Joni Mitchell skating on frozen Lake Mendota, Madison, Wisconsin, March 1976. Photos by Joel Bernstein.
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@tnelms
Joni Mitchell skating on frozen Lake Mendota, Madison, Wisconsin, March 1976. Photos by Joel Bernstein.
âWe already know what to expect from Noboaâs second term: more militarization at the expense of social programmes; more financialization, with the removal of controls on money laundering; privatizations, labour flexibilization and international investment treaties. Yet his plan to convene a Constituent Assembly marks an apparent shift from previous oligarchic governments. While the details remain unclear, it looks like the purpose of this body will be to give Noboaâs policies enough legitimacy so that they can be framed as a coherent national project â not just a series of piecemeal reforms to upwardly redistribute wealth, but a comprehensive programme to reverse correismo and roll back the gains of the 2008 Constitution: social rights, environmental protections, plurinationality, the role of the state in driving development, constraints on privatization and foreign military bases.â
â Franklin RamĂrez Gallegos, Noboa Victorious
@suchasuperlady
listen: cheating at baseball is like a whole second sport. as long as baseball has existed, people have been cheating at it
look at this shit.
I really need to know what Mr Bobby Valentine was attempting to do on that fateful day June 9th, 1999
say what you will about the reserve bank of india these are some cracking coins
Contact (1997)
This movie still rocks.
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âPolitics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them.â - Stuart Hall
âHumanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being in which the multiplicity of individuals are dissolved and into which these individuals are destined to be reabsorbed. As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognises to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful (which is not in dispute here) but also when it comes to happiness. There is no way of living with others which takes away the burden of being myself, which allows me to not have an opinion; there is no âinnerâ life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person. In this ambiguous position, which has been forced on us because we have a body and a history (both personally and collectively), we can never know complete rest. We are continually obliged to work on our differences, to explain things we have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal what is hidden within us and to perceive other people. Reason does not lie behind us, nor is that where the meeting of minds takes place: rather, both stand before us waiting to be inherited.â
â Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception (trans. Oliver Davis)
Or Bruce Coville: "What was one can become many. What was many can become one. You just have to know how to do it."
Zadie Smith's *The Fraud* is such an interesting investigation of the mystery of social relations. Extremely English! What exactly are our duties and obligations vis-a-vis others? Our freedoms?
What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daisies, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires filling. With things like angry letters to The Times.
[T]he great majority of people turn out to be extraordinarily suggestible, with brains like sieves through which the truth falls. Fact and fiction meld in their minds.
Keep stealing, my friends! From life for fiction, and from fiction for life.
We mistake each other. Our whole social arrangement a series of mistakes and compromises. Shorthand for a mystery too large to be seen. If they knew what I knew they would feel as I do! Yet even once one had glimpsed behind the veil which separates people, as she had -- how hard it proves to keep the lives of others in mind! Everything conspires against it. Life itself.
The world was sunk in madness. It covered everything, like weather.
Mrs Touchet had a theory. England was not a real place at all. England was an elaborate alibi. Nothing real happened in England. Only dinner parties and boarding schools and bankruptcies. Everything else, everything the English really did and really wanted, everything they desired and took and used and discarded -- all of that they did elsewhere.
All of our names are only temporary, she reminded herself. Only notations for something beyond imagining. They can give shape to matters too big to be seen, but never can they wholly describe the mystery.
It all comes to a head in one of the later chapters, in a crucial argument between two characters. The chapter is worth quoting in full! Here's the core of it.
Ultronic Systems Corp Stockmaster // trading terminal (US, 1969)
Obsessed thinking about the urban turkeys we've unwittingly created ...
The birds themselves are responsible for their urban success story, Huck said. The species has simply proven to be highly adaptable. Some individuals were able to tolerate people better than others. They were smart enough to learn how to find new food sources and navigate new environments. The turkey populations that do well in cities have higher levels of stress hormones than their country cousins, he told me, but they seem to suffer less harm from those hormones as well. In fact, these birds are so well adapted to cities that you canât solve the âproblemâ of troublesome urban turkeys by returning them to nature. They arenât from there. âYou stick them in the middle of nowhere and theyâll wander around until they find another city to be successful in,â Huck said. [...]
Humans can change the world in ways that make it harder for a species to thrive. We can overhunt (or overeat). And we can try to correct our mistakes. But when we do that, we canât expect the species to be grateful and docile, primly refilling the exact ecological niche we drove it out of. Sometimes it finds a new gap to fit into. Sometimes a species comes back mean. [...]
For all their faults, we like urban turkeys because they are a symbol of resilience and independence ⊠and of simply not giving a damn. They donât owe us civility. They know it. And itâs a kind of glorious, transcendent glimpse of the power of nature that you could not possibly get in the woods.
Hereâs how they came to be such a presence. (It was a joint effort.)
i am a woman at war with herself, torn forever between my love of detective fiction and my hatred of cops and cop media
it's so fucked up that detective is a type of cop irl. it's more like a gender to me
important to remember that many, many detective books are about private detectives who are actually at odds with the incompetent/crooked cops.
Absolute best genre of detective/mystery is the non-cop who makes the professionals look like fools. I'm looking at you Miss Marple.
My two favorite series of mystery novels/detective fiction both interrogate the idea of "detective" and are very, very much worth reading:
The Claire DeWitt series by Sara Gran (about a former girl sleuth/now-coked-up private eye who declares herself to be, unquestionably, the World's Greatest Detective and who learned her trade as a follower of the fictitious Jacques Silette, author of a criminological treatise that reads like French post-structuralist theory called Détection)
The Hilary Tamar series by Sarah Caudwell (about a group of junior barristers who cluster around the Oxford don Tamar, a historian of law whose gender identity we never learn and who serves as the first-person narrator of several hilarious novels that delight in legal specificities and classical references)
Everyone should read both series!
âBeyond a given point [we are] not helped by more âknowing,â but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.â
â
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
(via exhaled-spirals)
Clouds by Frederic Edwin Church
New short story collection just dropped
perhaps before youâre allowed to complain about civilisational incompetence you have to at least demonstrate that youâve mastered basic double entry bookkeeping