The Sequoia Farm

Creatures of Contact

David Rakoff reads his poetic retelling of the Turtle and the Scorpion.

Christian fiction for the 10th century

Douglas Wilson on how it is possible to see Beowulf as a kind of Christian apologetic:

"Hrothgar does not fight, and he cannot save the people. Beowulf does fight, successfully—and the ultimate point of the poem is (as we will see) that he cannot save the people from this cycle of violence either. Not fighting does no good, but neither does fighting.

[...] This is where the poem brings us, only to abandon us there. What can be done to save this people from their lost condition? By the end of the poem, it is absolutely certain that there is nothing that the people of this culture can do themselves about their lostness."

Read the complete essay here...

Q178: Past is prologue

"If you hate that it happened, then you hate that you are."

— Margaret Cutright

(You can hear the whole background that leads up to this quote here.)

Shed a little light...

"You can only love what you die for [...]"

— Foy Vance, in "Shed a Little Light"

Turn up your speakers, and I dare you not to like this song:

An Untenanted Bicycle Rolls Into View...

I've been watching readings of Edward Gorey stories on Youtube today. They are sometimes a bit dark and absurd, but that's half the fun right there. Here's a reading of "The Epiplectic Bicycle":

Just finished reading an interesting short story ("The Machine Stops...") written by E.M. Forster in 1909. Some of what he describes is uncomfortably close to reality today. Here is a link to the full text, and below are some quotes I thought were particularly good:

"Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not? In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress [...]"
~ · ~

"I want to see you not through the Machine," said Kuno. "I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine."
~ · ~

"[S]he did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears."

~ · ~

"[She] was seized with the terrors of direct experience."

~ · ~

"What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul."
~ · ~

"Rather did they yield to some invincible pressure, which came no one knew whither, and which, when gratified, was succeeded by some new pressure equally invincible. To such a state of affairs it is convenient to give the name of progress."

~ · ~

"[B]ehind all the uproar was silence - the silence which is the voice of the earth and of the generations who have gone."

Do-it-yourself Culture

Shea Hembrey at TED on how he invented 100 different artists and their works:

Q177: Etgar Keret

Just finished reading Four Stories, a small collection of writings by Etgar Keret. If you haven't read anything by him, I'd encourage you to find some of his work — it's available at different places around the Web. Here are a few quotes:

"[...] a great work of art is often just residual evidence of a great human soul. [...] what we call 'craft' is really just the means by which the writer manages to give clear passage to these positive virtues."

— George Saunders, from the introduction

"There is not one emotion that I have that you don't share with me. What it means to be afraid or cold or hungry — maybe I felt it ten thousand times more than you'll ever do. But you can understand it, for sure. And it's your duty to try and understand it. You cannot be excused from that."

— Keret, quoting his father

"But you don't always have to understand to learn from something."

— Keret

The book also contained the (extremely) short work called "Asthma Attack", which summarizes Keret's philosophy of writing. It's like a one-paragraph writing seminar. Here's a link to a copy online...