Archives
Categories
Mastodon (hcommons.social)
Tag Archives: Imagination
Weaving Wonderment
Roger Scruton. Xanthippic Dialogues. In one of these dialogues, Xanthippe is weaving a tapestry depicting the late Socrates and is engaged in conversation with Plato. She is also an adept weaver of words. Take for instance this summation of several … Continue reading
Fantasy Machines
Just what will replace the telephone book as a stimulus? Whenever I’m asked what book I would take with me to a desert island, I reply, “The phone book: with all those characters, I could invent an infinite number of … Continue reading
Active Mind
Nella Cotrupi in Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process draws attention to Frye’s discussion of Blake. In Fearful Symmetry, Frye used Blake’s distinction between the visonary ‘Hallelujah-Chorus’ perception of the sun and its more prosaic, rationalistic reception as a … Continue reading
Further Reading
Exercise imagination or beware. So says Vita Sackville-West in the introductory paragraph to Nursery Rhymes (Dropmore Press, 1947). Samuel Taylor Coleridge once remarked that he could not “recollect a more astonishing image than that of a whole rookery that flew … Continue reading
Mock Interview About the Narrative Impulse
[Anthony?] Storr drawing on Winnicott writes: Transitional objects gradually loose their emotional charge as the child grows older. Often such objects become linked with a variety of other objects and are used in play. Children easily transmute a broomstick into … Continue reading
Discovery in Repetition and Repeating
This is a longish piece from Januaray 10, 2003, here transcribed from two pages of longhand. Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia A close reading of a passage and a bit of translation à la Erasmian … Continue reading
Use of Imagination
Winifred Gallagher in Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life provides this gem of circumlocution in the interests of anticipating hurdles: Deciding beforehand what you’ll focus on when sticking to your goal becomes difficult can even be a better strategy than … Continue reading
Expression: Sensations and Representations
Malebranche offers an interesting take on the signifying limits of words. Consider this explanation from Thomas M. Carr Descartes and the Resilience of Rhetoric. The ideal use of words, according to Malebranche, is to communicate the pure ideas of the … Continue reading
inno’va-tion
Signed “James Downey”, the introduction to inno’va-tion: Essays by Leading Canadian Researchers contains an apt description of the ingredients of the research process While researchers may use highly sophisticated machines, they themselves are subject to the same vagaries of chance … Continue reading
Listenings
From the interview with Monkey Bread, in the Daughters of Nzingha newsletter in the novel Mosquito by Gayl Jones. Remember that listeners have got imaginations and sometimes their imaginations are richer than anything they can hear. Tell your stories right … Continue reading