“A writer’s notebook is not a diary. Writers react. Writers need a place to record these reactions. That’s what a writer’s notebook is for. It gives you a place to write down what makes you angry or sad or amazed, to write down what you noticed and don’t want to forget. A writer’s notebook gives you a place to live like a writer.” - Ralph Fletcher
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Noam Chomsky: Things Are Ugly—Let’s Do Something About It
Because we can!
We write every day, sometimes it’s about fishing, sometimes it’s about world news, sometimes it’s whatever the fuck from our fucked up brain.
Here, there, everywhere…sometimes more than once, in more than one place, nearly every day…because we fucking can.
We fucking can.
Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster. Members of this intellectual and artistic class, who are usually not welcome in the stultifying halls of academia where mediocrity is triumphant, serve as prophets. They are dismissed, or labeled by the power elites as subversive, because they do not embrace collective self-worship. They force us to confront unexamined assumptions, ones that, if not challenged, lead to destruction. They expose the ruling elites as hollow and corrupt. They articulate the senselessness of a system built on the ideology of endless growth, ceaseless exploitation and constant expansion. They warn us about the poison of careerism and the futility of the search for happiness in the accumulation of wealth. They make us face ourselves, from the bitter reality of slavery and Jim Crow to the genocidal slaughter of Native Americans to the repression of working-class movements to the atrocities carried out in imperial wars to the assault on the ecosystem. They make us unsure of our virtue. They challenge the easy clichés we use to describe the nation—the land of the free, the greatest country on earth, the beacon of liberty—to expose our darkness, crimes and ignorance. They offer the possibility of a life of meaning and the capacity for transformation.
Chris Hedges
(Source: truth-out.org)
I wrote this #poem for @LuluDating .. a long, long time ago ..
Love Poem
by Charles Bivona
It’s like tiny imperfect pebbles—
the precious blinks, the fleeting breaths
of my life—picked and polished
and quietly dropped in your rivers.
My love is like that, I told her.
(Source: charlesbivona.com)
There are at least four ways an author can become semi-important: He (or she) can have massive commercial success. He can be adored and elevated by critics. He can craft “social epics” that contextualize modernity and force op-ed writers to reevaluate What This All Means. He can even become a celebrity in and of himself, which means that whatever he chooses to write becomes meaningful solely because he is the person who wrote it. There are many, many writers who fulfill one or more of these criteria.
Chuck Klosterman, “The Jonathan Franzen Award for Jaw-Dropping Literary Genius Goes to … Jonathan Franzen”
(Source: byliner.com)
There is nothing more petty, insipid, crowded with paltry interests—in a word, antipoetic—than the daily life of an American.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America [1835]
