“Where does this person come from? Why here? Why now? You, who are made of star-dust, are now standing on a cliff, gazing at the starlit sky pondering your own origins and your place in the cosmos.”
Ramachandran, V. S. The Tell-tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. p. 292.
Catalog Record
W.W. Norton
“From beyond the horizon come the waves that break rhythmically on the beach, sounding now loud, now soft, as they did long before I was born and as they will in the far future. The restless, ever changing ocean is timeless on the scale of my life, and this also is a mystery.”
Revelle, Roger. "The Ocean." Scientific American 221, no. 3 (1969): 55. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0969-54.
Catalog Record
JSTOR
“This will engender an increasingly audible change in the music of the world. No longer will we hear tapes in which westerners invite non-westerners into the recording studio and later manipulate recordings of them playing their instruments. It’s too early to predict what the new music will sound like but it’s clear that the door is now open for non-western practices to have a much more profound imprint on electronic music than as mere source material.”
Puckette, Miller. "Max at Seventeen." Computer Music Journal 26, no. 4 (2002): 15. doi:10.1162/014892602320991356.
Catalog Record
MIT
“Instead of heading out into the forest with a computer to record the local artists (as we of Eurocentric cultures have been doing at least since Bartok’s time) we can now initiate e-mail conversations. People of almost any community on earth can now record their own music without the help of any modern Bartoks. And people almost anywhere can or soon will be able to get hold of a computer and involve it in their music-making.”
Puckette, Miller. "Max at Seventeen." Computer Music Journal 26, no. 4 (2002): 14-15. doi:10.1162/014892602320991356.
Catalog Record
MIT
“What does it mean for us, coming at our time in history, at once possessing and possessed by our sense of past and present, to say that literary works have as a necessary condition of their own intrinsic value the fact that they both implicate and are implicated in the conditions of the time and place in which they were created—in their history, that is to say. We grant that literature, as we know it now, in the continuing present, nourishes our sense of the past.”
Pearce, Roy Harvey. "Literature, History, and Humanism: An Americanist's Dilemma." College English 24, no. 5 (February 1963): 365.
Catalog Record
JSTOR
“We shall try to say no single word which should appeal to one group rather than another. All, equally, are now in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it.”
Pauling, Linus. "The Social Responsibilities of Scientists and Science." The Science Teacher 67, no. 1 (January 2000): 29.
Catalog Record
JSTOR
“The nature of the world has been changed so much by the discoveries of scientists—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, our means of transportation and communication, the means of waging war, all have been greatly changed—that the scientist now has come to play a special part in society. It is his role to help educate his fellow citizens about those aspects of great problems and smaller problems that involve science in an intimate way.”
Pauling, Linus. "The Social Responsibilities of Scientists and Science." The Science Teacher 67, no. 1 (January 2000): 28.
Catalog Record
JSTOR
“What is your favorite sound? How is it made? When can you hear it? Are you hearing it now?
What is the soundscape of the space you are now occupying?
How is the soundscape shaped? or what makes a soundscape?
What is the soundscape of your neighborhood?”
Oliveros, Pauline. “Listening Questions.” Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. New York: iUniverse, 2005. p. 56.
Catalog Record
iUniverse
“5) Do you remember the last sound you heard before this question?”
6) What will you hear in the near future?
7) Can you hear now and also listen to your memory of an old sound?
8) What causes you to listen?”
Oliveros, Pauline. “Ear Piece.” Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. New York: iUniverse, 2005. p. 34.
Catalog Record
iUniverse
"1) Are you listening now?
2) Are you listening to what you are now hearing?
3) Are you hearing while you listen?
4) Are you listening while you are hearing?
5) Do you remember the last sound you heard before this question?”
6) What will you hear in the near future?"
Oliveros, Pauline. “Ear Piece.” Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. New York: iUniverse, 2005. p. 34.
Catalog Record
iUniverse
“in the concept of two dennis and denise one has a tailfeather stuck on which one its so hard to find the cats eye and in the concept of two black gloss or gold light is the wings call to be all one and forget bread the light is stolen always is it midst of midst is that stolen ideas how to live in the here and now is stolen from all the others in stolen light of grew up around the grave.”
