from the comments
I’m in my sweats, under the covers, in a frigidly cold loft located above the karaoke action of my friends’ wedding reception. Right now a muffled voice is singing that love song from the movie, Aladin. We’re all in the guest house on a farm in McDade, Texas. Let me save you the trouble and clarify that this place is about 40 miles outside of Austin. I wish I were wearing some socks, but they’re somewhere in my suitcase and it’s too dark to tell where.
Today was kind of amazing. Rain was forecasted for the outdoor wedding, but as the hours counted down a storm blew in early and fast. We set everything up in the morning, tables, chairs, cloths, settings, flowers, other decorations, and sound equipment. By the time of the ceremony, nearly an hour late due to the brides’ clear need for a last-minute nap, winds were ripping across the farm at speeds greater than 30 miles an hour. Temperatures had dropped below 60 degrees.
You plan for months, you wake up worrying about the location of those dessert spoons you intended to have on hand for the cake course, and then the entire wedding happens (happily!) in the small room intended just for the catering set-up.
What also amazes me is how I respected my socializing limit and stopped there. I wished my friends love and happiness and all the fun they could have in one night, and then I came up here to rest. Last night it nearly broke me being trapped out at a bar in downtown Austin with no hope of leaving the bachelorette party until everyone staying at the farm was ready to take the van back, including the brides.
I am not the unyielding, overtired extrovert I used to be. Now, where are my socks?
tweet of the day
from the moderated comments
…Um, these kind of suck…
Full Disclosure
I’m not cut out for the Back-to-Basics life.
The last few years seem to have been on repeat: By late winter my body is craving an unprocessed, detoxed existence in the sun filled with hard work, and less digitized shenanigans mediated by an ongoing and evermore invasive variety of screens. So nose in a seed pack, fingers in the soil I get to work preparing and planting while dreaming about making cheese from scratch and creating handmade paper. Horrifically, I actually begin to think that one of those back-to-the-land communes could be kind of cool–communes got a bad rap, but they could be something special. Ugh. What is wrong with me?
Further disclosure at maldita lengua.
Last Words
Among the last words my mother spoke to me: “I wish money had never been invented.”
Putting the caped crusader on the couch
From a New York Times Op-Ed published several weeks ago:
Comic books have long relied on mental disorders to drive their most memorable villains. Consider the Batman line, in which the Joker, Harley Quinn and other “criminally insane” rogues are residents of Gotham City’s forensic psychiatric hospital, Arkham Asylum.
Introduced in 1974, Arkham grossly confuses the concepts of psychiatric hospital and prison. Patients are called “inmates,” decked out in shackles and orange jumpsuits, while a mental health professional doubles as the “warden.” Even the antiquated word “asylum” implies that the patients are locked away with no treatment and little hope of rejoining society. [...]
Of course, DC Comics, and comic books in general, are hardly the only source of these stereotypes or the only contributors to discrimination. At the same time, they are widely consumed, whether in the original form or as story lines for movies, TV shows and video games. Modernized mental health depictions in the Batman titles alone would reach millions of people worldwide through its billion-dollar-grossing films and blockbuster video games.
That’s why DC Comics should seize the opportunity with The New 52 to move to the forefront in transforming mental health depictions in comics. To start, writers should stop overemphasizing a link between violence and mental disorders to explain criminal behavior.
protips for arguing
A must read list of intellectually honest and dishonest debate tactics. For example:
Accusation of taking a quote out of context: debater accuses opponent of taking a quote that makes the debater look bad out of context. All quotes are taken out of context—for two reasons: quoting the entire context would take too long and federal copyright law allows “fair use” quotes but not reproduction of the entire text. Taking a quote out of context is only wrong when the lack of the context misrepresents the author’s position. The classic example would be the movie review that says, “This movie is the best best example of a waste of film I have ever seen,” then gets quoted as “This movie is the best…I’ve ever seen.” Any debater who claims a quote misrepresents the author’s position must cite the one or more additional quotes from the same work that supply the missing context and thereby reveal the true meaning of the author, a meaning which is very different from the meaning conveyed by the original quote that they complained about. Furthermore, other unrelated quotes that just prove the speaker is a nice guy are irrelevant. The discussion is about the offending quotes, not whether the speaker is a good guy. The missing context must relate to, and change the meaning of, the statements objected to, not just serve as character witness material about the speaker or writer. Merely pointing out that the quote is not the entire text proves nothing. Indeed, if a search of the rest of the work reveals no additional quotes that show the original quote was misleading, the accusation itself is dishonest.
