Stop Now

Story ID #2306

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 17:19:50 -0400

Story ID #2306

Used to be a lone wolf, now I'm your puppy dog.

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:18:39 -0400

The third answer to the question of Anne Carson’s origin is...

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 12:09:00 -0400

The third answer to the question of Anne Carson’s origin is ancient Greece. She discovered the Greek language in high school and took to it immediately. Since then she has spent a large percentage of her mental life inhabiting that distant world: learning to think in its rhythms, tracing its influences on English. Over the last 30 years, she has taught scores of college courses in Greek, an experience she describes — with rare positivity — as “a total joy.”

When I asked Carson what appealed to her so much as a teenager about Greek, she answered, “It just seemed to me the best language.” I asked her to elaborate. “It’s just intrinsic,” she said. “Just a different experience.” I asked her to describe the nature of that experience. “It’s just like what it is,” she said. “If it were like something else, you could do the other thing. It’s just like itself. I really can’t analogize.” This launched us into a five-minute circular conversation that felt like an allegory of the futility of all human language. “That’s as far as we can go with that,” she said.

Carson did admit, in the end, that part of her desire to learn Greek came from her childhood desire to be Oscar Wilde — classically educated, elegantly dressed, publicly witty.

I asked her when she stopped wanting this.

“I didn’t,” she said. “Who could stop? It’s unachieved, as yet.”

“The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson“ by Sam Anderson (The New York Times Magazine, March 17, 2013)

"We witen nat what thing we preyen heere: We faren as he that dronke is as a mous, A dronke man woot..."

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 21:52:46 -0500

“We witen nat what thing we preyen heere:
We faren as he that dronke is as a mous,
A dronke man woot wel he hath an hous,
But he noot which the righte wey is thider,
And to a dronke man the wey is slider.
And certes, in this world so faren we,
…”

- “The Knight’s Tale” from Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer

Photo

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 23:48:59 -0500

"I had a conversation with Babyface one time and Babyface was like, ‘Man, when I listen to you..."

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:23:24 -0500

“I had a conversation with Babyface one time and Babyface was like, ‘Man, when I listen to you rap, that shit is like Miles Davis, like Miles playin’ an instrument… I don’t hear your voice as words, I hear your voice as an instrument.’ And I was like ‘Wow, Babyface just said that shit.’ That shit blew my mind, that shit made me want to find out who Miles Davis was ‘cause I didn’t know who the fuck he was.”

- Snoop Lion, from the outtakes of his interview with GQ

Photographer: Amy Hildebrand

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 21:47:11 -0500

Photographer: Amy Hildebrand

From NPR’s “All Things Considered”: Earlier...

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 21:46:00 -0500

From NPR’s “All Things Considered”:

Earlier this year, Stephen Fowler, owner of The Monkey’s Paw used-book store in Toronto, had an idea.

He wanted a creative way to offload his more ill-favored books — “old and unusual” all, as the store’s motto goes — that went further than a $1 bin by the register.

It came in a conversation with his wife: a vending machine.

“Originally, I thought maybe we would just have a refrigerator box and paint it to look like a vending machine,” he tells NPR, “and put a skinny assistant of mine inside and have him drop books out when people put a coin in.”

But then he was hanging out with a friend, Craig Small, who runs an animation studio in Toronto.

“I mentioned the idea to him, and he said, ‘Forget it! Let’s just build one!’ “

…

Though he’s not making much money off the Biblio-Mat, Fowler says it’s a great way to entertain customers — especially kids.

“One kid I can think of in particular — a very intense, physical little boy, not what you would necessarily consider the bookish type — he got a weird, local history book about Hamilton, Ontario,” he says. “And apparently he’s been carrying it around his house, you know, asking his mom, ‘Did you see where I left my Hamilton book?’

“It’s like it completely reinjects the mystery into these old printed artifacts.”

Fowler says the machine reinforces something he’s learned in the book trade: People are always looking for meaning.

“People have a deep need to think the thing is actually being picked for them,” he says. “Yesterday a young woman got a book out of the machine —12 Hardest Shots in Golf, or something like that — and she was not very impressed. But then she said, ‘I know exactly who I’m giving this to for Christmas.’ “

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude,..."

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 23:48:00 -0500

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

- 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Audio

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 18:40:44 -0400

"I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out..."

