"Few people, for instance, realize that a time may easily
come when we shall see the great outburst of science in
the nineteenth century as something quite as splendid, brief,
unique, and ultimately abandoned, as the outburst of Art
at the Renascence." --G K Chesterton, Dickens

"If Hart Crane could have become a communist, he'd
be alive today. He would probably be to North America
what Neruda is to South." --Bill Knott (in the 60's)

"O Time, thou hast played strange tricks with us! and we
bless the stars that made us a novelist, and permit us now
to retaliate." --E Bulwer Lytton, Paul Clifford

In the salvation racket, politics is despair of psychology,
and psychology is despair of politics. To unite these perhaps
it is necessary to eschew salvation...

A wrong reason: doing this or that, just in case it might
have results. (I don't gamble my money, how much less
should i gamble my time.) Or--so as to avoid the feeling of
having missed my chance. (Most of these are named
"prize"--to win me over.) For example--first i reason out that
art careers have no meaning today. Then i go ahead and plan
shows: just in case i can have an art career. I call it an "experi-
ment" but is it not an experiment in hypocrisy...?

"Unfortunately Plautus did what was natural and easy, and he
had no successors. Ennius did what was unnatural and hard,
and he set a fashion from which poetry did not fully recover
until twelve centuries had passed." --Philip Schuyler Allen

"He [Gottschalk] is a significant witness to the history of the
Latin lyric, for his example proves that whenever the personal
conditions were present which were propitious to the expression
of intimate feeling there was a possibility of lyrical poetry. In
this sense the lyric has no continuous history." --F J E Raby,
A History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages(1934)

'St Francis of Assisi...founded an Order which quickly began to
participate in murder and massacre almost immediately after it
was formed.' --Simone Weil

It's alright to laugh at Shazia Mirza. (via Metafilter)

One of our last great used bookstores in town is closing down (sob!).
I picked up Mr Weston's Good Wine, a book of poems by Kenneth
Fearing...& a collectible Lyn Lifshin chapbook.