You know those people you hate getting into arguments with? It’s probably because they, willfully or not, ignore these sorts of distinctions. (via @interdome)
whoa
I just had a miniature explosion – the good kind – inside my head. I don’t quite know how to tell the story, but I’ll try to do it linearly. That’s usually a good strategy.
1st: I become an English teacher and rely almost completely on a book by Jim Burke to figure out what I’m doing. I think it’s a great book. I read every word, including the eloquent epigraph from one of Burke’s students:
Without companions, the world is a sea of stories with no one to listen.
2nd: I join Clusterflock.
3rd: I find that a certain Clusterflocker – Kelsey Parker – was the author of that epigraph.
4th: I hum “It’s a small world” to myself incessantly.
The world of the heterosexual
Commentary courtesy of Aunt Ida (Edith Massey), “Female Trouble” (John Waters).
in a haze
seeing isn’t necessary, running is. so say the limbs to the eyes.
screams echo in a haze but there is no body.
The torch gives enough light to see a couple feet in front of you
Frank Chimero posted the talk he gave at the AIGA National Conference in Phoenix:
There is a reach to knowledge and skill. You know what you know, and through time and effort and diligent focus, you’ve also come to realize a few of the things that you don’t know. You begin to understand that those unknowns are within reach if you stretch a bit. That’s learning. And then the thought occurs to you that puts the fear of God in your bones: there are things out of your reach, (Important things! Crucial things!) that you will never know that you don’t know. It’s a darkness too dark to pierce.
Don’t worry, it’s hopeful too.
quote out of context
In fairness, Generation X could use a better spokesperson. Barack Obama is just a little too senior to count among its own, and it has debts older than Mark Zuckerberg. Generation X hasn’t had a real voice since
Kurt Cobain blew his brains out,Tupac was murdered,Jeff Mangum went crazy,David Foster Wallace hung himself,Jeff Buckley drowned,River Phoenix overdosed,Elliott Smith stabbed himself (twice) in the heart, Axl got fat.
via Tim Carmody
From streetbonersandtvcarnage.com
A reflection on #Occupywallstreet by a twenty-something hipster-ish business owner:
To make ends meet while my business grows, I work at a wine shop and that nets me a whopping $12.50 an hour. As a bonus for my ears, I am privy to humoring whatever bat-shit crazy political stance my customers offer up as they wait for me to ring up their booze. Lately, I’ve been getting customers buying hooch on their way to Occupy Wall Street. Funny, because I don’t recall seeing any of the Little Rock Nine being armed with flasks of Evan Williams. Anyhoo, today this British girl with legs that nearly scraped the ceiling strutted into the shop wearing a see-thru dress. She was particularly amped because she was on her way to the protest and asked if I would like to go. I said no thanks. Without skipping a beat she asks, “Why not? Don’t you hate the banks?”
And there my friends lies the problem with Occupy Wall Street. There is a considerable lack of education on what caused the economic crises and therefore we are playing the blame game. To make matters worse, there seems to be no clear resolution being offered by the protest’s organizers. And if you are reading this and saying, “Well, the giant corporations could just give us the money,” then you sir are a jackass. That mode of thought is reserved for friends of successful rappers who thought that they’d be getting a free ride out of the hood.
I don’t think people shouldn’t be angry, but this feels more like a mood than a movement.
Jason Molina – Don’t It Look Like Rain
The wolf outside my door don’t need
Anymore of my blood
Of my bood
She don’t wait for nothing
nothing anymore
She’s watching for nothing anymore
Moon above my light
Starts fading out
I live for nothing anymore
I live for nothing
from the archives: August 25, 2009
Driftless: Stories from Iowa By Danny Wilcox Frazier:
Life in Iowa can be punishing. Many Iowans expend their lives sweating over soil and spilling the blood of livestock; they endure the hardships associated with a life inextricably bound to the ups and downs of nature. Today, those challenges and a shift in our nation’s economy have pushed the youth of rural communities to migrate to the metropolises of America. Those left in the wake of this out-migration continue their lives, seemingly unchanged from the generations that preceded them, and entombed in obscurity.
from the comments
Bear with me here, It’s gonna get stream-of-conscious-y for a sec.
