> Ancient and modern writers are my closest friends, with whom I am in sympathy. They are wise and talented and their conversation sends me. Maybe I am lonely more than average (How would I know?), but I need them. Books and artworks are extraordinary company (one does not need to make allowances), and in the nature of the case, they speak most clearly to us writers and artists because we respond to them most actively; we notice how he does that, and if it is congenial we say, “I could do something like that.” Despite its bloodlessness, the tradition of literature is a grand community and, much as I envy the happy and the young, I doubt that they have as good a one.” —from Speaking and Language: Defense of Poetry

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#PaulGoodman on #AncientWriters #LonelyWriters #CommunityOfWriters #WritersAsCompanions

in reply to Brian Small

> Paul Goodman’s use of anarchism was very instructive. To make change you join up with friends and neighbors and try to create alternatives that meet needs blocked by the big institutions. Or you demand new rules that can make life more livable directly—these modes of action are more practical and effective than appealing to authorities and institutions to bring the change.

> Rather than spend primary energy to get the university to become a community of scholars, create your own—and by so doing you may affect the institution as well as making a practical difference.

- s-usih.org/2012/01/did-paul-go…

#PaulGoodman #PaulGoodmanUniversity #UsesOfAnarchism #Neighborism #CommunityOfScholars
"He's the Dude!" --- Quincy Jones

in reply to Brian Small

> “As my books and essays have appeared, I have been severely criticized as an ignorant man who spreads himself thin on a wide variety of subjects, on sociology and psychology, urbanism and technology, education, literature, esthetics, and ethics. It is true that I don’t know much, but it is false that I write about many subjects. I have only one, the human beings I know in their man-made scene. I do not observe that people are in fact subdivided in ways to be conveniently treated by the ‘wide variety’ of separate disciplines. If you talk separately about their group behavior or their individual behavior, their environment or their characters, their practicality or their sensibility, you lose what you are talking about.”

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#OnHumans #EntireHuman #CompleteHuman #WholeMan #AvoidSpecialism

in reply to Brian Small

> As epigrammatist and diarist he was in the league of Pascal, Nietzsche, and Camus. Had he been French, he might have written prose-paragraphs in the manner of René Char or Paul Eluard, and would not have been taken to task as a bad poet. But the culturally approved forms have their weight, and deadweight, even for someone as rambunctious as rambunctious as Paul Goodman. Forced off the reservation, he had to—in one of his own favorite phrases—"make do" in a form that some people, at least, might read.

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