PolyArchive

      “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders […]

I started dating him when I was too young and stupid to know that just because someone thinks you’re loveable does not mean you should devote your entire life to him and ignore the fact that he’s a manipulative rat bastard* who hates your friends and family… There is nothing worse than wanting desperately to […]

Marginalia Billy Collins Sometimes the notes are ferocious, Skirmishes against the author Raging along the borders of every page In tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, They seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments […]

Infirmity Theodore Roethke In purest song one plays the constant fool As changes shimmer in the inner eye. I stare and stare into a deepening pool And tell myself my image cannot die. I love myself: that’s my one constancy. Oh, to be something else, yet still to be! Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity; […]

I wasn’t always a fan of Bruce Springsteen. Of course, I knew his music (or so I thought). Who didn’t? Every song on Born in the USA had been a single, and had been played to death, right? And then he did those mediocre movie soundtrack songs in the 90s, which, I was convinced, were actually the […]

pity this busy monster, manunkind E. E. Cummings pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness –electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of […]

  “The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake in the middle of the night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss […]

“The buying of more books than one can perchance read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity, and this passion is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish.” — A. Edward Newton (1863-1940)

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. – George Orwell, Ninety Eighty-Four, ch.7. Til the End of Days by Javier de la Torre

“Twenty-nine’s Fell Shadow! O, inhospitably final year of any Pretense to Youth, its Dreams now, how wither’d away … tho’ styl’d a Prime, yet bid’st thou Adieu to the Prime of Life! … There,— there, in the Stygian Mists of Futurity, loometh the dread Thirty,— Transition unspeakable! Prime so soon fallen, thy Virtue so easily […]

Ulysses (1833) Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson(1809–92) It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink […]

…Among those “enemies” prosecuted as a parasite was Joseph Brodsky, a young poet and future recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. At that time, he was considered among “the most politically unreliable” people, because he  “was part of a circle of anti-Soviet individuals” and “wrote poems of a decadent and even hostile nature” instead of engaging in activities that […]

  If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. –T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets The Heidelberg Project is an art environment in the heart of Detroit’s east side. The project was started by artist Tyree Guyton and his grandfather, Sam Mackey, in 1986. After serving in […]

“Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.” “Certainly.” “You say that a man’s first job is to earn a living, and that the first task of education is to equip him for that job?” “Of course.” “Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of […]