Anne Sexton, from a letter featured in Anne Sexton; A Self-Portrait In Letters
d e v o n

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macklin celebrini has autism
trying on a metaphor
Cosmic Funnies

titsay
styofa doing anything
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hello vonnie
occasionally subtle
taylor price

#extradirty
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
AnasAbdin
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

if i look back, i am lost
Misplaced Lens Cap
we're not kids anymore.
seen from India
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@stillnothuman
Anne Sexton, from a letter featured in Anne Sexton; A Self-Portrait In Letters
Alice Notley // Warsan Shire
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
December 29, 2024
Heather Cox Richardson
Dec 30, 2024
Former President Jimmy Carter died today, December 29, 2024, at age 100 after a life characterized by a dedication to human rights. His wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, died on November 19, 2023; she was 96 years old.
James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, in southwestern Georgia, about half an hour from the site of the infamous Andersonville Prison, where United States soldiers died of disease and hunger during the Civil War only sixty years earlier. He was the first U.S. president to be born in a hospital.
Carter’s South was impoverished. He grew up on a dirt road about three miles from Plains, in the tiny, majority-Black village of Archery, where his father owned a farm and the family grew corn, cotton, peanuts, and sugar cane. The young Carters and the children of the village’s Black sharecroppers grew up together as the Depression that crashed down in 1929 drained away what little prosperity there was in Archery.
After undergraduate coursework at Georgia Southwestern College and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carter completed his undergraduate degree at the U.S. Naval Academy. In the Navy he rose to the rank of lieutenant, serving on submarines—including early nuclear submarines—in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets.
In 1946, Carter married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s, who grew up in Plains. When his father died in 1953, Carter resigned his naval commission and took his family back to the Carters’ Georgia farm, where he and Rosalynn operated both the farm and a seed and supply company.
Arriving back in Georgia just a year before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, Carter quickly became involved in local politics. In 1962 he challenged a fraudulent election for a Georgia state senate seat, and in the runoff, voters elected him. The Carters became supporters of Democratic president John F. Kennedy in a state whose dominant Democratic Party was in turmoil as white supremacists clashed with Georgians eager to leave their past behind. Kennedy had sent troops to desegregate the University of Mississippi.
Carter ran for governor in 1966, the year after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. He lost the primary, coming in third behind another liberal Democrat and a staunch segregationist Democrat, Lester Maddox, who won it and went on to win the governorship. When Carter ran again in 1970, he emphasized his populism rather than Black rights, appealing to racist whites. He won the Democratic primary with 60% of the vote and, in a state that was still Democrat-dominated, easily won the governorship.
But when Carter took office in 1971, he abandoned his concessions to white racists and took a stand for new race relations in the United States. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he told Georgians in his inaugural speech. “No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”
His predecessor, Maddox, had refused to let state workers take the day off to attend services for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral; Carter pointedly hung a portrait of King—as well as portraits of educator Lucy Craft Laney and Georgia politician and minister Henry McNeal Turner—in the State Capitol.
Carter brought to office a focus not only on civil rights but also on cleaning up and streamlining the state’s government. He consolidated more than 200 government offices into 20 and backed austerity measures to save money while also supporting new social programs, including equalizing aid to poor and wealthy schools, prison reform and early childhood development programs, and community centers for mentally disabled children.
At the time, the state constitution prohibited Carter from reelection, so he built recognition in the national Democratic Party and turned his sights on the presidency. In the wake of the scandals that brought down both President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, as well as many of their staff, when it seemed to many Americans that all of Washington was corrupt, voters welcomed the newcomer Carter as an outsider who would work for the people.
He seemed a new kind of Democrat, one who could usher in a new, multicultural democracy now that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had brought Black and Brown voters into the American polity. Like many of the other civil rights coalitions in the twentieth century, Carter’s supporters shared music reinforced their politics, and Carter’s deep knowledge of blues, R&B, folk, and especially the gospel music of his youth helped him appeal to that era’s crucially important youth vote. Bob Dylan; Crosby, Stills & Nash, Nile Rodgers, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, as well as the Allman Brothers, all backed Carter, who later said: “I was practically a non-entity, but everyone knew the Allman Brothers. When they endorsed me, all the young people said, ‘Well, if the Allman Brothers like him, we can vote for him.’”
