MK

Meg Kramer is a Saint Louis-based musician, a writer, and a founding member of experimental music collective Close/Far. She recently released an EP with her band Quarry House. Find her all over the internet: Quarry House Blog Quarry House Facebook Page Twitter @MegKramer

[megkramer]

Recommended Reading

Here are some old and new favorites:

Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees

http://www.powells.com/book/under-the-udala-trees-9780544003446/2-0

Marisha Pessl, Night Film

http://www.powells.com/book/night-film-9781400067886/18-2

Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief

http://www.powells.com/book/every-day-is-for-the-thief-9780812995787/62-0

Christa Wolf, Cassandra

http://www.powells.com/book/cassandra-9780374519049/2-1

Alejo Carpentier, The Chase

http://www.amazon.com/Chase-Alejo-Carpentier/dp/0816638098/

Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching

http://www.powells.com/book/white-is-for-witching-9781594633072/2-3

Reinaldo Arenas, Old Rosa: A Novel in Two Stories 

http://www.powells.com/book/old-rosa-a-novel-in-two-stories-9780802134066/7-4

Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

http://www.powells.com/book/balzac-the-little-chinese-seamstress-9780385722209/7-3

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

http://www.powells.com/book/snow-9780375706868/2-23

Hai Jin, Waiting

http://www.powells.com/book/waiting-9780375706417/7-16

[thinkmexican]

Trump’s ‘Fight!’ Tweet Is Our Call to End Mexican Scapegoating

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump went on Twitter this morning to incite violence against Mexicans. “I love the Mexican people, but Mexico is not our friend. They’re killing us at the border and they’re killing us on jobs and trade. FIGHT!”, Trump tweeted.

Calling on his Twitter followers to “FIGHT!” Mexicans marks a new low for the belligerent Trump. In doing so, he uses the threat of violence in an attempt to quell criticism and, we feel, as retaliation in response to the backlash he’s received over his original anti-Mexican comments made almost two weeks ago in announcing his candidacy.

Such hate speech leads to violence and death, as we’ve seen one too many times in our community.

Shown above are:

Brisenia Flores, 9, shot and killed by Minute Men in their Arizona home in May 2009. Her father Raúl was also killed. Her mother was shot, but survived.

Juan Varela, shot and killed in May 2010 days after SB1070 was passed in Arizona by a neighbor who yelled, “You fucking Mexican, go back to Mexico!” Varela’s family has lived in Arizona since before 1848 when it was still a part of Mexico.

Luis Ramírez, beaten to death by 4 teenagers in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, in July 2008. “Tell your Mexican friends to get the fuck out of Shenandoah,” one of Ramírez’s assailants yelled at him before he was attacked.

10 anti-Mexican hate crimes were reported in the Port Richmond neighborhood of Staten Island, New York, in 2010. The victims were typically men on their way home from work. Almost all of the assailants were young black men.

Anti-Mexican hate speech can’t go unchallenged. The scapegoating of Mexicans ends today! 

[megkramer]

[quarryhouse]

This video contains sequences from “The Amazing Mr. X,” about a widow who is deceived by a phony spiritualist. It was directed by Bernard Vorhaus and released in 1948. The film is in the public domain. Watch it in full at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/amazing_mr_x

Download the song here: https://quarryhouse.bandcamp.com/trac…

[megkramer]

Don't be hasty...my birthday fortune cookie from last week.

[megkramer]

Detroit Man Who Walks 21 Miles to Work Is Rewarded by Strangers

Ugh, this story is so upsetting.

The man is such an exemplary employee that his boss "sets attendance standards by him," yet this employer clearly can't be troubled to pay a decent wage. Sure, it's nice that people came together to help him out, but workers shouldn't have to spend 10 years walking 21 miles a day to hold down a crappy job before some rich teenager decides they're worthy of a more comfortable life.

[megkramer]

The Dirtbombs: current favorite band 

[megkramer]

This is pretty great.

[megkramer]

In the new year I pledge to master overtone singing. This is my future.

[actuallygrimes]

“The chance encounter yielded a remarkable photograph. It also raised questions about “tear-feeding,” a phenomenon otherwise known as lachryphagy, which has been well documented but remains poorly understood.” - national geographic 

this seems really weird and poetic and creepy and lovely

butterflies and bees  feeding on crocodile tears

for every terrible thing that exists in the world there is something beautiful and incredible 

ah <3 

[megkramer]

Beautiful!

[explore-blog]

We now know that 24 hours without sleep, or a week of sleeping four or five hours a night induces an impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol level of .1 percent. We would never say, ‘This person is a great worker! He’s drunk all the time!’ yet we continue to celebrate people who sacrifice sleep for work.

Insights from the doctor who coaches athletes on sleep. Pair with the science of what actually happens while you sleep and how it affects your every waking hour.

More on sleep here.

(via explore-blog)

Get that rest, folks! Science says so.

(via jtotheizzoe)

[megkramer]

A good day. (at Mother's Brewing Company)

[bestoffates]

In one study, participants were asked to rank the humor in various cartoon captions. Half of the captions had been written by men, and half by women. When not told who wrote what, the participants judged them almost equally funny. In fact, based on the scores given in this experiment, men are just 2.2 percent more likely to be funny than women. Yet 90 percent of the participants agreed with the stereotype that men are funnier. Talk about a mind-bogglingly huge difference in perception versus reality. And it gets weirder — when the participants were asked which gender they thought wrote a caption, the funnier ones were almost always assumed to be by men and the less funny ones by women. This might be expected, considering their stated bias. Even when told the name and gender of the person who wrote each caption, within a short time the participants started misattributing the funny ones to men. In other words, even when they knew that women had written some of the funniest captions, the bias that men are funnier was so ingrained that it made them misremember who had written what.

4 Ways We’re Programmed to Think Women Aren’t Funny by Kathy Benjamin (via bestoffates)

[majman]

Nachtmusik by seams http://ift.tt/Km8PRz

[megkramer]

Ooh!

[megkramer]

Winter is OVER. No turning back. #ShawSTL (at Shaw Neighborhood)

[megkramer]

Gasp!

[fuckyeahbeatniks-blog]

A woman from the audience asks: ‘Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?’ and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.

Stephen Scobie, on the Naropa Institute’s 1994 tribute to Allen Ginsberg  (via thisisendless)

FUCK

(via femmeboyant)

I’m just frozen. Absences of women in history don’t “just happen,” they are made.

(via queereyes-queerminds)

^could not cosign that thought harder as an historian

(via fauxmosexualtranstrender)

reblogged this before, would reblog again

(via emilyafter)

Emphasis mine.

(via amydentata)