#tempo

We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now. ↗

— Julie Taymor

#contemporary #english #epic #epic poem #feel

It is hard to play Blue Suede Shoes. I know everyone has heard it 10 million times, and that makes it even harder to play it, but there's a very laid back tempo on that. I was surprised at how slow it really was. ↗

— Brian Setzer

#blue #even #everyone #hard #harder

The world, as it is, is not a permanent reality, but is a temporary product of our choices as creators. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#reality #temporary #death

Shortly before school started, I moved into a studio apartment on a quiet street near the bustle of the downtown in one of the most self-conscious bends of the world. The “Gold Coast” was a neighborhood that stretched five blocks along the lake in a sliver of land just south of Lincoln Park and north of River North. The streets were like fine necklaces and strung together were the brownstone houses and tall condominiums and tiny mansions like pearls, and when the day broke and the sun faded away, their lights burned like jewels shining gaudily in the night. The world’s most elegant bazaar, Michigan Avenue, jutted out from its eastern tip near The Drake Hotel and the timeless blue-green waters of Lake Michigan pressed its shores. The fractious make-up of the people that inhabited it, the flat squareness of its parks and the hint of the lake at the ends of its tree-lined streets squeezed together a domesticated cesspool of age and wealth and standing. It was a place one could readily dress up for an expensive dinner at one of the fashionable restaurants or have a drink miles high in the lounge of the looming John Hancock Building and five minutes later be out walking on the beach with pants cuffed and feet in the cool water at the lake’s edge. ↗

— Daniel Amory

#city #contemporary-fiction #contemporary-literature #downtown #lake

Poetry is not an art, it's a symptom. ↗

— Michele Brenton

#humor #inspirational #poet #poetry #art

Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others. ↗

— Slavoj Žižek

#freedom #the-other #attitude

How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#contemporary #half #how #length #novel

He trailed his eyes down over her beautiful breasts then told her, “You’re going to keep your mouth shut and I’m going togive you that Orgasm you asked for.” He thought for a moment she was going to tell him to get lost, but instead she leaned her head back against the wall and pushed her hips out toward him. ↗

— Ella Frank

#family-relationships #lovers #beauty

The scent of him was subtle, beautifully fresh, and she couldn’t think clearly. No man had ever brought out these intense feelings in her. Chris Augustine was dangerous and she could get lost in his arms. ↗

— Suzan Battah

#french #latino #multicultural #romance #beauty

I’m busy trying not to look like anything edible. ↗

— Elle Lothlorien

#business