Elected by just over 50% of American voters over Republican candidate Gerald R. Ford’s count of about 48%, Carter’s outsider status and determination to govern based on the will of the people sparked opposition from within Washington—including in the Democratic Party—and stories that he was buffeted about by the breezes of polls. But Carter's domestic policy advisor Stuart Eizenstat once said that Carter believed an elected president should “park politics at the Oval Office door” and try to win election by doing the right thing. He took pride in ignoring political interests—a stance that would hurt his ability to get things done in Washington, D.C.
Carter began by trying to make the government more representative of the American people: Eizenstat recalled that Carter appointed more women, Black Americans, and Jewish Americans to official positions and judgeships “than all 38 of his predecessors combined.”
Carter instituted ethics reforms to reclaim the honor of the presidency after Nixon’s behavior had tarnished it. He put independent inspectors in every department and established that corporations could not bribe foreign officials to get contracts. He expanded education programs, establishing the Department of Education, and tried to relieve the country from reliance on foreign oil by establishing the Department of Energy.
Concerned that the new regulatory agencies that Congress had created since the mid-1960s might be captured by industries and that they were causing prices to rise, Carter began the deregulation movement to increase competition. He began with the airlines and moved to the trucking industry, railroad lines, and long-distance phone service. He also deregulated beer production—his legalization of homebrewing sparked today’s craft brewing industry.
But Carter inherited slow economic growth and the inflation that had plagued presidents since Nixon, and the 1979 drop in oil production after the Iranian revolution exacerbated both. While more than ten million jobs were added to the U.S. economy during his term—almost twice the number Reagan added in his first term, and more than five times the number George H.W. Bush added in his—inflation hit 14% in 1980. To combat that inflation, Carter appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve, knowing he would combat inflation with high interest rates, a policy that brought down inflation during the first term of his successor, Ronald Reagan.
Carter also focused on protecting the environment. He was the first president to undertake the federal cleanup of a hazardous waste site, declaring a federal emergency in the New York neighborhood of Love Canal and using federal disaster money to remediate the chemicals that had been stored underground there.
Carter placed 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection as a national monument, saying: “These areas contain resources of unequaled scientific, historic and cultural value, and include some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife in the world,” he said. In 1979 he had 32 solar panels installed at the White House to help heat the water for the building and demonstrate that it was possible to curb U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Just before he left office, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting more than 100 million acres in Alaska, including additional protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Coming after Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia and support for Chile’s right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose government had systematically tortured and executed his political opponents, Carter’s foreign policy emphasized human rights. Carter echoed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights established by the United Nations, promising he would promote “human freedom” while protecting “the individual from the arbitrary power of the state.” He was best known for the Camp David Accords that achieved peace between Israel and Egypt after they had fought a series of wars. Those accords, negotiated with Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel paved the way for others. Carter credited the religious faith of the three men for making the agreement possible.
Carter also built on his predecessor Nixon’s outreach to China, normalizing relations and affording diplomatic recognition of China, enabling the two countries to develop a bilateral relationship. While commenters often credit President Reagan with pressuring the Soviet Union enough to bring about its dissolution, in fact it was Carter who negotiated the nuclear arms treaty that Reagan honored and who, along with his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as a major breach in international relations. He cut off grain sales to the USSR, ordered a massive defense buildup, and persuaded European leaders to accept nuclear missiles stationed in their countries, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said was a significant factor in the dissolution of the USSR.
To Carter also fell the Iran hostage crisis in which Muslim fundamentalists overran the American embassy in the Iranian capital Tehran, seizing 66 Americans and holding them hostage for 444 days, in return for a promise that the American-backed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whom Carter had admitted to the U.S. for cancer treatment, be returned to Iran for trial. Carter immediately froze Iranian assets and began secret negotiations, while Americans watched on TV as Iranian mobs chanted “Death to America.” A secret mission to rescue the hostages failed when one of the eight helicopters dispatched to rescue the hostages crashed, killing eight soldiers. Before he left office, Carter successfully negotiated for the hostages’ return; they were released the day of Reagan’s inauguration.
Carter left office in January 1981, and the following year, in partnership with Emory University, he and Rosalynn established the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization to advance peace, health, and human rights around the world.
