sometimes birds break

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qclxx4uO0ac

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bark

before abandoning hopscotch

"if you were to take a good look you would see very easily that on all sides, where you least suspect, there are images that copy all your movements."

reality = internal

+ to understand something, one must be outside of the thing being understood

= never capable of understanding reality

"we understand less and less what a fish is"

"the relationship between me and what is happening to me escapes me at this moment, but i don't deny that it is happening to me."

hopscotch

1. “Oh, you mean why all this. You’ll find out, I don’t think that either you or I is too much to blame. We’re not grown up yet, lucia. It’s a virtue, but it costs a lot. Children always end up pulling each other’s hair when they’ve finished playing. That’s the way it probably is. Think about it.” (91).
2. “hopscotch is played with a pebble you move with the tip of your toe. The things you need: a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a pretty chalk drawing, preferably in colors. . . . little by little you start to get the knack of how to jump over the different squares and then one day you learn how to leave earth and make th pebble climb up into heaven, the worst part is that at precisely at that moment, when practically no one has learned how to make that pebble climb up into heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden and you’re into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another heaven that you have to learn to reach too.” (214).
3. “and in this way duty, morals, the immoral and the amoral, justice, charity, the European and the American, day and night, wives, sweethearts, and girlfriends, the army and the bar . . . came to be like teeth and hair, something accepted and inevitably incorporated, something which was not alive or capable of being analyzed because that’s the way it is and it makes us what we are.” (80).
4. “it’s impossible to live with a puppeteer who works with shadows, a moth-tamer. Someone who spends his time making pictures out of the iridescent rings the oil makes on the seine is unacceptable.” (182).
5. “and these crises that most people think of as terrible, as absurd, I personally think they serve to show us the real absurdity, the absurdity of an ordered and calm world . . .” (164)
6. “the absurdity is that it doesn’t look like an absurdity.” (165)
7. “action can give meaning to your life” (166)
8. “the second should be read by beginning with chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter.” Table of instructions
9. “without any words I feel, I know, that I am here, . . . that’s what I call reality. Even if that’s all it is.” (160)
10. “reality is there and we’re inside of it, understanding it each in his own way” (161)
11. “the intercessors, one unreality, showing us another, like painted saints pointing towards heaven. This cannot exist, we can not really be here, I cannot be someone whose name is horacio” (12).
12. “the absurd thing is to believe that we can grasp the totality of what constitutes us in this moment or in any moment, and sense it as something coherent, something acceptable” (163).
13. “life as a commentary of something else we cannot reach, which is there within reach of the leap we will not take.” (458)
14. “and then you start talking about the search for unity, then I start to see a lot of beautiful things, but they’re all dead, pressed flowers and things like that.” (76).
15. “the catch is that nature and reality become enemies for some unknown reason, there is a time when nature sounds horribly false, when the reality of age twenty rubs elbows with that of age forty and on each elbow there is a razor-blade which slashes our jackets. I discover new worlds which are simultaneous and alien, and every time I get the feeling more and more that to agree is the worst of illusions. Why this thirst for universiality, why this struggle against time?” (93)

this is just what it looks like

here are the things people said and i wrote down:

celebrating world. reestablishing surprise and awe. turning. considering what happens at each turn. no boundary between what is a gift and what would otherwise not be. no distinction. agree upon something between two realities. everything agreed upon. seeing in agreement with our reality. orismology: study of definitionalizing. purpose. station. examining cognitive processes in yourself. in the differences something happens. sets up process to reverse it. speaker takes on theoretical presence. constantly dislocated figure we keep seeing. more ridiculous action, more viable it is. order. dislocation. elizabeth bishop. geography iii. melodrama. dramatized. jauntiness.

notes from class

myth: sacred narrative

legend: 3rd person story believed to have occurred in present world

folktale: fictional narrative in which people or animals act out culturally meaningful plots

memorates: first person narratives about striking events (often supernatural) that happened to the narrator

"there was a time period where one's actions changed one form; rabbits used to be human size."

list, list, before i lose it

geek love, dunne
nights at the circus, carter
freak's armour, dehaven
cruddy, lynda barry
black juice, margo lanagan
a very long engagement, s. juprisot
fancies and goodnights, john collier
black glass, karen joy fowler
bel canto, ann patchett
carment dog, carol emshwiller
high wind in jamaica, richard hughes
understanding comic, scott mccloud
short stories, saki
short stories, joan aiken
mr. wilson's cabinet of wonder, lawrence weschler

yet another

i couldn't resist adding one more:

what i like most about poetry is "write about a mystery like scary i also like to write poetry about funny things like once my dad try to take everything in the house upstairs he sleep and it was really funny even my mom laugh about it and the last of writing poetry is by thinking of my thoughts. funny, scary, happy, sad, emotion, mad, dreams, and mostly wishes that come true.

what i don't really like about poetry was those persons that came to us was some of the things that they say was kind of boring but other times was really fun."

the storyist

so, after writers in the schools, the kids had to finish the sentence: what i like most about poetry

what i like most about poetry is "that i don't like poetry. poetry is boring. poetry is silent. poetry is silent and boring."

what i like most about poetry is "i don't like reading and writing, i like only listening and speaking. i like the storyist a lot for the poetry."

what i like about poetry is "one thing i like about poetry is that you can write about anything you can think of or just imagine. there are only little rules in poetry but hardly any."

"what i like about poetry is experiencing just what is in my mind, and writing it down in a paper. i also like when we wish and write it down in a paper. next what was my favorite thing is when we get to touch things that they brought and let us touch it. also when we shared that is what i mostly like about poetry."

what i like most about poetry is "that you can feel creative exploring like if you were on a play but when you write a poem you can write anything like about what you did just write about what you think no matter what you write some people might like the poems you write but most people do. when i was small i would always write poems about little bugs some people liked my poems some people didn't so i really didn't care i was mostly sure i liked my own so i really didn't care that much."

event horizon

"things really are like other things, but also they're not and we've got to deal with that."

--bin

lemmings from norway have been reported to migrate to a particular area in the atlantic and then swim in circles until they drown. flocks of of birds have gone to their deaths in the same spot. is archaic instinct drawing them back to atlantis?

--from reader's block