Category: art

a figure must be invented who can be superimposed on the society as a whole, whose routine and life-pattern serve somehow to tie its separate and isolated parts together. The equivalent is the picaresque novel, where a single character moves from one background to another, linking “picturesque” but not intrinsically related episodes together. In doing this the detective in a sense once again fulfills the demands of the function of knowledge rather than that of lived experience: through him we are able to see, to know, the society as a whole

Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality by Fredric Jameson

Tippett: It was actually in your book that I first realized, and I had never thought about this, that the root — the Greek root for the word “beauty” is related to the word for “calling”; to “kalon” and “kalein.”

O’Donohue: That’s right. That’s it exactly.

Tippett: That’s fascinating.

O’Donohue: It is, actually, and it means that, actually, in the presence of beauty, it’s not a neutral thing, but it’s actually calling you. And I feel that one could write a wonderful psychology just based on the notion of being called — being called to be yourself and called to transfigure what has hardened or got wounded within you. And it’s also, of course, the heart of creativity, this calling forth all the time, because, like in the work that I do, trying to write a few poems, you never write the same poem twice. You’re always at a new place, and then you’re suddenly surprised by where you get taken to.

On Being with Krista Tippett, John O’Donohue : The Inner Landscape of Beauty

Original Air Date : February 28, 2008

“Pleasure … can fortify us. The pleasure that is beauty, the beauty that is meaning, order, calm” (RS)

Untitled (A place to stand and stare, recalling tunes of ballads in a minor key)

It is “the running after the spinning top” or “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” Carson via Enns.