The Carter Center has supervised elections in more than 100 countries, has helped farmers in 15 African countries to double or triple grain production, and has worked to prevent disease in Latin America and Africa. In 1986, when the Carter Center began a program to eradicate infections of the meter-long Guinea worm that emerges painfully from sufferers’ skin and incapacitates them for long periods, 3.5 million people a year in Africa and Asia were infected; in 2022 there were only 13 known infections, in 2023 there were 14. So far in 2024, there have been 7, but those will not be officially confirmed until spring 2025. In a 2015 interview, Carter said he hoped to outlive the last case.
President Carter said, “When I was in the White House, I thought of human rights primarily in terms of political rights, such as rights to free speech and freedom from torture or unjust imprisonment. As I traveled around the world since I was president, I learned there was no way to separate the crucial rights to live in peace, to have adequate food and health care, and to have a voice in choosing one’s political leaders. These human needs and rights are inextricably linked.”
In 2002, Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” When journalist Katie Couric of The Today Show asked him if the Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me, I think that’s the most exciting thing.”
In his Farewell Address on January 14, 1981, President Jimmy Carter worried about the direction of the country. He noted that the American people had begun to lose faith in the government’s ability to deal with problems and were turning to “single-issue groups and special interest organizations to ensure that whatever else happens, our own personal views and our own private interests are protected.” This focus on individualism, he warned, distorts the nation’s purpose because “the national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.”
Carter urged Americans to protect our “most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us,” and to advance the basic human rights that had, after all, “invented America.” “Our common vision of a free and just society,” he said, “is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
Illustrated poetry: ‘Oh rascal children of Gaza’
Rafah-born author and poet Khaled Juma wrote a heartbreaking tribute to the children of the Gaza Strip amidst the missiles striking his hometown. At least 506 Palestinian children have been killed since Israel commenced its latest invasion of Gaza on July 8, 2014
Photograph #1: A Palestinian boy, who fled with his family from their home during Israeli air strikes, bathes his brother at a United Nations-run school in the Jabalya Refugee Camp in the northern Gaza Strip on July 31, 2014. The school is a designated shelter for Palestinians who were displaced by Israel’s offensive. Photo credit: Mohammed Salem
Photograph #2: A Palestinian girl reacts at the scene of an explosion carried out by the Israeli military that killed at least eight children and wounded 40 more in a public garden in Gaza City on July 28, 2014. Photo credit: Finbarr O’Reilly
Photograph #3: A traumatized Palestinian child is comforted by a man arranging care for him in a hospital in Gaza City following an Israeli air strike on July 9, 2014. Photo credit: Momen Faiz
Photograph #4: A Palestinian child pulls out toys from a box at a local market in Gaza City during a temporary ceasefire on August 6, 2014. Palestinian and Israeli delegations met in Cairo with Hamas demanding an end to the siege on Gaza and Israel demanding a demilitarization of the territory. Photo credit: Lefteris Pitarakis
Photograph #5: A Palestinian boy sleeps at a United Nations-run school in Gaza City on July 14, 2014, after fleeing with his family from their home in Beit Lahya. Photo credit: Mohammed Salem
Photograph #6: Doctors tend to injured children while a young girl sitting on her mother’s lap cries at a hospital in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on August 4, 2014. Photo credit: Eyad El Baba
Photograph #7: A Palestinian girl cries while being treated at a hospital in Beit Lahya following after sustaining injuries from an Israeli air strike on a United Nations school in the Jabalya Refugee Camp on July 30, 2014. Photo credit: Khalil Hamra
Photograph #8: Two Palestinians girls celebrate the first day of Eid Al-Fitr on the grounds of a United Nations school in the Jabalya Refugee Camp in the northern Gaza Strip on July 28, 2014. Their families are among the dozens that have fled their homes and sought refuge in the school. Normally, Muslim families in Palestine celebrate Eid Al-Fitr by visiting one another and gifting children with new clothes and shoes. Photo credit: Khalil Hamra
Photograph #9: One-and-a-half year old Razel Netzlream was killed after she was fatally hit by shrapnel from an Israeli air strike on an adjacent home the previous day. Her father carries her body to the funeral in Khan Younis on July 18, 2014. Photo credit: Alessio Romenzi
Photograph #10: A portrait of Shahed Quishta, 8, is fixed to a pillar in her home in Beit Lahya on August 16, 2014, after an Israeli tank fired a shell into the living room. She was killed on July 22, 2014. Photo credit: Khalil Hamra
remember when this was as bad as it got
Cold day
(via)
James Baldwin
Salaam Cinema (1995)
Dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf
No pienso en el suicidio, pero si pudiera dormir dos semanas, si me pudiera apagar unos momentos, sería infinitamente hermoso.
