Food for thought: Joshua T. Dickerson’s poem “Cause I Ain’t Got a Pencil.”
Wednesday, August 16, 2023
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Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
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Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“Who are we as a country?”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
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Words to live by
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
#1 hit
In memory of
Blog Archive
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- Twelve movies
- Sad songs
- The Daily Tar Heel front page
- Goodbye, Fine Arts elevators
- The Times like
- “Slang Stew”
- A January day
- A Very British Cult
- Plenty of nothing
- “Not the odds, but the stakes”
- Turgenev understood the flow state
- Goodbye, (dumb) TV
- Transit Diner (?)
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- Zippy draws Nancy
- Groats, grits, grout, Grote
- Why are pencils so popular?
- “Sure, Jan”
- Brain food
- Mutts meta
- Got bail?
- The Martin family dictionary
- Turning off Mac auto-punctuation
- Screen apnea
- How to improve writing (no. 112)
- Domestic comedy
- A plumbing story
- The plumber’s reward
- Sardinecore
- Nancy adds a wall
- Gowanus scaffolding
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- More 1232 Madison
- How to improve writing (no. 111)
- “O Heaven, were my whiskers neglected!”
- How to lay off of Josh Marshall
- “Th’ anti-Ernie!”
- #:~:text=
- An EXchange name sighting
- “Cause I Ain’t Got a Pencil”
- What is an overt act?
- TV in the classroom
- “School Pencils? Pencil Cases?”
- Georgia on our minds
- Overheard
- Twelve movies
- More Bozzo
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- THANK YOU
- Reading and writing in the dark
- The Republic of Laundry
- From Artie to Zippy
- “My little right paw”
- Ian’s Shoelace Site
- “The stuff that was good”
- “Scholarly voracity”
- A Gennett Records documentary
- Two Millhauser reviews
- Eleven movies, one series
- A joke in the traditional manner
- Dad, i.m.
- Dictée writ large
- Today’s Saturday Stumper
- Weaving through traffic
- Nancy synchronicity
- On Louis Armstrong’s birthday
- Swing, swing, swing
- A Steven Millhauser interview
- Hat trick
- One family’s dictionary
- Happy birthday, Steven Millhauser
- Mystery actor
- Criterion’s August
- Another indictment
- “Books, always books”
- Sold a Story updates
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▼
August
(77)
favorite posts
- Against “deep reading”
- Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer
- At the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Chapel
- Being wrong about beauty
- Bobbing for apples
- “Bon Appétit!”
- “The Case of the Purloined Prairie”
- ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems
- “The ’Clipse”
- Couric and Palin and Orwell
- Digital naïfs
- Donald Trump’s spelling
- Ebinger’s
- Ellington for beginners
- “Extra credit?”
- Five desks
- Five pens
- Fluke life
- The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else
- Happy birthday, Mr. Piletti
- Hoagies, pizza, and English studies
- Homeric blindness in “colledge”
- How to Write a Sentence
- Imaginary liner notes
- Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
- Invitation to a dance
- Is there a pencil in The House?
- John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat
- A Kerouac notebook page
- The kitchen shink [sic]
- Klenosky!
- “Make My Jotter Quit!”
- Lady Elaine’s can
- Mysteries of the tollbooth
- National’s et cetera
- Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado
- Obama revisions
- Obama thoughts
- On “On the New Literacy”
- On “Politics and the English Language”
- “On the Road”
- The Oteris and Marty
- The other little book
- Out of the past
- Peppa Pig and the Brontës
- Phones Are For People
- Politics and theory
- “The Poet”
- Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things
- P.S. 131
- Pullum on Strunk and White
- Re: the Beloit Mindset List
- Some have gone and some remain
- “The Spokesmen”
- Sports Illustrated and Proust
- The Springfield Daily Gazette
- That (in)famous line
- Things I learned on my summer vacation
- Van Dyke Parks in Chicago
- W(h)ither grammar
- What I hear in “Walk Away Renee”
Nancy, October 19, 1950.
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