( via / via )

"Before AI, 20,000 people in Kenya earned a living writing essays full-time."

" 'I AM IN DANGER--SIR--'

'Half-cracked' to Higginson, living,
afterward famous in garbled versions,
your hoard of dazzling scraps a battlefield,
now your old snood

mothballed at Harvard
and you in your variorum monument
equivocal to the end--
who are you?

Gardening the day-lily,
wiping the wine-glass stems,
your thought pulsed on behind
a forehead battered paper-thin,

you, woman, masculine
in single-mindedness,
for whom the word was more
than a symptom--

a condition of being.
Till the air buzzing with spoiled language
sang in your ears
of Perjury

and in your half-cracked way you chose
silence for entertainment,
chose to have it out at last
on your own premises."

--Adrienne Rich

"Such an act of faith, he says to lug them from wherever and shape them in a circle, and still nobody knows how they did it."

"The Stoic ... trains himself to swallow stones and worms, glass shards and scorpions without nausea; he wants his stomach to be ultimately insensible to everything the chance of existence pours into him...". ~Nietzsche via @joshualwatson

"A review appeared of the first edition of After Babel by a very distinguished linguist, an old man now, still alive, and someone I respect very much: the high priest of the mandarins. 'After Babel is a very bad book,' it began, 'but alas it is a classic.' So I wrote this professor and said no review has ever honored me more, particularly the alas, which was wrung from him. I can live with that."