May 2012
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“It is safe to say that all organisms have discriminative capacities that are...”
– A Primer of Operant Conditioning by George Stanley Reynolds
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“The psychologists who use this approach differ greatly in their degree of...”
– A Primer of Operant Conditioning by George Stanley Reynolds
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“I didn’t see no di’monds, and I told Tom Sawyer so. He said there...”
– Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human...”
– The Federalist Papers (#51)
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April 2012
10 posts
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“Thus the devotion required by the Gita is no soft-hearted effusiveness. It...”
– Gandhi, The Message of the Gita
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“Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved...”
– Maurice Sendak
March 2012
7 posts
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“Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.”
– Kurt Vonnegut (via Letters of Note)
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“Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a...”
– Jorge Luis Borges, Partial Magic in the Quixote
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Two Essays on the Problem of Literature
Towards a Solution of the Problem of Literature
On reading this audacious title, you will of course be inclined to ask—“What is the problem of literature?”
I think it fitting and fortunate that literature herself has provided an articulation of the problem of literature—an articulation, and not a full-fledged definition. George Eliot, in her novel Middlemarch, provides a painful symbol of this...
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“There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and...”
– Michel de Montaigne, Of Experience
February 2012
4 posts
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“Hayward discovered the tavern at which this priceless beverage was to be...”
– Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
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January 2012
11 posts
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My mother sang nursery rhymes to me; I sang in chorus; I listened to the Beatles and Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground; Mark said to be part of the now, the us and not them, so I fell in love with Animal Collective; in school we turned the pages of the score of Bach, let’s explain sound, us non-Christians were supposed to cry for Jesus if we didn’t when Matthew told us himself; to...
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“Can I be sure, that in leaving all established opinions I am following truth;...”
– David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
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“It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to...”
– George Eliot, Middlemarch
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“Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost among small closets and winding stairs, and...”
– George Eliot, Middlemarch
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The Burgeoning
I didn’t write any New Year’s Resolutions this year, and I don’t think it’s just because I had Middlemarch to read. In my room at home I have a list of things I want to do every day taped up on my desk:
WAKE up early
don’t just do something—SIT there
READ a book, a lecture, Wikipedia
WRITE those essays
EXERCISE—walk, 30 minutes a day, maybe pullups and pushups...
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“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality...”
– Will Ladislaw, George Eliot’s Middlemarch
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of COURSE I can write hard if I want to, even write the Great American novel if I so desired the sweat of it, the trouble is getting myself in the situation where I’d have to make it so, where I’d have to live in a bedroom of some widow’s house with a bare mattress and an oven and a pile of books and air to breathe and the vegetarian equivalent of flipping burgers to keep me in a...
December 2011
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“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand...”
– Ernest Hemingway on The Old Man and the Sea
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