that when we consider our origins and our ultimate fate, humans are not very impressive. We are designed to fail, he emphasizes, and death is the framework for all our attempts to make something of ourselves. In a previous book, “Dying for Ideas,” he considered how philosophers across the ages wrestled with mortality. In “In Praise of Failure,” he looks at how various thinkers — Seneca, Mohandas Gandhi, Simone Weil, Emil Cioran, Yukio Mishima — detached themselves from an obsessive drive for worldly success by reckoning with failure and death. Bradatan wants us to grasp how striving to succeed prevents us from dealing with our mortality and hence from living a more meaningful life.

Failure and Flourishing

So why not make our setbacks more visible, asked researcher Melanie Stefan in a 2010 Nature letter? Instead of scholars hiding their failures and trumpeting their successes (which surely, she notes, can leave colleagues “feeling alone and dejected” when their work gets rejected), why not “compile an ‘alternative’ CV of failures”?

more like corroborating testimony than a root source,

if you see how I mean