Let's Play....

        ....Why's My Bookbag (or e-reader equivalent) so Heavy?

From Sunday's NY Times:

One theme that runs through the songs, Bono said, “is the ability to surrender, to give yourself, whether in reverie or revelry. And the journey of the artist is surely the journey away from self-consciousness.” He paused and smiled ruefully. “Fame is all about self-consciousness.” Bono has leveraged celebrity into political clout. Part policy wonk, part showman, part charmer, he works on causes like ending extreme poverty in Africa. While he has been mocked as St. Bono, he strives not to be too single-minded. He said: “Edge is always whispering in my ear: ‘You’re an artist. That’s how you’re getting away with this. If you start to behave in a correct fashion and very serious and doing a serious job, it’s awful.’ ”

Bono added: “I feel as an artist that my job is to try and understand the forces that are shaping the world that our songs occupy. And maybe, if you get a chance, try to shape it. That’s what the band didn’t understand. They thought the natural flak that we would receive for daring to want to play with the big boys, philosophically and every other way, would frighten our audience away. But actually our audience feels much more powerful.”

A Glimpse of Seamus Heaney (via a link on Terrence Berres' blog):

What he writes about is solidly grounded in a sense of place; his language is rooted in the speech patterns of Ulster, with something of that Derry quality of “phonetic grunting”. He recalls, lovingly, the old black leatherette sofa on which he and his siblings played; the magical dial of the radio; the horse which rubbed its flanks along the wall. He has a strong purchase on earth-bound things, an enduring commitment to places that, as he says, “unlock the word-hoard”. He speaks of what a poem does for its author, restoring something to the self. Good poems are not willed into being but come from things remembered with a certain aura. “It is a matter of waft rather than word-choice,” he tells us...

From Alan Jacob's Original Sin commenting on "Witness":

The book’s foreword, from which I have been quoting, takes the form of a letter to Chambers’s children, and it concludes with an apocalyptic vision of the father leading those children to Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, where Jesus was crucified. Chambers tells them: “When you understand what you see [there], you will no longer be children. You will know that life is pain, that each of us hangs always on the cross of himself. And when you know that this is true of every man, woman, and child on earth, you will be wise.”