Notley, Alice. "Grave of Light." Chicago Review, Christopher Middleton: Portraits, 51, no. 1/2 (Spring 2005): 165.
Catalog Record
JSTOR
“The profound bass of the naked branches and boles booming like waterfalls; the quick, tense vibrations of the pine needles, now rising to a shrill, whistling hiss, now falling to a silky murmur; the rustling of laurel groves in the dells, and the keen, metallic click of leaf on leaf—all this was heard in easy analysis when the attention was calmly bent.”
Muir, John. The Writings of John Muir: Sierra Edition. Vol. I. The Mountains of California. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917. p. 282.
Catalog Record
Internet Archive
“Through this delightful wilderness, Cañon Creek roves without any constraining channel, throbbing and wavering; now in sunshine, now in thoughtful shade; falling, swirling, flashing from side to side in weariless exuberance of energy.”
Muir, John. The Writings of John Muir: Sierra Edition. Vol. I. The Mountains of California. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917. p. 101.
Catalog Record
Internet Archive
“but revelatory light that is no light
the unending light of the realization
that no light will ever light your bodily presence again
Now your poems’ light is all
the unending light of your presence
in the living light of your voice”
Low, Jackson Mac. “32nd Light Poem: In Memoriam Paul Blackburn 9-10 October 1971." 22 Light Poems. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1968.
Catalog Record
thing.net
“Paul Valéry, acknowledging the self-analytic tendency of philosophy, and wishing to salvage from it something of value, suggests that even if Plato and Spinoza can be refuted, their thoughts remain astonishing works of art. Now, as art becomes less art, it takes on philosophy’s early role as critique of life.”
Kaprow, Allan, and Jeff Kelley. “Manifesto.” Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1993. p. 82.
Catalog Record
University of California Press
“Aristophanes, on the other hand, said that the word ‘androgynous’ is preserved as a term of reproach, but that once, upon a time, ‘the sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was a man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which once had a real existence, but now is lost. The primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members and the remainder to correspond.'"
Howe, Fanny. For Erato: The Meaning of Life. Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, 1984.
Catalog Record
MIT
“This experience is shared by the readers of True Romances, Farm Journal and The Butcher and Grocery Clerk's Journal, no matter how popularized or technical the spaces traversed by the Amazon or Ulysses of everyday life.
Far from being writers—founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses—readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves.”
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. p. 174.
Catalog Record
University of California Press
“We must calculate and recalculate, even though only approximately, to check and recheck our initial impressions until slowly, with time and constant application, the real world, the world of the immensely small and the immensely great, becomes as familiar to us as the simple cradle of our common earthly experience. The Cosmic Pageant. Now that we have become familiar with the magnitudes involved, both large and small, for both space and time, we must sketch what we know of the origin of the universe, together with the formation of the galaxies and the stars and finally of the planets which make up our solar system, so that we can outline the conditions under which life originated, either on earth or elsewhere in the cosmos.”
Crick, Francis. Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. New York: Touchstone, 1982. pp. 28-9.
Catalog Record
"...small world this door frame back
of me the panes of simple glass yet
airy up sweep of birch trees sit in
flat below all designation declaration
here as clouds move so simply away.
*
Windows now lit close out the
upper dark the night’s a face
three eyes far fainter than
the day all faced with light
inside the room makes eye re-
flective see the common world...”
Creeley, Robert. “Helsinki Window.” Selected Poems of Robert Creeley. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. p. 346.
Catalog Record
University of California Press
“The picture is built up from our present-day knowledge of the fundamental particles of matter and radiation, together with a rather small number of experimental facts, such as the cosmic radiation background which now pervades all space—the faint whisper of creation just audible in radio tele- scopes. Such an imaginative synthesis is necessarily not entirely secure.”
Crick, Francis. Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. New York: Touchstone, 1982. p. 30.
Catalog Record
“buying credit maybe its the same credit nationhood
is a formal celebration of the objecthood of language and
credit and what it attempts to do is give the appearance
of regularization to human transactions throughout the
culture
now all over the country people are buying and selling
the same or seemingly identical things and services and
notions at wildly varying prices”
Antin, David. “Real Estate.” Tuning. New York: New Directions, 2001. p. 64.
Catalog Record
New Directions Books