Excerpt - "In Memory of W.B. Yeats", W.H. Auden, 1940
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
Article - "How We Learned to Love the Pedagogical Vapor of STEM", Virginia Heffernan, WIRED Magazine
"It seems possible that early ill-defined STEM programs succeed to the degree that they get students into still more ill-defined STEM programs in preparation for ever changing STEM jobs in unstable STEM industries which metamorphose so rapidly that formal education can't keep up. (IT and “social media” are currently the two best fields for STEM majors, according to career-information company Vault.com.)
The long-held anxiety that Americans are somehow “falling behind” the other great powers in math and science—or is it engineering and computer programming?—has let up a bit as data has emerged showing more students than ever are enrolled in higher-ed STEM programs. Thus they qualify for STEM jobs, presumably, and increase America's wealth and power in a STEM world."
"You have to live with your mind your whole life. You build your mind. So make it into something you want to live with."
- Marilynne Robinson (quoted in the WIRED article above)
Notes on Irish Wolfhounds (for an M.A. Assignment)
“The last variety, and the most wonderful of all that I shall mention, is the great Irish wolfdog, that may be considered as the first of the canine species.....Nevertheless he is extremely beautiful and majestic in appearance, being the greatest of the dog kind to be seen in the world. The largest of those I have seen - and I have seen about a dozen - was about four feet high, or as tall as a calf of a year old. He was made extremely like a Greyhound but more robust, and inclining to the figure of the French Matin or the Great Dane. His eye was mild, his colour white, and his nature seemed heavy and phlegmatic....the size was enormous but, as it seemed to me, at the expense of the animal’s fierceness, vigilance, and sagacity. However, I was informed otherwise; the gentleman who bred them assuring me that a Mastiff would be nothing when opposed to one of them, who generally seized their antagonist by the back.”
(what is a commonplace book?)