The third act opens . . .
It's Tew's day . . .
Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. – Ansel Adams
Joyce Vance quickly posted re: Harris/Biden and coming events on her blog Civil Discourse.
Joe Biden has demonstrated what it means to put the country first. – Heather Cox Richardson in Letters from an American.
Alison Krauss turns 53 today. The bluegrass/country/pop aficianado was born on this day in 1971 Champaign, Illinois. She and Robert Plant are on tour together this year.
“(You say it best) When you say nothing at all.” – Alison Kraus (without her violin).
Today is the birth date of Raymond Chandler, born in 1888 Chicago. The patron saint of Los Angeles noir and perhaps the most famous crime fiction writer of all time, Chandler was the author of The Big Sleep and creator of the hard-boiled detective Philip Marlow.
· The French have a phrase for it, and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.
· Guns never settle anything. They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.
· Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine.
– Raymond Chandler (as Philip Marlow)
Light shines on The Way
It's the Moon's day . . . waning from its Thunder characterization of the past two days . . .
Paradox is where enlightenment is born—it’s not about resolving or conquering paradox by choosing one side; rather, it’s in the tension of more than one truth being true that a new wisdom arises. – Kai Cheng Thom
The mailbox has been deluged with notes – short version: “Its Kamala time.” In the wake, Trump's rants are more flotsam than jetsam.
Leonard Cohen resisted “the devil behind my tongue” in order to warn us about anger. “The antidote to anger,” The Marginalian, 2024 July 18.
And today is the 142nd anniversary of Edward Hopper's birth. The “painter of light” was born on this date in 1882 Nyack, New York
There Comes the Strangest Moment
There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free …
How many people thought you’d never change?
But here you have. It’s beautiful. It’s strange.
--Kate Light, “There Comes the Strangest Moment,” Open Slowly. Zoo Press, 2003.
Finding a voice in silence …
It's Sol's day . . . and the full “Thunder Moon” continues tonight and into Monday morning, along with the Perseid meteor shower under way now, peaking ten days into August . . .
Garry Trudeau turns 76 today. The Pulitzer Prize laureate for editorial cartooning – “Doonesbury”-- was born in 1948 New York City.
Two born today on 1899, almost next door to one another: Ernest Hemingway, born in Oak Park, Illinois and Hart Crane, born in Garrettsville, Ohio
“ 200 Years of Solitude,” There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In solitude, we may begin to hear in the silence the song of our own lives. – Maria Popova, The Marginalian, 16 July 2024.
Humanity's search for cosmic truth and poetic beauty: TED talk by Maria Popova
How to be a Poet
(to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each
than you have . . .
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
— Wendell Berry, New and Collected Poems, Counterpoint, 2013.