katherine fellows

One of the things I think that, when you asked what I’ve overcome, it’s thinking that I’m boring. And, I think that there are a lot of people like me out there who, if I’m just real honest, people will find themselves in what I’m saying. And so, nobody’s boring.

I’m excited for this album because, you know, we toured Save Me, San Francisco for two and a half years, and no one expected for Save Me, San Francisco to be a very popular record. And, to sell a million albums is unheard of—except if you’re Adele.

I store all the information in my head, not caring whether I’ll ever need to use it. The knowledge piles up in my brain and keeps me company.

‘It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens,’ [Perelman] said. ‘It is people like me who are isolated.’

I’ve never quite understood why tourists from the more prosperous end of the market are so drawn to wine-growing areas. They wouldn’t, presumably, want to go and see cotton before it became L.L. Bean slacks or caviar being gutted from sturgeon, but give them a backdrop of vines and they appear to think they have found heaven.

Imagine a form of baseball in which the pitcher, after each delivery, collects the ball from the catcher and walks slowly with it out to center field; and that there, after a minute’s pause to collect himself, he turns and runs full tilt toward the pitcher’s mound before hurling the ball at the ankles of a man who stands before him wearing a riding hat, heavy gloves of the sort used to handle radioactive isotopes, and a mattress strapped to each leg. Imagine moreover that if this batsman fails to hit the ball in a way that heartens him sufficiently to try to waddle forty feet with mattresses strapped to his legs, he is under no formal compunction to run; he may stand there all day, and, as a rule, does. If by some miracle he is coaxed into making a misstroke that leads to his being put out, all the fielders throw up their arms in triumph and have a hug. Then tea is called and everyone retires happily to a distant pavilion to fortify for the next siege. Now imagine all this going on for so long that by the time the match concludes autumn has crept in and all your library books are overdue. There you have cricket.

In 1992 a young man in Cairns, ignoring all the warning signs, went swimming in the Pacific waters at a place called Holloways Beach. He swam and dove, taunting his friends on the beach for their prudent cowardice, and then began to scream with an inhuman sound. It is said that there is no pain to compare with it. The young an staggered from the water, covered in whiplike stripes wherever the [box] jellyfish’s tentacles had brushed across him, and collapsed in quivering shock. Soon afterward emergency crews arrived, inflated him with morphine, and took him away for treatment. And here’s the thing. Even unconscious and sedated, he was still screaming.

To Australians anything vaguely rural is ‘the bush.’ At some indeterminate point ‘the bush’ becomes ‘the outback.’ Push on for another two thousand miles or so and eventually you come to bush again, and then a city, and then the sea. And that’s Australia.

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That’s all there is to it. Without doubt the moose is the most improbably, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it—its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers—looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is its almost boundless lack of intelligence. If you are driving down a highway and a moose steps from the woods ahead of you, he will stare at you for a long minute (moose are notoriously shortsighted), then abruptly try to run away from you, legs flailing in eight directions at once. Never mind that there are several thousand square miles of forest on either side of the highway. The moose does not think of this. Clueless as to what exactly is going on, he runs halfway to New Brunswick before his peculiar gait inadvertently steers him back into the woods, where he immediately stops and takes on a startled expression that says, ‘Hey—woods. Now how the heck did I get here?’ Moose are so monumentally muddle-headed, in fact, that when they hear a car or truck approaching they will often bolt out of the woods and onto the highway in the curious hope that this will bring them to safety.

I’m not making light of things, but who’s to say who’s right with things like this? There’s so much that we miss, trying so hard to be rich and famous—pretty and thin to win. It’s a shame that youth is wasted on the young.

We are seeing the beginning of a new abolitionist movement, facing challenges as difficult and entrenched as those faced in the early nineteenth century. One of those challenges is that we don’t want to believe that slavery exists. Many people in developed countries feel good about the fact that slavery was abolished ‘back then’ and are shocked and disappointed that it will have to be abolished all over again. In fact, the work to be done today doesn’t diminish the achievements of the nineteenth-century abolitionists one bit. They fought to stop legal slavery, and they won that fight. We must stop illegal slavery.

‘Cause I’ll be hanging out with you—not Jimi Hendrix, Jesus, or the dude who played the sheriff in Blazing Saddles. You.

Many a woman’s beauty is widely praised. If such a woman’s heart is counterfeit, then I praise her as I ought to praise the blue bead set in gold. I think it no trifling matter if a man works a noble ruby into base brass—and the whole of his adventure—to that I liken a true woman’s mind. If a woman does justice to her womanliness, then it is not for me to scrutinize her complexion, nor her heart’s covering—what is outwardly visible. Provided she is intact within her breast, then noble fame will remain unimpaired there.

The contradictions between intuitive, spontaneous, understandings and the scientific concepts of secondary mathematics can be the beginning of the end of mathematical engagement for adolescents. If they cannot understand the subject by seeing what it does and how it works, but instead have to believe some higher abstract authority that they do not understand, then the subject holds nothing for them. This analysis has contributed to the belief that mathematics need not be taught to everyone and that many adolescents only need to become functionally numerate. But this view misses the point. The authority of mathematics does not reside in teachers or textbook writers but in the ways in which minds work with mathematics itself. For this reason mathematics, like some of the creative arts, can be an arena in which the adolescent mind can have some control, can validate its own thinking, and can appeal to a constructed, personal, authority. But to do so in ways which are fully empowering has to take into account the new intellectual tools which simultaneously enable students to achieve in mathematics, and which develop further through mathematics.