“When we read, we start at the beginning and continue until we reach the end. When we write, we start in the middle and fight our way out.”
– Vickie Karp

“No one is asking, let alone demanding, that you write. The world is not waiting with bated breath for your article or book. Whether or not you get a single word on paper, the sun will rise, the earth will spin, the universe will expand. Writing is forever and always a choice — your choice.”
– Beth Mende Conny

What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain

Epilogue: What can we learn from them?

1. Part of being a good teacher is knowing that you always have something new to learn–not so much about teaching techniques but about these particular students at this particular time and their particular sets of aspirations, confusions, misconceptions, and ignorance.

Good teaching is not just a matter of technique. The best teaching is often both and intellectual creation and a performing art.

“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”

Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written… I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place.

Language is what stops the heart exploding.

Read the whole essay at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/ts-eliot-festival-donmar-jeanette-winterson

There is Another Day
Know that your most worthy efforts will be scorned by your peers, for it is they who suffer most when you excel. If your actions and ambitions threaten them not, you’re simply striving toward the insignificant.

Perceptions and Publicity
Contrary to what most chieftains think, you’re not remembered by what you did in the past, but by what most Huns think you did.

Customs
It is the custom of all Huns to hold strong to personal and national honor. This is a cardinal virtue. One’s word must prevail over all other considerations, including political expediency.

Leaders and Leadership
A wise chieftain never depends on luck. Rather, he always trusts his future to hard work, stamina, tenacity and a positive attitude.

Leadership and Loneliness
Chieftains who lead our Huns must have courage. They must be fearless and have the fortitude to carry out assignments given them – the gallantry to accept the risks of leadership. They must not balk at the sight of obstacles, nor must they become bewildered when in the presence of adversity. The role of a chieftain has inherent periods of loneliness, despair, ridicule and rejection.

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that’s where it begins

You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
What keeps mankind alive?

What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
And for once you must try not to shriek the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts

“Take it easy, but take it.”

Amen to that.

One way to look at reading: as the lifelong construction of a map by which to trace and plumb what it has ever meant to be in the world, and by which to gain perspective on that other, ongoing map—the one that marks our own passage through the world as we both find and make it.

If all we can ever know comes filtered through the lens of our own experience, and if we are readers, some part of our very selves will be the result of what we have read—this is obvious enough. Good writers not only have read widely and deeply, but they continue to do so—not in order to be better writers, but because for them the act of reading is as inseparable from living as writing is.

As for the fear that by reading the great work that has come before one’s original voice will either be influenced away from itself or overwhelmed into utter silence: an original voice can perhaps half willingly be seduced; it is rarely mastered.

The whole essay can be read at http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19238

When I was born
The doctor said
There’s something wrong
Inside that baby head
When I was a boy
In Sunday school
I told them all
That they were fools
All in a day’s work
To live and breathe
A sight to see
And so it goes
I went into
The fortune teller’s
She wouldn’t read
My horoscope
I go into
The laundromat
The people all
Buy extra soap
All in a day’s work
To live and breathe
A sight to see
All in a day’s work
To live and breathe
A sight to see