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Kevin Fitzpatrick

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contemporary-politics‎ (11)
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Kevin is Currently Reading

Kevin Fitzpatrick rated a book it was amazing

The Courage to Create

by Rollo May

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in August 2025

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Kevin Fitzpatrick said: " "We are living at a time when one age is dying and the new age is not yet born. We cannot doubt this as we look about us to see the radical changes in sexual mores, in marriage styles, in family structures, in education, in religion, technology, and ...more "

Aug 31, 2025 05:39PM · see review

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Collected Prose

by Charles Olson

bookshelves: currently-reading

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read in August 2025

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Kevin Fitzpatrick said: " "feeling and desires and breath/
the cause of the words coming into existence/
ahead of them, the nose bringing them out ahead of its--/
self, and a principle, their own meaning, enough/
animus so it all has/
will

Feminine/
Writing so that all the World/
i "feeling and desires and breath/
the cause of the words coming into existence/
ahead of them, the nose bringing them out ahead of its--/
self, and a principle, their own meaning, enough/
animus so it all has/
will

Feminine/
Writing so that all the World/
is redeemed, and history/
and all that politics,/
and 'State' and Subjection/
are for once, done away with,/
as the reason/
of writing"
(Olson, "Places and Names," 1965)

Consisting of seven discrete segments ("Call Me Ishmael," "On Melville, Dostoevsky, Lawrence, and Pound," "Human Universe," "The Present is Prologue," "Poetry and Poets," "Space and Time," and "Other Essays, Notes, and Reviews,"), this collection of the prose of esteemed poet and theorist Charles Olson is filled with a panoply of prose pieces, everything from reviews of books, to poems themselves, to an almost book length exposition of the sources of Melville's "Moby-Dick," to meditations on the nature of knowledge in general and the sources of culture (and language) in the Semitic Near East. To say that Mr. Olson has access, in that capacious mind of his, to wide sources of study and arcane knowledge is to analogously suggest that Einstein liked to tinker in the laboratory: this man has the chops, both poetic and academic, to put much better known figures to shame! And these wide 'fields' (to use a term appropriate for the theorist of "Projective Verse") are communicated in gnomic fashion, as if just a tincture or touch of the 'stuff' (knowledge) was enough to elicit a cascade of thought that will have no end in sight! And, in the some of the areas, I was able to keep up with the weighty and lofty (and serious) ideas inherent in Mr. Olson's obtuse, syntactically-rich prose. However, due to my newness towards is oeuvre, perhaps, he left me behind at some points, struggling to maintain coherence as I processed his febrile mind's machinations and workings. This is not to say that I did not gain much from acquaintance with this prose, for the knowledge here is controversial, filled with a sense of 'agon,' and as such is well worth the needed time to decipher its contents. It just felt, to these neophyte eyes, that a 'context,' such as a classroom centered on Olson's thought, would be a necessity if one desires to truly conquer the "Everest" that is Olson's thought. In the end, this work should be seen, I would attest, as an exemplar of all that is deep and profound in 20th century poetic thought, but you need a "Virgil" to help conduct your way through the 'hell' of Olson's thought, the better to achieve the 'paradiso' at its conclusion. Mixed bag this book is! ...more "

Aug 24, 2025 04:42PM · see review

Kevin Fitzpatrick is currently reading

The Deerslayer or The First War Path (The Leatherstocking Tales, #1)

by James Fenimore Cooper

bookshelves: currently-reading, classic-literature

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May 30, 2025 10:53AM

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Kevin’s Quotes

“But there is another conclusion: to laugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of men.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

13 likes

“She is standing on my lids
And her hair is in my hair
She has the colour of my eye
She has the body of my hand
In my shade she is engulfed
As a stone against the sky

She will never close her eyes
And she does not let me sleep
And her dreams in the bright day
Make the suns evaporate
And me laugh cry and laugh
Speak when I have nothing to say”
― Paul Éluard

tags: lady-love

22 likes

“It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

1 likes

“On the way from mythology to logistics thought has lost the element of self-reflection and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them.”
― Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

tags: critical-thinking, philosopy, social-theory, technology, thinking

10 likes

“To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place -- an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City...a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.”
― Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

tags: 103, city, identity, nowhere, pedestrianism, walking

49 likes

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