Astronaut Anna Fisher
John Bryson
Many wonderful cicada illustrations from A Monograph of Oriental Cicadidae, 1889-1892
(via Scientific Illustration)
Have you seen any cicadas in your neck of the woods yet? This is one of LibraryLinkNJ’s Summer 2013 Obsessions (and it ties in so beautifully with the Summer Reading Program theme), so there will be (a lot) more cicada content in the coming months.
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. (Roy Ascott’s phrase.) That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.
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Brian Eno (via jessiethatcher) I could reblog/post this every day as a constant reminder. (via notational) |
Children’s publisher Barefoot Books has said it has terminated its relationship with Amazon in the UK and the US, declaring the way the retailer does business “undermines” Barefoot’s approach.
Women are afraid of meeting a serial killer. Men are afraid of meeting someone fat.
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It reminds me of that famous Margaret Atwood quote: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” It also reminds me of something written by one of the mods of Sex Worker Problems: “Misandry irritates. Misogyny kills.” I mean, it’s just true. (via tealeafprincess) |
But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
‘Cause people seem to only post the 20-something Audrey Hepburn
this is genuinely the first photo i’ve seen of her looking older
I didn’t know Audrey Hepburn grew old into a bomb-ass old lady until like, last year. I thought she died young cuz that’s the only pictures I’ve ever seen.
omg
She’d become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
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| — | Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (via picadorbookroom) |
Toxic stress is the heavy hand of early poverty, scripting a child’s life not in the Horatio Alger scenario of determination and drive, but in the patterns of disappointment and deprivation that shape a life of limitations.
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Poverty as a Childhood Disease, by Perri Klass. As we saw at this year’s schoollibraryjournal Public Library Leadership Think Tank, school and public libraries have a very strong role to play in mitigating the effects of poverty, for both children and their caregivers. (via librarylinknj) |
“So many of us fail: we divorce our wives and husbands, we leave the roofs of our lovers, go once again into the lonely march, mustering our courage with work, friends, half pleasures which are not whole because they are not shared. Yet still I believe in love’s possibility, in its presence on the earth; as I believe I can approach the altar on any morning of any day which may be the last and receive the touch that does not, for me, say: There is no death; but does say: In this instant I recognize, with you, that you must die. And I believe I can do this in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plates, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary; we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together, we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.”
- Andre Dubus
