And thus began an empire of self-help, classroom curricula, conventions and coaches, podcasts, nutritional supplements, books, gadgets, organizers, and stickers with cute little motivational mottoes to paste on your mirror, all designed to help you unleash your creativity.
[I]f we allow ourselves to conceive of Quixote as both an inspirational and aspirational character, then maybe there are lessons to be learned from a 17th century book that has intrigued, challenged, and inspired authors and artists for centuries.
TILT ON!
Traditional customs meet modern technology and an obsessive attention to detail with regards to the offering. “We like our Montgomery’s cheddar to have been made on a Tuesday,” says Hirsh of the Somerset maker that uses a different starter culture each day of the week.
Byzantium, I come not from,Waukegan/ Green Town/ Byzantium.
But from another time and place
Whose race was simple, tried and true;
As boy
I dropped me forth in Illinois.
A name with neither love nor grace
Was Waukegan, there I came from
And not, good friends, Byzantium.
The poem continues, describing my lifelong relationship to my birthplace:
And yet in looking back I see
From topmost part of farthest tree
A land as bright, beloved and blue
As any Yeats found to be true.
Waukegan, visited by me often since, is neither homelier nor more beautiful than any other small Midwestern town. Much of it is green. The trees do touch in the middle of streets. The street in front of my old home is still paved with red bricks. In what way then was the town special? Why, I was born there. It was my life. I had to write of it as I saw fit:
So we grew up with mythic dead
To spoon upon midwestern bread
And spread old gods’ bright marmalade
To slake in peanut-butter shade,
Pretending there beneath our sky
That it was Aphrodite’s thigh…
While by the porch-rail calm and bold
His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold
My grandfather, a myth indeed,
Did all of Plato supercede
While Grandmama in rockingchair
Sewed up the raveled sleeve of care
Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright
To winter us on summer night.
And uncles, gathered with their smokes
Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,
And aunts as wise as Delphic maids
Dispensed prophetic lemonades
To boys knelt there as acolytes
To Grecian porch on summer nights;
Then went to bed, there to repent
The evils of the innocent;
The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears
Said, through the nights and through the years
Not Illinois nor Waukegan
But blither sky and blither sun.
Though mediocre all our Fates
And Mayor not as bright as Yeats
Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?
Byzantium.
Byzantuim.
_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)
.jpg?mode=max)