mi cabeza, mi corazon, mi mente
Tears - Part One Atonement Joe Wright Ian McEwan Christopher Hampton Seamus McGarvey The Hours Stephen Daldry Michael Cunningham David Hare Seamus McGarvey Olive Kitteridge - Security Lisa Cholodenko Elizabeth Strout Jane Anderson Frederick Elmes Queer as Folk- Full Circle Alex Chapple Ron Cowen Daniel Lipman The Leftovers - Cairo Tom Perrotta Damon Lindelof Curtis Gwinn Carlito Rodriguez Michael Grady The Fountain Darren Aronofsky Ari Handel Matthew Libatique Biutiful Alejandro G. Iñárritu Nicolás Giacobone Armando Bo Rodrigo Prieto The Fall Tarsem Singh Dan Gilroy Nico Soultanakis Colin Watkinson Bright Star Jane Campion Greig Fraser
“when it welts and over flows, when i’m flooded and can’t help to weep, every tear is asking... why. over and over; why?” - by me, noelis. from Learning To Keep Quiet
Watching old episodes of Parts Unknown and being struck by little moments like these. What an extraordinary tragedy.
still so fucking broken
what a morning. i'm shocked and honestly broken by the news, and i simply just admired the man. i can't imagine his child, his friend. i hope they come to understand with loving peace that the end is not a reflection of their relationships, of their memories. which now i'm sure sounds like bullshit to many. but i know first hand how life can turn on us, turn for you and your love ones, leave you weak. until all you remember is your last meal together. and so i'm only broken. i thank him for being authentic and a dream story teller, so brave and inspirational - despite all conditions. his life is unearthing a memory for me, of my soulmate now in transition who should have died so many years before, but transformed suffering - just for a little while. just like #anthonybourdain 🖤
Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
Jonathan Safran Foer (via themiracleforest)
talking golden globe nominations
it’s been 3 years since i’ve watched the globes… or emmy’s. it’s gonna be longer. its whatever for them i’m sure but before i never missed it. because i am a filmmaker and it means something when good work gets recognized… but wow! every year they start off good then do something politically correct or not or something just so nice for the artists but totally undeserved…. it’s aggravating. can’t it just be about the work!? making me hate award shows when it used to be an event i looked forward to… in college i remember one of my professors say about art critics; those who can’t do critique. sad but true. because yes criticisms is sometimes so good and rewarding but most of the time it misses any formal, conceptual or emotional analyses and instead it is filled with points of view, trends, and shit the awards are becoming those kind if critics.
so though i am glad The Young Pope finally got some well deserved recognition (because like it or not it was so perfectly done and ACTED!) there were also a few very nice nominations that were kinda… like whah?? ex. Mr. Elgort, Ms. Langford and Mr. Plummer… it’s very mean to say but still I wonder, where and how did these performances go to get a nom… is the work! really being evaluated? if it is then where is Mr. Peele’s nomimation… I didn’t like that movie but I can admit and recognize it so well done and he deserved it. not to mention the HUGE snubs: Greta Gerwig, Jake Gyllenhaal, Garrett Hedlund, Megan Mullally and Justin Hartley(who has killed it this season!). I mean JAKE and GRETA! REALLY??? again, wow.
everyone else is wonderful and well deserved… they thankfully did right by Call Me By Your Name…. but still, disappointed.
lady bird (dir. greta gerwig - NOV 03)
life and nothing more (dir. antonio méndez esparza - DEC 01)
the florida project (dir. sean baker - NOV 10)
i, tonya (dir. craig gillespie - DEC 08)
the killing of a sacred deer (dir. yorgos lanthimos - NOV 03)
roman j israel, esq. (dir. dan gilroy - NOV 22)
last flag flying (dir. dan gilroy dan gilroy - NOV 03)
three billboards outside ebbing, mo (dir. martin mcdonagh - NOV 10)
call me by your name dir. (luca guadagnino - NOV 24)
loving vincent (dir. dorota kobiela & hugh welchman - SEPT 01)
here we go 2017-2018: i’m no critic, no foreign press but an artist and a film lover - a story lover. stories are a part of human existence, we tell them, retell them; verbally, in gesture, with sound, image, in time, through time. here are some i’ve loved this season. all in theaters so please go watch them! all works of art... each in their own way telling our story - the human story, of nature; our stories all so different but most of all beautiful despite the darkness. here is the creative telling of our experiences, of our transformations, our growth with pain, death, life and love.