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 00:21:17 -0400

“I would there were no age between sixteen and
three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the
rest; for there is nothing in the between but
getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry,
stealing, fighting…”

- Shepherd, in William Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale” (Act III, Scene 3)

Easter morning, 1941, Southside Chicago Photographer: Russell...

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 21:30:32 -0400

Easter morning, 1941, Southside Chicago

Photographer: Russell Lee

Photographer: Amy Hildebrand

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 18:03:19 -0400

Photographer: Amy Hildebrand

ISS in front of the sun

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 15:54:37 -0400

ISS in front of the sun

Grass Seeds

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 15:52:41 -0400

Grass Seeds

thepeoplesrecord: Colombian GM workers sew mouths shut to...

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 17:30:14 -0400

thepeoplesrecord:

Colombian GM workers sew mouths shut to protest work conditions
August 16, 2012

Jorge Parra struggles to get the words out of his painfully swollen lips, stitched together with thick thread. “This is for all the workers,” he says with a muffled voice. “We are now prepared to die because this situation is critical. General Motors has given us no choice.”

Parra, 35, is one of a group of former General Motors employees who have sewn their mouths shut in a hunger strike protesting the treatment of workers at the company’s Colombian plant, Colmotores. They say GM has fired injured workers, refused to provide compensation and erased medical records. After spending a year protesting outside Bogota’s United States Embassy with no results, they decided to take drastic action.

“The sewing was extremely painful,” says Manuel Ospina, a 42-year-old father of five who says he’s been left permanently disabled by a spinal injury. “But the more pain we suffer here every day, the more hunger we feel, hopefully we can force people to take notice. If we can’t resolve this problem we will die trying.”

Parra and Ospina say more than 200 Colmotores employees have been injured while working at the automotive plant outside Colombia’s capital city of Bogota. Herniated discs, severe carpal tunnel syndrome, lumbar scoliosis and chronic tendonitis are among the list of complaints they claim many have suffered after years spent doing repetitive, physical work making GM’s car parts.

Instead of providing medical care and changing the work patterns of injured employees, GM fires them, according to the protesters, who last year set up the Association of Injured Workers and Ex-Workers of Colmotores (Asotrecol) in an attempt to defend their rights.

GM, which has more than 1,800 Colombian employees, vehemently denies Asotrecol’s allegations. In a statement, the company said: “General Motors Colmotores is respectful of the law and has never put the health or the well-being of its employees at risk…No employee has been discharged for health reasons.” Of the ex-employees who have filed legal claims, 95% of the cases have been resolved in GM’s favor. Asotrecol blames the Colombian government and GM’s “corruption.”

The protesters say they are in no doubt as to why they were fired. Injuries suffered on the job gradually rendered them incapable of carrying out physical labor. “I fell down the stairs carrying a piece of machinery,” says Ospina, who worked for GM for 11 years before he was fired in 2008. “I received serious injuries to my spine which the company doctor said we would not report to the insurers so that I could keep my job. The pain got worse over time and left me unable to walk. GM refused to listen or give me different work and after I complained multiple times they fired me.”

Source

"In one of her incarnations, [Helen Gurley] Brown was the host of a radio talk show. A caller asked..."

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 12:49:00 -0400

“In one of her incarnations, [Helen Gurley] Brown was the host of a radio talk show. A caller asked if she thought that diamonds really were a girl’s best friend. That notion…was first proposed by another shameless, enterprising native daughter of and famous escapee from Little Rock: Lorelei Lee. She was the adorably mercenary heroine of Anita Loos’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” and the first Material Girl in a lineage from which the Cosmo Girl, Madonna, and Carrie Bradshaw all descend. Brown began her answer by lamenting the demise of gold-digging: “I think all the sugar daddies dissolved in their own sugar or something, and chorus girls have to compete with all the other pretty girls there are nowadays.” Then she added that one could marry a rich man for big diamonds, or a poorer man for smaller diamonds, but maybe the best idea was to buy one’s own diamonds. Attention shoppers: a girl’s best friend is herself.”

- Judith Thurman in “Helenism” (The New Yorker, May 11, 2009)

Audio

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 13:13:50 -0400

This boy is Jack. (by nina ahn)

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 13:12:29 -0400

This boy is Jack.

(by nina ahn)

blamazing: Kool A.D. x Himanshu - Gwyneth Paltrow

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 11:41:33 -0400

blamazing:

Kool A.D. x Himanshu - Gwyneth Paltrow