Monthly Archives: June 2020

What is success irrespective of literature definition?

“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.” – Tim Ferriss

“The secret to success is to do the common things uncommonly well.” ― John D. Rockefeller

Art by a very successful painter who paints uncommonly well – Michael Cheval.

What are some book recommendations that make you really think?

I have answered this at Quora.
Wind, Sand and Stars (French title: Terre des hommes, literally “Land of Men”) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

“When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.”

“I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”

Curfew

Curfew
by Paul Eluard

What else could we do, for the doors were guarded,
What else could we do, for they had imprisoned us,
What else could we do, for the streets were forbidden us,
What else could we do, for the town was asleep?
What else could we do, for she hungered and thirsted,
What else could we do, for we were defenceless,
What else could we do, for night had descended,
What else could we do, for we were in love?

Art – Mario Reviglione – Metaphysical Nocturne (Alassio), 1912.

What are some good short stories?

I have answered this at Quora.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro
by Ernest Hemingway.

“The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past the shade onto the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.”

“Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.”

Which is the best website to learn about digital marketing?

I have written and answer at Quora.

I do believe there are many wonderful digital marketing websites, but everything I know about marketing and digital marketing I have got it from Seth Godin: Seth’s Blog

Also I particularly enjoyed his Icarus Deception:

“Author James Elkins writes of the three components necessary for someone to become an artist: seeing, making and the tabula rasa.
First, students need to learn to see. They have to see the world as it is without labels, without knowing the name of what is seen.
Second, they are taught how to make. How to use hands or voice or body to take what they see and reflect it back to the world.
And third, and most difficult, the artist starts with a blank slate. Art must be done for the first time, not repeated, and that first stroke, those first words – this is the source of our fear.”
Seth Godin – The Icarus Deception

“A great story is true. Not necessarily because it’s factual, but because it’s consistent and authentic.” – This has become my guideline in everything I write.

Art – Jennifer Diehl.

Lycidas by John Milton

Lycidas
by John Milton

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forc’d fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his wat’ry bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.

………………………………………..
SAMUEL PALMER – An Illustration to Milton’s ‘Lycidas’

Love’s Lantern

Love’s Lantern
by Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

“Because the road was steep and long
And through a dark and lonely land,
God set upon my lips a song
And put a lantern in my hand.

Through miles on weary miles of night
That stretch relentless in my way
My lantern burns serene and white,
An unexhausted cup of day.

O golden lights and lights like wine,
How dim your boasted splendors are.
Behold this little lamp of mine;
It is more starlike than a star!”

Harald Slott-Møller

Writers of the Imperfect Maps

Medium.com has published my “Writers of the Imperfect Maps” in the Blue Insights publication.
https://medium.com/blueinsight/writers-of-the-imperfect-maps-276a2ce16869

The naiads have splurged with roses.
Swirls of scented air hover above their clearings.
Without petals and stars they cannot dwell
beneath the glass shine…
Day dreamers see their unfading beauty
in the sands of the fountains.

Their love is
imprecise
built on a foundation
of unicorn-green grass…

Their skeleton
is composed of myrtle and oleander
and moss-covered lungs
heave along with waters driven
by tide…

Their flesh is irrational atoms
that laugh the blood
and rhythm of life
in the veins
that sing the helplessness blues.
White hymnal doors
flung open
on Midsummer’s Eve
at the harvest of ripe and lofty words
and lady’s bedstraw
they found
in the flicker of buried treasures.

Their words shield
the scent of a tuberose
and shelter
the spoils of the evening.

They sing in the wind
“Leave this war with me!”
It is never too late
nor too soon
to wager
on a tear.

These are no Great Songs of indifference
They are the Great Songs of out-of-time
and out-of-life
that light
this new dominion
which is the old…

29 petals of all the flowers
in the world
line up to write a map
draw sounds and borders
in as many secret alphabets
as breathing proof that

Language is not like the sun,
heating and scorching
but like the moon
keeping secrets
and the arcane magic of the night
throwing stars
in the lilacs’ claws
till dawn.

Words are lamps
they shimmer in the vilest of places.
They make dreams
out of particles and matter.
The words in the
29 secret alphabets
burn for all.

© Iulia Halatz

Lilian Gish, 1929 — photo by Cecil Beaton

What are some poems about meaning (philosophy)?

The World Is Too Much With Us
By WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

I have answered this question at Quora.com.

Art – Emil Nolde.

Mirror of the night

“My Diego:

Mirror of the night
Your eyes green swords inside my flesh. waves between our hands.

All of you in a space full of sounds — in the shade and in the light. You were called AUXOCHROME the one who captures color. I CHROMOPHORE — the one who gives color.
You are all the combinations of numbers. life. My wish is to understand lines form shades movement. You fulfill and I receive. Your word travels the entirety of space and reaches my cells which are my stars then goes to yours which are my light.”

Frida Kahlo‘s love letter to Diego Rivera. Probably one of the most beautiful and eccentrically revealing of the magic between them.

Artist Frida Kahlo