“Hate was just a failure of imagination.” — Graham Greene
Re-appropriate is a word that I stole from my friend David Dark. He’d stolen it from a guy named Jeff Tweedy. It’s a good word to steal. In fact, of all the words I’ve stolen in my lifetime I feel the least remorse for lifting this one. Re-appropriate: to seize and reassign. It’s very definition encourages a theft of sorts. I suppose all of language works like that: taking anonymous words and making them our own. This enlightened practice of re-appropriation is unique to the human experience: We adapt within our situation to make the most of it. All other creatures are defined by their innate abilities, mostly untaught. A worm is not taught how to crawl. A chameleon is not taught how to change colors. A rabbit, a horse, a spider- these creatures are defined by themselves and their intrinsic giftings. We human beings are not like this: we bend, we learn, we invent, we change. Humanity has been making herself up all along. Making life. Making a living.
I would like to re-appropriate the phrase “making a living” to mean something larger than accumulating net worth in an online bank account. I’d like to suggest that ATM receipts and mortgage payments have very little to do with living or life or making life worth living. In my personal struggle to make a living, I’ve found that true success has very little to do with income or comfort. In fact, it seems to me that inconvenience, hardship and discomfort are my best teachers. It’s as though these horrible, wonderful moments where I realize my own limitations are almost exclusively the only ones that matter. So when I’m brave enough, I chase these awkward moments down. I write songs about them. I put my scattered thoughts online. Heck, I even seek therapy from time to time. Love, dreams, confessions, God, women — these are dreadful, awe-inspiring mysteries to me. They put a funny taste in my mouth. They give me scrapes and scars. And stories.
The best stories often come from inconvenient and uncomfortable places. [Read more]
fa/_ get back ^P…fa/_ get back ^P…fa/_ get back ^P
Here is a review of Moby Dick from 1851:
“This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed. We have little more to say in reprobation or in recommendation of this absurd book. Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature—since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.” — HENRY F. CHORLEY, IN London Athenaeum (via Ben)
