Read The Canon in College

What is being invoked here is not a stuffy obeisance before dead texts from a dead past, but rather a critical engagement with living texts from powerful minds still very much "active" in the present. And we should want our students to read Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Jane Austen and Kafka, Emily Dickinson and Leopold Senghor, not because they "support" one or another view of social revolution, feminism, and black self-esteem. They don't, in many instances; and we don't read them for the sake of enlisting them in a cause of our own. We should want students to read such writers so that they may learn to enjoy the activity of mind, the pleasure of forms, the beauty of language—in short, the arts in their own right.

- Irving Howe, New Republic.

Won’t you celebrate with me

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

- Lucille Clifton

De outras Joanas - 20

When the social structure starts to crack is when the dropouts and the delinquents and the crazies turn up.These are not people who don’t know the rules. These are people who can see, without understanding why, that the rules no longer make sense. But, once people like that are thrown out of the system, once they become druggies or panhandlers or abusers of all sorts, no one wants them back in. They get scape- goated. Individual moral failure is taken to be the problem. It can’t be the system. Part of wagon-train morality was leaving the weakest behind to freeze in the mountain passes. Survival, not caring, is what Didion thinks that ethos finally boiled down to—“careless self-interest and optimism,” the California mentality. California’s answer to the problem of broken people was to build more prisons to put them in.

- Louis Menaud, "Out of Bethlehem - The Radicalization of Joan Didion", na New Yorker desta semana.

De outras Joanas - 19

Mestre da Vida de São José, D. Joana I de Castela, c. 1500.

A escrita é uma pintura.

Este que vês, de cores desprovido,
o meu retrato sem primores é
e dos falsos temores já despido
em sua luz oculta põe a fé.

Do oculto sentido dolorido,
este que vês, lúcido espelho é
e do passado o grito reduzido,
o estrago oculto pela mão da fé.

Oculto nele e nele convertido
do tempo ido excusa o cruel trato,
que o tempo em tudo apaga o sentido;

E do meu sonho transformado em acto,
do engano do mundo já despido,
este que vês, é o meu retrato.


- Ana Hatherly (1929-2015)

It is a dangerous error to confound truth with matter-of-fact. Our life is governed not only by facts, but by hopes; the kind of truthfulness which sees nothing but facts is a prison for the human spirit.

- Bertrand Russell, Theory of Knowledge, 1926.