July 2010
11 posts
“I think we should build nothing but shrines [at Ground Zero]. One of every kind...”
– Dave Winer (via marco)
Rock stars use Internet Explorer 6. →
Nick Cernis:
To Whom It May Concern
You are not a ninja. Each time you use the word ‘ninja’ in vain, another one moves into your attic. Ninjas train. Ninjas battle. Ninjas don’t check email.
You are not a rock star. Rock stars paint on silence. Rock stars trash hotels. Rock stars use Internet Explorer 6. Rock stars just don’t give a shit.
An artist? Please. Artists see. Artists reflect....
This shit is MAKING MY DAY, y'all. →
The original commercial’s cute enough, but the video responses are BRILLIANT. Who is writing these things?! They are so great!
Monocle smile.
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The Waking
Theodore Roethke:
The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you? God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there, And learn by going where I have...
I'm doing this. →
Preparing for my ass to be kicked.
SUPER EXCITED.
“Questions of agency, divine or otherwise, dog us these early-summer days, amid a...”
– Nick Paumgarten studies the passive/divine voice in the New Yorker (via Julia)
“questions of agency dog us these early-summer days.”
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poetry as tonic #23
Jane Kenyon:
Happiness
There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, which you saved for an occasion you could not imagine, and you weep night and day to know that...
June 2010
9 posts
3 tags
This is Why I'll Never be an Adult →
Hyperbole and a Half:
…a few times a year, I spontaneously decide that I’m ready to be a real adult…The first day or two of my plans usually goes okay.
For a little while, I actually feel grown-up and responsible. I strut around with my head held high, looking the other responsible people in the eye with that knowing glance that says “I understand. I’m ...
lkm:
“(H)uge numbers of lagging students were offered a free tutoring option, often in the school they already attend, but only about 10 percent signed up, and even then, most dropped out after a few sessions. (…) If only 10% of our students, whether by nature of nurture, have a desire to learn more”
— Stop right there. Wrong conclusion. The fact that only 10% of all lagging students showed up...
“I’m going to assume here (because I think it makes sense) that “male” is still...”
– oh, just making wild assumptions and shit.
Update (since I’m a jerk and don’t enable comments):
my friend Julia says: my mind might have exploded from this phrase. which i maybe read 3x. but then totally understood! i think.
The brilliant Patti pointed me to this: Gaga Stigmata, which...
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in which Lady Gaga's latest video is actually...
The premise is key, so I’ll back up a little and summarize the previous post(s) you obviously should have read about my take on Lady Gaga’s feminist commentary but couldn’t because I didn’t write them, I just explained them to my long-suffering boyfriend and also my mother:
Lady Gaga has, for some time (and with some backup from Beyoncé), been building a comprehensive...
“His earlier work shows the weather has a similar impact on us - wet, dreary...”
– Feeling grumpy ‘is good for you’ (BBC)
a grammar: True or False Quiz →
writing about music : dancing about architecture
singing about life : belching about sociology
talking about feelings : drinking about cellphones
reading about politics : cooking about theology
laughing about your mistakes : emigrating about your haircut
being hopeful about the future :…
I was in a dance about architecture once. I think I was 9, and the...
3 tags
Leap Before You Look
W. H. Auden, December 1940:
The sense of danger must not disappear: The way is certainly both short and steep, However gradual it looks from here; Look if you like, but you will have to leap. Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep And break the by-laws any fool can keep; It is not the convention but the fear That has a tendency to disappear. The worried efforts of the busy heap, The...
May 2010
9 posts
5 tags
Academic Freedom: How Marquette Demonstrated Their...
[Last weekend, my brother and I had a conversation about Jodi O’Brien’s experience with Marquette, and I told him that if he wrote up his thoughts, I’d be happy to put them here. Now that he has, I’m even happier to: they’re well-considered, focused, and well expressed, which is why you should read this. But mostly you should read it because it’s important.
The...
“He told me “Being sustainable is living like you give a damn about the future.”