this is list one and here’s two plus other lists.
mudbound (dir. dee rees - NOV 17)
phanthom thread (dir. paul thomas anderson - DEC 25)
battle of the sexes (dir. jonathan dayton & valerie faris - SEPT 29)
the meyerowitz stories (dir. noah baumbach - OCT 13)
the shape of water (dir. guillermo del toro - DEC 08)
dunkirk (dir. christopher nolan - JULY 20)
film stars don't die in liverpool (dir. paul mcguigan - NOV 16)
novitiate (dir. margaret betts - OCT 27)
stronger (dir. david gordon green - SEPT 29)
the post (dir. steven spielberg - DEC 22)
here we go 2017-2018: i’m no critic, no foreign press but an artist and a film lover - a story lover. stories are a part of human existence, we tell them, retell them; verbally, in gesture, with sound, image, in time, through time. here are some i’ve loved this season. all in theaters so please go watch them! all works of art... each in their own way telling our story - the human story, of nature; our stories all so different but most of all beautiful despite the darkness. here is the creative telling of our experiences, of our transformations, our growth with pain, death, life and love.
this is list one and here’s two plus other lists.
The Twelve Initiations of Love
In our experiences, it is our job to teach and to learn…
Aries (the infant): “I am” - to teach that love is innocence and to learn that love is trust
Taurus (the baby): “I have” - to teach that love is patience and to learn that love is forgiveness
Gemini (the child): “I think” - to teach that love is awareness and to learn that love is feeling
Cancer (the adolescent): “I feel” - to teach that love is devotion and to learn that love is freedom
Leo (the teenager): “I will” - to teach that love is ecstasy and to learn that love is humility
Virgo (the adult): “I analyze” - to teach that love is pure and to learn that love is fulfillment
Libra (marriage): “I balance” - to teach that love is beauty and to learn that love is harmony
Scorpio (sex): “I desire” - to teach that love is passion and to learn that love is surrender
Sagittarius (knowledge): “I see” - to teach that love is honesty and to learn that love is loyalty
Capricorn (experience): “I use” - to teach that love is wisdom and to learn that love is unselfish
Aquarius (idealism): “I know” - to teach that love is tolerance and to learn that love is Oneness
Pisces (submission): “I believe” - to teach that love is compassion and to learn that love is all
… and so to realize at last that love is eternal
(from Linda Goodman’s “Love Signs”)
i'm sharing this song because i love it. i have to admit i have never heard this guy sing before. like never. but i heard it the other day and its fucking art. i read an article the other day, by chance really: by clicking on what i wanted to read, then something that was like 'whats this' and then the article - that stated that taylor swift is the voice of the pop generation. because it doesn't need to be said that rap is (as it always has been) representing society plus the state and identity of a generation's everythings artistically and beautifully... but rap music does miss out on identifying with some of our society which is why its awesome that we have different genres - and it's artistic brilliance when any artist refrains from acting like one is better than the other. what matters is the message - who cares how they hear it. NOW back to the article that said that when it comes to pop music they say taylor swift is the voice of the generation, that terrifies me. see i heard the song above and i thought this guy, and THAT song should fucking represent this generation. he is just as ridiculously 'famous' as swift, if that's is some kind of a requirement. and in my humble opinion the song is a great work of art. because great art is simple, its not the act of kiss and tell... its reflective of our world's identity. and its simple, not empty but simple. sorry swift lovers but her songs are empty to me, maybe cause i'm not bitter about my heartbreaks. this song though reminds me of my love for nirvana, bowie, prince - (which i would dare say have influenced this young man, prob the doors too). pop sounding doesn't mean it cant have truth, in fact mr. lennon would insist it should. its such a simple song about RIGHT NOW. like its me right now and i know its many of us - the world is ending around us and we must fight for it but we also just want to just get away from the constant reminder of it. the song isn't saying do it, its a mirror of us, a simple but truthful reflection. great art must always be simple. even in its complexity and all the reasons anyone makes anything, all that inspires - when its time to show your art then it stops being yours. and the reason you wrote something, or painted, sang, filmed... it doesn't matter. if its great then it should allow its audience: readers, spectators, listeners... to experience and complete the piece with their own experiences.
we don't talk enough, we should open up before it's all too much will we ever learn? we've been here before it's just what we know