Dear clusterflock
How do you relate to your limitations? With acceptance? Regret? Shame? Resignation? Do you know them at all?
quote out of context
One of my favourites is pavements. He is not discussing what the stuff is that pavements are made up of. Instead he is looking at what the movement of pavement tells us about who has driven on that road. For instance he describes “shoving”, which is when warm pavements, over time, create a little crevice and then a hill after it — the pavement has been moved by the starting and stopping of a large force. If you begin to look for this shoved part of the pavement as you cross the street you will see it here and there. What it represents is where a lot of cars, or in New York a very large bus, might have stopped and started repeatedly. At bus stops you will see shoving. I love the idea that you can look at something so familiar that you have never really examined, and see this additional dimension — in this case, of who has passed by before.
bananas
Reading this paragraph from an article on how retail stores prime shoppers to make particular choices, I couldn’t help feel I was being primed for a subconscious lesson in grammar.
Let’s take for example Whole Foods, a market chain priding itself on selling the highest quality, freshest, and most environmentally sound produce. No one could argue that their selection of organic food and take-away meals are whole, hearty, and totally delicious. But how much thought have you given to how they’re actually presenting their wares? Have you considered the carefully planning that’s goes into every detail that meets the eye?
What has happened to online writing? Matt Yglesias and Josh Marshall, both political writers I admire, often post with grammatical errors. Have we decided this medium doesn’t require the rigor of print? Are the errors part of the message? What bananas should I buy?
(Even if it does involve covering one eye to flatten everything.)
Rob Giampietro and Frank Chimero discuss artistic, personal, and collective identity:
The artist changed from a capable set of hands able to express what is seen into a lens able to capture what is perceived through their own point of view. And even now, a large part of how we access the quality of the art of others (whether pop music, painting, design, or writing) could be said to be an assessment of the artist’s individual way of seeing the world.
(thanks, Luke)
clusterflock, five years in
When I first started clusterflock, the idea was to gather a smallish group with varied and somewhat overlapping interests who could speak from expertise and point to fascination. I’m still surprised, and pleased, at the community we have become, and look forward to hearing more about the things we know intimately, and the things we find that demand attention.
The Decade Since
I realize now that those in history whose lives were short and mean and threatened by sword and disease gathered and told stories not as leisure, but as desperately needed distraction, and reassurance that they were not alone.
So if art cannot contain or describe this event, and if for now the suffering is too keen to be alleviated by parable… if stories are for the moment not as critically needed, as courage, as medicine, as blood, as bacon, they can at least revert to this social function. As time goes on, this will all pass away into memory, into a story with a beginning and a middle and finally an end.
The above quote is from John Hodgman’s McSweeney’s column on September 25, 2001, where he discusses narrative in the context of the attacks. This morning, for probably the first time since maybe 2002, I sat down and actually pondered the events of 9/11. I sat and looked through the many photos provided by The Atlantic and read columns from that strange time, reflecting on what this would all mean. I still don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about it a decade later, but I think most striking is the sheer sadness and emotion captured through the lens and in the words that were written.
I jokingly told a friend last night that I remember where I was the last time someone asked me if I remembered where I was on 9/11. Nowadays, I tend to think in broader terms about September 11th – namely how we’ve responded with irrational fear to the slightest threat of terrorism in our post-9/11 reality. But I had a moment this morning where I felt almost shameful at how much I had allowed things to gloss over in the years since. Not in a hollow sort of “remembering 9/11 as a form of dime store patriotism” way, but more in how much we’ve let the genuine feelings of unity and pride we felt for our neighbors slip, thrown away as talking points in elections or manipulated as tools of demagogues.
If September 11th was ever meant to be a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, I sometimes wonder whether we’ll ever get the closure of a happy ending.
Whitney Cummings on lady writers
I talked to Whitney Cummings last night at a Paley Center event for her new sitcom Whitney. I asked her about her views on lady writers having difficulty in the industry and she had this to say:
“I don’t know, I guess I’m confused when people say that, I guess I don’t see that. I know the numbers might say that. I don’t think its because they’re not qualified, I think it’s because they don’t want to do it because it’s a shitty gig. It’s the same reason women don’t play football, because we’re not stupid enough to play a sport that you have to put on a helmet to get in there, it’s a bad idea. I think a lot of women are qualified to higher level writing jobs but they’re kind of like “This is torture, I’m going to do something that’s easier and more fun.” I think it’s the same reason that there’s less female comedians, it’s just a really grueling life and they are not masochistic, they’re smarter.”
I don’t know what I think about that, exactly.
the only reason I hate fall
is because now I have to exert even more effort to ignore football related stuff on the web.
As the Spirit Moveth
A pentecostal minister has provoked the ire of her fellow believers after praying in tongues via her Facebook wall.
(The Dish)