– from Wendy Joan’s Eat Media op-ed, “Sustainable Journalism and the Next Generation of Writers”
I like this piece, but this statement is wrong. Being sustainable is simpler to measure and more complicated to do: it’s just fucking surviving for a long time.* Valuing...
1 tag
“Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite...”
– Douglas Adams
RE: this:
1. Jodi O’Brien is a brilliant, challenging, and damn good professor, thinker, and person. She is funny, no-nonsense, compassionate, and memorable.
2. In class, she pointed out that “gay marriage” as it’s currently discussed gives her major pause, not because the privileges of marriage shouldn’t be extended to gay people or because of theological reasons,...
Marquette Withdraws Job... →
I took Jodi O’Brien’s Sexual Politics class in my last quarter at Seattle U. We covered basic feminism, sex work, gay marriage, and more—but mostly, she demanded that we deal with gender theory. In that class, I had to think about what it meant to be female, to be feminine, to be a person in a heteronormative world. She made us think about the concept and the realities of sex...
1 tag
Wild Geese →
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile…
(via Frageelaytwit)
April 2010
13 posts
“I first wrote a popular short free ebook about this seven years ago and the...”
– Seth Godin, in a moment of stunning narcissism and historical blindness.
I’ve thought this before, reading Dickens on poverty—Alcott on gender—Douglass on racism—but not particularly when reading Seth Godin on marketing. “I wrote about this seven years ago…the...
3 tags
“No homo tweaks this dynamic because it allows, implicitly, that rap is a place...”
– Jonah Weiner, in Slate (via skitch)
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"EXPERIENCE THINGS!"
Matthew Weiner:
When I look at digital, the dark side of it for me is the physicality that’s being presented alongside the Internet. I think about that movie The Matrix, and about these bodies that are human batteries that support computers. I met this guy who was creating software where you could watch Mad Men and you could chat with your friend while you’re watching it, and...
2 tags
“In the past, when something fell out of the sky, or there were collisions, men...”
– Miranda Mellis, The Revisionist (via Wekwom Texos)
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The Wild Party, by Joseph Moncure March:
Books? Books? My god! You don’t understand. They were far too busy living first-hand For books. Books!
“Palin, unlike some of her rivals who feel some kind of lingering need to relate...”
– Andrew Sullivan
Recently, I was reminded via Wordpress-comment-notification that my old site—or rather a post I wrote for it some time ago—is (bizarrely) Google-optimized for the rhetoric & composition term Engfish, thanks to this bit I wrote on Sarah Palin. I re-read it, and you...
Song
Seamus Heaney:
A rowan like a lipsticked girl. Between the by-road and the main road Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance Stand off among the rushes. There are the mud-flowers of dialect And the immortelles of perfect pitch And that moment when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens.
(in Opened Ground)
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“When the sun went down and it was time for us to leave, the tormented little man...”
– Faith Ringgold’s “The Sunflowers Quilting Bee at Arles” (The French Collection, Part I: #4)
Build a rockstar environment.
Rework:
Instead of thinking about how you can land a roomful of rock stars, think about the room instead. … Rockstar environments develop out of trust, autonomy, and responsibility. They’re a result of giving people the privacy, workspace, and tools they deserve. Great environments show respect for the people who do the work and how they do it.
(Emphasis mine.)
It’s a quick...
March 2010
20 posts
3 tags
Hire the better writer.
Rework:
If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn’t matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off. That’s because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make...
2 tags
Sady Doyle, from “13 Ways of Looking at Liz Lemon:”
Oh, sure, we can say that Liz is written as a caricature of female insecurities, and of an insecure female. That would be completely true! That is why I like her! But we also need to address that the fact of her imaginary ugliness, the fact that we are constantly told she is all brain and no body, fits into some very specific...
3 tags
“[This kind of woman is] fond of cupcakes and feminist theory but unsure how to...”
– Sady Doyle, “13 Ways of Looking at Liz Lemon”
Start it for the spectacular turns of phrase, finish it for the genuinely stunning thoughtfulness.
