I'm married to a wonderful woman, Leigh Ann, and we have a son who is 20 months old and keeps up us really busy. I am currently an MA student at the University of Mississippi majoring in English Literature. I also teach freshman writing (English 101). I also love reading and writing poetry and fiction and aspire to be a published writer. My other love is music and I love all kinds. (well, except for country, uh... well make that bad country, anything except bluegrass, Johnny Cash, Hank Sr., and my Uncle Coke is crap in my opinion.) I want to be a vegetarian but my addiction to meat always thwarts me.
.. Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner
or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a
mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are
corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful
things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean
only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral
book. Books are well written, or badly written.
That is all.
The nineteenth-century dislike of realism is the rage
of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth-century dislike of romanticism
is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face
in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject
matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists
in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things
that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical
sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable man--
nerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can ex--
press everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments
of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for
an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts
is the art of the musician. From the point of view of
feeling, the actor's craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their
peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their
peril.
It is the spectator, and not the life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that
the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with
himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long
as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a
useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
--Oscar Wilde
My father spent four years in their war.
He didn’t hate his enemies, or love them.
But I know that already there
he formed me day after day
from quiet moments
few as they were, which he gleaned
between explosions and smoke,
and he put them in his tattered pack
along with the remnant of his
mother’s hardened cake.
And in his eyes he gathered the nameless dead
a great many dead he gathered for my sake,
that I might recognize them in his gaze
and love them
and not die, as they, in horror . . .
he filled his eyes with them, but he erred:
to all my wars I am going out.
-- Yehudah Amichai, 1924-2000
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