Saturday, April 11, 2009

The post no one cares about.

Hi. I'm on the floor all showered and clean and readin about Virgina Woolf.
People say she was nuts.
She was.

I love scholars for quoting little parts of her journal.
I love her.

"Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.”
she says.


Finals week is brutal.

What will survive my education?

My desire.

I believe in the literary practice , and I will fight for its voice.

I am eating cinnamon life.
I am nostalgic.

I am reading posts from 2007.
Committing
to the perpetuation of words.

“No living educational force can come to birth without passion for the truth, and it is precisely the absence of this passion that has sterilized our education system as a whole.” -- Martin Crusoe; qtd by Francis Mulhern in The Moment of Scrutiny Page 104. “[Literature] is less an academic subject than a spiritual exploration coterminous with the fate of civilization itself” -- Terry Eagleton; The Rise of English Page 28. "Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great words of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance […] Every great work of literature is an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors, and infidelities of life" -- Azar Nafisi; Reading Lolita in Tehran Page 47


“It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped […] There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let’s build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes” -- Dana Gioia; Can Poetry Matter? Page 24.

1 comment:

Que Buen Chica! said...

Dear Phoenix:
Forget about scholars quoting from your journals.

Just forget about that right NOW.

There will not be arbitrary quotes from your journals or blogs because no one will know where to start and definitely they won't know where to STOP. They'll just publish the whole dang thing!

Everything you write is so meaningful and easy to relate to. I love love love reading your goodies.