Jeremy Fischer

Because rhetoric is a rhetor’s solution to perceived problems, it constitutes “equipment for living”— a chart, formula, manual, or map that an audience may consult in trying to decide on various courses of action.

—Sonja K. Foss in her work, Rhetorical Criticism where she was elucidating Kenneth Burke’s The Philosophy of Literary Form.

You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.

—Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives

Decline of Values

So strong it makes me breathless.

wwnorton:

I’m reading a B.A. thesis
on the decline of values. Logically,
falling implies a height from which
to fall, and who’s that stupid?

Life is neither up nor down, and still less
in between. Life has no idea
of up and down, fullness and void, before
and after. And knows zip about the present.

Tear up your pages, ditch them in the sewer,
abandon your degree and you can brag
that you were momentarily alive (maybe).

Eugenio Montale, from The Collected Poems

I am a mysteriously slow writer. I say “mysteriously” because there is no accounting for it.

To never open a book, always reading a magazine.
Out-spent betting, if it looks like winning,
You haven’t been.

—Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton - “Winning”

W. W. Norton: Ex-Boyfriends

wwnorton:

They hang around, hitting on your friends
or else you never hear from them again.
They call when they’re drunk, or finally get sober,

they’re passing through town and want dinner,
they take your hand across the table, kiss you
when you come back from the bathroom.

They were your loves, your…

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Andre Dubus III

—We're Here To Learn How To Love And Be Loved

wwnorton:

“I was a raging, violent kid and it was finding, for me, creative writing which gave me a way into all the other symphonic feelings a human being has. I came alive.”

—Andre Dubus III, author of Townie: A Memoir, speaking on the “What’s Up With Men” panel at the Boston Book Festival.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

—Oscar Wilde (via mur-de-merveille)

When you see a good move, look for a better one.

—Emanuel Lasker (via fuchess)