Notes from The Otherground

[solarmorrigan]

So. 10th grade English class. We all come in one morning to find a balloon and a perfectly sharpened pencil on each of our desks. No instructions, no explanation, which is strange, because our teacher is meticulous about that sort of thing. A couple of people try to ask her and she says we’ll get to it. She takes role and then announces that she needs to go to the copy room and she’ll be back in a couple of minutes

Kinda unorthodox, but no one is complaining because this is advanced English and the teacher usually goes kinda hard. So, y’know. Brief respite. We all sit and chat; one of the boys teasingly steals a girl’s balloon, but gives it back to her easily enough; it’s quiet and kind of a nice break. Then the teacher comes back, stops in the doorway, and just stares at us

After a long moment, she says, confused, “You didn’t pop the balloons.”

To which one of the guys about two rows over exclaims, “We’re allowed to pop them?” and immediately turns around and stabs his friend’s balloon with the pencil

There is a vicious revenge balloon-stabbing, and a few more people pop seatmates’ balloons or their own, and the whole time the teacher is just shaking her head. “I can’t believe you didn’t pop your balloons.”

Apparently we were starting Lord of the Flies that day and she wanted to demonstrate the basic concept of kids turning on each other when there are no authority figures present and it was basically my favorite failed social experiment ever

[loveharuokumura]

Back in my 10th grade we did a similar things around Lord of the Flies, where we had a test scheduled for that day, and when we walked in, the teacher took role by looking through the window of the door and never entered the classroom. On the board were three tasks written and the teacher had brought in donuts. At first we all sat around and waited for the teacher to come in, but eventually we just started tackling the list of tasks. Task 1- the test. Everybody took it silently, no one cheated, everyone turned it in and we went on to Task Two: tidy up the room. So we did, we split into a couple groups and each one cleaned an area of the room. Task Three: Hand out the donuts. There were 12 donuts, and 30 of us. So we split the donuts into thirds, each took a third, and left the extras for the teacher. After this, the teacher came in absolutely FUMING. She was so upset we had followed all the rules and completed the tasks. Apparently she had been texting kids telling them to start some chaos but they all ignored it because they were too nice. She tried to dock our grades for not going absolutely wild because it meant her class didn’t get the point across

[hookedonafeeeling]

That’s because lord of the flies isn’t representative of humanity it’s representative of rich white male shitheads

[punkpugs]

Lord of The Flies isn’t representative of humanity it’s representative of rich white male shitheads

[amuseoffyre]

Brexit is Lord of the Flies on a political stage.

[lifetimeinafist]

YO

[nycmick]

Worth it for the @amuseoffyre upshot

[jeaniefranklins]

[globefan]

Up yours, Oxfordians.

[nycmick]

They Thought They Were Free

Chris Orbach

October 27 at 12:53 PM

"Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

-They Thought They Were Free

The Germans, 1933-45

Milton Mayer

[the-revolution-continues]

Credit: Liesl Manone.

[ohneweiterebedeutung]

“Die Ereignisse von 1933 bis 1945 hätten spätestens 1928 bekämpft werden müssen. Später war es zu spät. Man darf nicht warten, bis der Freiheitskampf Landesverrat genannt wird. Man darf nicht warten, bis aus dem Schneeball eine Lawine geworden ist. Man muss den rollenden Schneeball zertreten. Die Lawine hält keiner mehr auf…”

—

Erich Kästner

The events of 1933 to 1945 should have been fought at the latest in 1928. After that it was too late. You mustn’t wait until the fight for freedom is called treason. You mustn’t wait until the snowball has become an avalanche. You have to crush the rolling snowball. No one can stop the avalanche …

[nycmick]

“...it’s a matter of the calendar, not heroism.”

[tastefullyoffensive]

“Not use collective punishment as it is not fair on the many people who did nothing and under the 1949 Geneva Conventions it is a war crime.”

[nu11-pointer]

Wait it’s a fucking WAR CRIME?!?! I mean that might not be 100% accurate but now I gotta know

[tlitookilakin]

holy crap, collective punishment is a war crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Geneva_Convention#Collective_punishments

and according to the exact legal phrasing-

No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

This technically counts, as students are civilians, and thus considered a “protected person”. So yes, collective classroom punishment breaks the fourth Geneva Convention, and she should be rewarded for standing up for human rights and doing her research.

[squided]

Power-move: accuse your teacher of a war crime using knowledge they supplied you with

[flores-et-dracones]

“If the real clash of civilizations is, as I believe, a clash within the individual soul, as greed and narcissism contend against respect and love, all modern societies are rapidly losing the battle, as they feed the forces that lead to violence and dehumanization and fail to feed the forces that lead to cultures of equality and respect. If we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away, because they do not make money. They only do what is much more precious than that, make a world that is worth living in, people who are able to see other human beings as full people, with thoughts and feelings of their own that deserve respect and empathy, and nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favor of sympathetic and reasoned debate”

Martha Nussbaum, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

[nycmick]

Got my attention. If you get stuck in a debate about for-profit schools, and whether education that doesn’t directly set you up for a career makes any sense, maybe keep this in mind for a sec.

[nycmick]

You can’t be neutral on a moving train

[dukeofbookingham-deactivated202]

I feel like Jack Kerouac gets misrespresented as a drunk dudebro on a road trip and occasionally yeah he is that but he also like, moves into a tent and picks grapes to provide for his immigrant girlfriend and her son and lives with his mom in his forties and spends three weeks alone in a cabin making tiny cheese plates for the mice because he can’t bear to kill them and swims up out of DT to spend six pages talking about how much he loved his cat and writes a bunch of poetry about being afraid of the ocean and I just… why does nobody remember that Kerouac

[macrolit]

Congratulations to asexy-as-fuck, the FIRST winner of our If We Were Villains paperback giveaway (sponsored by Flatiron Books)! But fear not: We will be choosing another random winner in two weeks!

[nycmick]

Hello, Music-lovers!

Saddens me to say this, but I have a pair of tix to the Yo La Tengo show at Brooklyn Steel on Friday, April 6, that I now can't use. They're yours for face value if you want 'em. Lemme know!

[nycmick]

A true legend and thorough master; one of those utterly rare individuals who knew *exactly* what he was talking about and never resorted to bullshit (and when he was bullshitting, he had such an irresistible gleam in his eye you knew he wasn't trying to get away with an iota.) I bought his book the day after I was cast in my first Shakespeare play, I had the absolute pleasure of sitting in on one of his workshops at BAM, and did a show in Vermont with one of the actors in his justly renowned "Playing Shakespeare" series, so got to see first hand how stunningly powerful that work can be. Even after he slowed down (barely) knowing he was around was a comfort, and he will be missed. Ave atque vale John Barton.

[hamletthedane]

tag your major, your favorite Shakespeare play, and what you did on Friday night

[dukeofbookingham-deactivated202]

I’m dead

[nycmick]

I declare this Thank Your Local Bookseller Day.

[macrolit]

Giveaway Contest: Thanks to the generosity of @harperperennial, we’re giving away all eight of the brand new, limited edition 2017-18 Harper Perennial Olive Editions! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these books, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on November 18, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Harper Perennial has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Easy, right? Good luck!

[weavemama]

REPRESENTATION MATTERS 

[dukeofbookingham-deactivated202]

You know you’ve done something right when you get the stereo sounding good enough that you have a hard time concentrating on anything else if it’s on