“ Be contemporary. Have impact. Strive for it. Be of the world. Move it. Be bold, don’t hold back. Then the moment you think you’ve been bold, be bolder. We are all alive today, ever so briefly here now, not then, not ago, not in some dreamworld of a hypothetical future. Whatever you do, you must make it contemporary. Make it matter now. You must give us a new path to tread, even if it carries the footfalls of old soles. You must not be immune to the weird urgency of today. ”
Wisdom from Ian Bogost’s commencement address at the University of Iowa, a fine addition to this ongoing archive of timeless advice. Pair with Greil Marcus’s fantastic 2013 School of Visual Arts commencement address.
(↬ austinkleon)
“ Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies - say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work - when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds? ”
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (via ambientdew)
Albrecht Dürer (21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528), Study of hands
Cats, Walter Benjamin and Bronson Pinchot in a video that came to me by way of Lauren freaking Berlant. THIS IS EVERYTHING.
“ I want to make a praise of sleep. Not as a practitioner—I admit I have never been what is called “a good sleeper” and perhaps we can return later to that curious concept—but as a reader. There is so much sleep to read, there are so many ways to read it. ”
Anne Carson, “Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise to Sleep)” (via themoonsofjupiter)
“ Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried. Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands. Maybe this is the way it should be ”
Anne Carson (via glennuh)
“ I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough. ”
Anne Carson, “Introduction” (from Short Talks).
(I suspect that all of the major decisions in my life have been motivated by just this drive to avoid boredom.)
