“I see people who do not read: they are so limited in their lives, even in the good things. They do not see beyond their immediate surroundings; they are incapable of changing anything because they neither know what there is to change, nor how to go about it. They don’t understand other people, not even their own loved ones, because they do not have the habit of reflecting on the yearnings, motives, and passions of human beings. And whatever thing they experience makes much less sense than it does for someone who reads. Besides, what would a man see in the fields of La Mancha who does not know who Don Quixote is? Dusty roads, nothing more.” – Agustin Cadena, “Why I Read” (trans. Mayo)
“Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is one of the great intellectual accomplishments of the twentieth century. Its implications are so far reaching that it is difficult to overestimate them. Gödel’s result puts intrinsic limitations on the reach of deductive systems; that is, it shows that given any (sufficiently complex) deductive system, there are results that are beyond the reach of the system—results that are true but cannot be proved or disproved on the basis of the initial set of axioms. The new result might be proved by adding new axioms to the system (for example, the result itself) but the new strengthened system will itself have unprovable results.” – William Byers, How Mathematicians Think
“Facebook can seem at times an enormous simulacrum of the Pussycat Lounge, full of voyeurism and cynical, semi-professional exhibitionism, but obviously the divide between performer and audience that structures the flow of money, power, pity, and contempt in strip clubs has been largely obliterated online. Instead, there is the ambiguous simultaneity of consuming and producing spectacle, of performing the self, of spectatorship as performance, in a medium that immediately allows you to substitute yourself for any performer with broadcast responses of your own. This stew of contradictory and self-negating impulses makes up what now often gets described simply as sharing. It’s sharing when we confess something; it’s sharing when we link to someone else’s work; it’s sharing when we simply express approval for something; it’s sharing when a social-media service automatically announces some action we took. Online we all have a million hearts to give.” – Rob Horning, “The Failure Addict”
“Mathematics is not a body of facts arranged and justified by a stringent logical structure. To give a dynamic metaphor that stems from the related field of fluid flow, it is like a turbulent river. The flow of the water is extremely complex, but every now and again you see the appearance of stable structures, eddies and whirlpools. These stable structures correspond to the propositions and theorems of mathematics. It is the logical structure of mathematics that gives these theorems their stability, but when we look at things in this way we see that the stability is not absolute. The data can be structured in many different ways corresponding to what we are interested in and in the mathematical ideas that arise to do the structuring. These ideas arise in response to the question, ‘What is going on here?’—that is, from the attempt to make sense of the phenomena in question.” – William Byers, How Mathematicians Think
“Revise! Read writing that inspires and challenges you. Write about what really matters to you and do it so well that it is compelling to others. Keep editing your work. Be strict with yourself, but patient with your own process.” – Lisa Cohen (from David Low interview in The Wesleyan Connection)
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic: ‘Man in the Arena’”
“The problem in politics is this: You don’t get any credit for disaster averted. Going to the voters and saying, ‘Boy, things really suck, but you know what? If it wasn’t for me, they would suck worse.’ That is not a platform on which anybody has ever gotten elected in the history of the world.” – Barney Frank, quoted in Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail
“When it comes to writing, the despairing perfectionism known as alcoholism can be as tragically inhibiting as it is sordid to witness.” – Terry Castle, “You Better Not Tell Me You Forgot”
“As sophisticated as the world’s markets have become, the glue that holds the entire arrangement together remains old-fashioned trust. Once that vanishes, things can unravel very quickly.” — Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail
“I was still busy in pushing forward the repairs to the railroad-bridge at Bear Creek, and in patching up the many breaks between it and Tuscumbia, when on the 27th of October, as I sat on the porch of a house, I was approached by a dirty, black-haired individual with mixed dress and strange demeanor, who inquired for me, and, on being assured that I was in fact the man, he handed me a letter from General Blair at Tuscumbia, and another short one, which was a telegraph-message from General Grant at Chattanooga, addressed to me through General George Crook, commanding at Huntsville, Alabama, to this effect: ‘Drop all work on Memphis & Charleston Railroad, cross the Tennessee, and hurry eastward with all possible dispatch toward Bridgeport, till you meet further orders from me. U.S. Grant.’
“The bearer of this message was Corporal Pike, who described to me, in his peculiar way, that General Crook had sent him in a canoe; that he had pulled down the Tennessee River, over Muscle Shoals, was fired at all the way by guerrillas, but on reaching Tuscumbia he had providentially found it in possession of our troops. He had reported to General Blair, who sent him on to me at Iuka. This Pike proved to be a singular character; his manner attracted my notice at once, and I got him a horse, and had him travel with us eastward to about Elkton, whence I sent him back to General Crook at Huntsville; but told him, if I could ever do him a personal service, he might apply to me. The next spring when I was in Chattanooga, preparing for the Atlanta campaign, Corporal Pike made his appearance and asked me a fulfillment of my promise. I inquired what he wanted, and he said he wanted to do something bold, something that would make him a hero. I explained to him, that we were getting ready to go for Joe Johnston at Dalton, that I expected to be in the neighborhood of Atlanta about the 4th of July, and wanted the bridge across the Savannah River at Augusta, Georgia, to be burnt about that time, to produce alarm and confusion behind the rebel army. I explained to Pike that the chances were three to one that he would be caught and hanged; but the greater the danger the greater seemed to be his desire to attempt it. I told him to select a companion, to disguise himself as an East Tennessee refugee, work his way over the mountains into North Carolina, and at the time appointed to float down the Savannah River and burn that bridge. In a few days he had made his preparations and took his departure. The bridge was not burnt, and I supposed that Pike had been caught and hanged.
“When we reached Columbia, South Carolina, in February, 1865, just as we were leaving the town, in passing near the asylum, I heard my name called, and saw a very dirty fellow followed by a file of men running toward me, and as they got near I recognized Pike. He called to me to identify him as one of my men; he was then a prisoner under guard, and I instructed the guard to bring him that night to my camp some fifteen miles up the road, which was done. Pike gave me a graphic narrative of his adventures, which would have filled a volume; told me how he had made two attempts to burn the bridge, and failed; and said that at the time of our entering Columbia he was a prisoner in the hands of the rebels, under trial for his life, but in the confusion of their retreat he made his escape and got into our lines, where he was again made a prisoner by our troops because of his looks. Pike got some clothes, cleaned up, and I used him afterward to communicate with Wilmington, North Carolina. Some time after the war, he was appointed a lieutenant of the Regular Cavalry, and was killed in Oregon, by the accidental discharge of a pistol. Just before his death he wrote me, saying that he was tired of the monotony of garrison-life, and wanted to turn Indian, join the Cheyennes on the Plains, who were then giving us great trouble, and, after he had gained their confidence, he would betray them into our hands. Of course I wrote him that he must try and settle down and become a gentleman as well as an officer, apply himself to his duties, and forget the wild desires of his nature, which were well enough in time of war, but not suited to his new condition as an officer; but, poor fellow! he was killed by an accident, which probably saved him from a slower but harder fate.” — William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman (emphases in original)
Three months ago, Snow Monkey published my story, “The Tiny Toy Train.” Today, I am adding it to the “Previously Published Stories” sidebar immediately to your right and one level below “The Gordon Lish Notes.”
“Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things.” – Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”
“A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.” – Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”
