April 2012
48 posts
“Conservatives blame the poor, leaving it to them to pull themselves together, adopt the right values, and work harder. Liberals turn to government for the answer, but this shouldn’t be mistaken for systemic change. Liberals use government programs to change individuals-poor people-by giving them money, job training, food stamps, or health care rather than trying to change how society generates poverty in the first place.”
—Allan G. Johnson (via wretchedoftheearth)
“
I would not speak of this dilemma if it were only mine, but I watch many others race again and again through the cycle of widening concern, frenzied effort, and exhaustion. Whatever the source of conscience—parents, God, solemn books, earnest friends, the dictates of biology—it is adapted to a narrower space than the one we inhabit. Limited to a small tribe or a community of a few hundred people, conscience may prompt us to serve others in a balanced and wholesome way. But when television and newspapers and the Internet bring us word of dangers by the thousands and miseries by the millions and needful creatures by the billions; when pleas for help reach us around the clock; when aching faces greet us on every street—then conscience either goes numb or punishes us with a sense of failure.
I often lie awake at night, rehearsing the names of those I’ve disappointed by failing to give them all they asked. I don’t say this to make myself out as a generous soul. I am hardly that; I feel defenseless rather than virtuous. The truth is that I’ve come to fear the claims that other beings make on me, because their numbers grow relentlessly. I wish to love my neighbor, but the neighborhood has expanded so far, and the neighbors have become so many, that my love is stretched to the breaking point. I’m tempted to run away, beyond reach of the needy voices. So I make of this hut a hiding place.
” —Stillness | Scott Russell Sanders | Orion Magazine (via ayjay)
“The easiest thing to feel is sadness.”
—Justin Vernon (via saddest-summer)
Raconte-Moi Une Histoire
M83
M83 - Raconte-Moi Une Histoire
“Do you want to play with me? We can be a whole group of friends. We can be a whole group of frogs!! … Jumping and laughing forever.”
I set this to loop and have been designing to it all day.
Do you have a favorite lemon curd recipe? I'm not sure why, but something tells me that you do, and I need to make a pavlova topped with lemon curd and berries or else I'll die.
Business voice: Nigella has one on her blog that a reader submitted. It’s basically the one I use.
Spitting-milk-out-my-nose-laughing voice: GURL! We has GOT to have some of the same chromosomes! Seriously, can I come over?
**edit**
The recipe doesn’t mention it, but garnishing your finished product with lemon zest adds instant fancy points.
“When you have a daughter and you say to her, ‘Look, things are not going to be fair for you. People might treat you in a certain way because you’re female. Might say this thing or that thing.’ That’s kind of easy. When you’re saying to your boys, ‘Okay, there’s a certain kind of privilege that comes along with being a white man and you should not take that.’ That’s a kind of craziness. That’s asking them to be different from people – certainly different from the macho men who they might see on TV or hear around them. I just felt like the payoff ultimately was going to be so great.”
—Anna Quindlen on raising feminist boys. [full interview here] (via nprfreshair)
Orangette: No such thing →
orangette.blogspot.com
I’m making this pound cake sometime this weekend. And adopting Molly as my writing role model. Just consider the following sentence: “Like a proper pound cake, it’s firm and buttery, but it gets a gentle lift from the citrus, both in flavor and in fragrance, and then, behind it, there comes the deep, toasty, rumbling flavor of the pistachios.”
“When things break, it’s not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It’s because a little piece gets lost — the two remaining ends couldn’t fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.”
—John Green and David Levithan, Will Grayson Will Grayson (via saddest-summer)
“I even dislike the concept artist when it sets you above, all it is is working in a certain kind of medium to make something right. The material is no more exalted than any other kind of material and the idea of making it right is what should be applied to all making.”
—Flannery O’Connor (via dailyflanneryoc)
“The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.”
—George Bernard Shaw (via thepajamawarrior)
Red Balloon Rising by Laurel Blossom : American Life in Poetry →
americanlifeinpoetry.org
This week’s offering was exquisite. Enjoy.
JUST STARTED A DANCE WITH DRAGONS
…and I have already forgiven George R. R. Martin for everything I ever held against him. These books are so terrifically perfect for me to be reading right now.
“The reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day.”
—Anne Lamott (via wordslessspoken)
Just had a great weekend with parents;
they’re off early in the morning. Sad but happy.
“Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.”
—Lemony Snicket (via saddest-summer)
“Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.”
—Kahlil Gibran (via thelittlephilosopher)
“[Disc jockey Alan Freed] told me to … open the phone book and look up record companies and get appointments and go play my stuff for them. And no, you can’t do that anymore. At that time, the record industry was established, but record executives were actively looking for acts that would resonate with teenagers. And there weren’t a lot of them out there, so the doors were wide open.”
—Carole King remembers her career in an interview with Morning Edition host Renee Montagne and in an new memoir. (via nprmusic)
Back to You
Greg Laswell
“Back to You”by Greg Laswell
“Once and for all it’s like this
All that I am and have these days
can all be traced back to you.”
WUSTL proposes $80 million investment in retail and student apartments in Delmar Loop | Newsroom | Washington University in St. Louis →
news.wustl.edu
My neighborhood is changing! Suspicious, hopeful, scared, unsure…
Prairie Sure by Carol Light : American Life in Poetry →
americanlifeinpoetry.org
Again, I find myself delighted by the weekly offering from Ted Kooser. This one, “Prairie Sure,” by Carol Light, reminded me of how rooted my family is and has been in the midwest, something I don’t often think about.
“It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
—Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “The Other America.” Grosse Pointe High School, March 14, 1968. (via rethinksocialism)
DeVotchKa - We're Leaving
DeVotchKa
DeVotchKa - “We’re Leaving”
W. W. Norton: How to Find the Underworld →
wwnorton.tumblr.com
How to Find the Underworld
Enter the serpent’s mouth, and sadness will walk
in you like a pilgrim through the desert.
The descent feels something like your devotion
to empty rooms, and something like a ladder.
There are demons, of course, and stone owls
on the entrance to frighten away crows.
If you go deep enough you will recognize the dead
by their sins. Hornets and forsaken children attend them.
Be careful. Your heart will testify against itself.
The daughter who approaches you is not the one
you lost. The quarantined infants rocked in cradles
made from the twisted rib cages of horses
do not hold her either. I would spare you anything
but this—her first word was for her father,
and her last word was one of God’s names.
You can’t bring her back. You can’t bring back
anything from here that you want to keep. Only grief
and a new obedience and four pounds of ash.
—from Traci Brimhall’s newly published poetry collection Our Lady of the Ruins, winner of the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize
(via wwnorton)
Play
“Individual growth toward love and wisdom is slow. A community’s growth is even slower. Members of a community have to be great friends of time.”
—Jean Vanier, Community and Growth (1979)
