try to praise the mutilated world.

Spring fever (found heart, Capitol Hill)

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:03:40 -0800

Spring fever (found heart, Capitol Hill)

When Books Could Change Your Life: Why What We Pore Over At 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do | Baltimore City Paper

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:40:15 -0800

When Books Could Change Your Life: Why What We Pore Over At 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do | Baltimore City Paper:

ipomoea:

sleepswithbooks:

nerdgasms:

(via theeviltwin)

At age 12 I was working my way through Stephen King’s oeuvre with some (extensive) side reading on the Northern Irish Troubles. This explains a lot about me as a person.

The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Madeleine L’Engle and Hillary Carlip. Yeah, that’d do it.

Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, Francesca Lia Block, and L. M. Montgomery. This explains so much.

Just reading this headline makes my head nearly explode with stuff to read/say. So I’m reblogging before I even get to go read the thing.

An active silence

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:32:17 -0800

bobulate:

“White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background,” wrote Jan Tschichold in 1930. And just as you cannot ignore white space, you cannot ignore silence, as it’s the white space of conversations.

We get anxious about silence. It connotes issues. Stress. Awkwardness. Yet, like Tschichold’s white space, silence is often an active element in our day-to-day conversations. It can indicate productive thinking is in progress. But we — twitchy, anxious communicators that we are — forget this.

Faith in silence

If you’ve shipped off an email, transmitted a voicemail, and received no reply: fear not. This does not mean your recipient has not heard, seen, understood, respected, and acted upon your message. I would argue, in fact, that a thoughtful message that receives no immediate reply most likely means the recipient is constructing an equally thoughtful message in return. It just hasn’t reached the “send” state.

White space is an active element.

Thoughtful takes time

Give your recipients time. If you don’t hear back, pester not. If you have a deadline, make it clear. If it’s urgent, make it known. But if you’re simply seeking thoughts, give others time to construct their own. A pause. Some white space.

Give silence a chance to be the active element it needs to be. You might be surprised at what you hear, even when you don’t.

Kanye on Creativity

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:37:10 -0800

viafrank:

Am I really putting up something Kanye West said? Yes I am. Because it’s about better. And, I’m inclined to believe this thought, regardless of what I think of the man’s music or behavior.

There’s no such thing as fact anymore, only opinion. The closest thing we have to fact is “common opinion”. Everything is an opinion. The way you dress is an expression of your opinion. Your religious beliefs are your opinion. The music you turn up loud is your opinion. For most people it’s easier to just agree. For me the hardest thing is to ‘just’ agree and that is what sparks creativity, the feeling that something can be better, the feeling that something’s missing. The feeling that something’s needed.

(Oh, and obviously facts still remain.)
via putthison, converted to non-all-caps by Colin Marshall

“For me the hardest thing is to ‘just’ agree.”

This picture is from last summer at Long Beach. Not flattering,...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:22:57 -0800

This picture is from last summer at Long Beach. Not flattering, but I like it. From just this picture, you can tell the following:

we aren’t that into shoes
we aren’t that into chairs
we are a little bit into beer
something was delicious
LORDY but they crack me up.

Living Alone (III)

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:15:23 -0800

Levertov:

I said, the summer garden I planted
bears only leaves–leaves in abundance–
but no flowers.
And then the flowers,
many colors and forms,
come forth.

I said, the tree has no buds.
And then the leaves,
shyly, sparse, as if reluctant,
in less than two days appeared,
and the tree, now,
is flying on green wings.

What magic denial
shall my life utter
to bring itself forth?

(previously)

just-spring

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:06:15 -0800

just-spring

"A chief virtue of digital books is said to be their economical size—they take up no space at..."

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:31:24 -0800

“A chief virtue of digital books is said to be their economical size—they take up no space at all!—but even a megabyte seems bulky compared to what can be conveyed in the few cubic feet of a bookshelf. What other vessel is able to hold with such precision, intricacy, and economy, all the facets of your life: that you bake bread, vacationed in China, fetishize Melville, aspire to read Shakespeare, have coped with loss, and still tote around a copy of The Missing Piece as a totem of your childhood. And what by contrast can a Kindle tell you about yourself or say to those who visit your house? All it offers is blithe reassurance that there is progress in the world, and that you are a part of it.”

- The Millions: In Our Parents’ Bookshelves (via everythinginthesky : morrowplanet : clapifyoulikeme)

Books out of identity, identity out of books.

GPOYF (haircut edition)

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:14:20 -0800

GPOYF (haircut edition)

real work.

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:22:46 -0800

real work.

Photo

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:33:19 -0800

unhappyhipsters: It was hard to tell if social networking had...

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:20:43 -0800

unhappyhipsters:

It was hard to tell if social networking had instilled an instinct to compulsively pose, or if there was actually a photographer at the end of the living room.

(Photo: Mark Steinmertz; Dwell, September 2003)

The Case for an Older Woman (oktrends)

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:37:56 -0800

The Case for an Older Woman (oktrends):

I love the OKCupid blog and the guys who are writing it. Even when they’re revealing really irking things about how gender works in our society, they mean so well.

This article is great. My favorite points (may be exaggerated for drama):

Guys have a pathological problem with dating older ladies and a bizarre affinity for inappropriately younger women.
Ladies are quite reasonable about age.
No you’re biased.
But seriously, womens’ desirability peaks really young (before they can drink!) and starts dropping off around….well, around my current age.
Eighteen-year-old girls, by and large, don’t want sex more than about once a week, don’t believe in birth control, don’t get tested regularly, and won’t date you unless you’d like to marry them. Plus they have no confidence, so they’re gonna be high maintenance. (Read: the magazines and the nudie tumblrs are doing you a disservice, fellas.)
Hey! In Seattle, even the younger ladies are pretty sex-positive (except they don’t like birth control - what!?!).
The OK Cupid guys seem like sweethearts. I love how they actually take the angle of trying to talk older men into dating women their own age. Also how they argue that ladies don’t get less attractive. I want to hug them.

Also, I just realized that several of the founders were behind thespark.com. Man, remember the old days when we all took 15-page quizzes about when (whether?) we were gonna have sex and how we were gonna die? Those quizzes were way awesomer than this Facebook crap, right?

"I’ve never really thought of myself as depressed so much as I am paralyzed by hope."

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:47:51 -0800

“I’ve never really thought of myself as depressed so much as I am paralyzed by hope.”

- Maria Bamford (via beeborg)

Nada Surf - Do It Again: I bought a stack of books I...

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:24:00 -0800

Nada Surf - Do It Again:

I bought a stack of books
I didn’t read a thing
It’s like I’m sitting here
Waiting for birds to sing
Let’s do it again

[Currently infatuated with this song.]

This song, for Valentine’s day (no video, just an album...

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 01:42:42 -0800

This song, for Valentine’s day (no video, just an album cover, sorry).

I’d like to post a whole poem, but I think I oughtn’t, for copyright reasons. But it’s from Elizabeth Bradfield’s Approaching Ice, and here’re three lines:

I walked as if the pavement’s grooves
were signs of where it would collapse.
I wanted it to.

"The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian..."

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 13:24:00 -0800

“The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

- Treaty signed by George Washington, 1796.

[Our Founders Were NOT Fundamentalists | The Smirking Chimp]

(via nickdouglas : doublejack : piscesinpurple : alinasmith)

Waiting for the Google Buzz Privacy Outcry

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:14:35 -0800

otwas:

benbrown:

It will only be a matter of time now before my mother calls me to ask why I keep emailing her to tell her all about my late night bowel movements/software releases. ”I’m not emailing you, mom! Google decided it was a good thing to crap everything I say into your email inbox so that you won’t miss out on the exciting world of social media.”

…

I feel they are trying to force feed me the worst parts of social media - ie, the most popular stuff - via an interface that I’ve been trained means HIGH PRIORITY ALWAYS ON RESPOND NOW.

I pity the inbox zero people the most.

Reblogged for my mom: Hi, Mom! Here’s what’s going on! I’ll come by tonight and make sure it’s not flooding you.

Also, as a semi-consistent inbox zero person with a deeply unhealthy relationship to my unread(#) counts, I have officially disabled that shit.

"We should assemble all those who are pure and cannot abide other faiths, put them all in rockets,..."

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:45:48 -0800

“We should assemble all those who are pure and cannot abide other faiths, put them all in rockets, and fire them into space.”

- Wole Soyinka, via givemesomethingtoread

This is the best quote on religion I’ve seen since Zora Neale Hurston’s “Gods always behave like the people who make them.” Mostly because it comprehends the connection between purity and lack of tolerance, but partly because firing people into space is funny and Soyinka has (obviously) a fabulous sense of the dramatic.

toothpastefordinner.com true dat.* *actually I do not know if...

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:46:00 -0800

toothpastefordinner.com

true dat.*

*actually I do not know if this is true, since I think I fail at personality tests, based on my experience of getting different answers every time I take one of those fake shortened versions they give out in insightfully-oriented educational moments.