The Odysnooki: A Homeric Recounting of Jersey Shore’s Fourth Season.
In which we tell you, O muses, of that ingenious hero—who traveled far and wide after she had sacked the famous town of Seaside Heights.
The Odysnooki: A Homeric Recounting of Jersey Shore’s Fourth Season.
In which we tell you, O muses, of that ingenious hero—who traveled far and wide after she had sacked the famous town of Seaside Heights.
Will and Kate cowboyed it up in Calgary Thursday after a short period where, gasp, people thought they might not wear cowboy hats. (Stuart Gradon/Postmedia News) More photos here.
it feels so good to know that the disparity between the conservative political appearance of these men and the discourse of “outness” inherent in the culture represented by the bill they are signing didn’t matter. (via The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia)
installation art: aura by zaha hadid venice biennale
displayed on archiphile | facebook | twitter
The First Lines of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot.
“To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-sized but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: “Incurably Romantic.”
(Source: walkwhilereading)
Have you met us? From 8pm on, every show on television we watch begins with an internal tracking shot of a gaping wound above someone’s left eye, pulling out only to reveal half a hooker in a Dumpster discovered by a child on a bicycle. You know what we call it? Primetime.
…Personally, the best reason in my mind for releasing the pictures is that we’ve been fighting this war for nearly ten years: thousands of U.S. deaths, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died, and we’ve seen nearly zero photographic evidence of it. Remember how long the media had to fight to show military coffins returning from overseas? You probably dont’t remember, ‘cause you saw pictures of it the day they won the case, and not since.
Maybe we should always show pictures — bin Laden, pictures of our wounded servicepeople, pictures of maimed, innocent civilians. We can only make decision about war only if we see what war actually is — and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear, leaving behind a shiny gold coin.
…By the way, the White House today decided to not release the bin Laden photo. Instead, to keep it a secret, they’re going to airdrop it into an affluent Pakistani suburb, so it won’t be found for years.
–
JON STEWART, reacting to the Obama administration choosing not to release photos of a dead Osama bin Laden because they are too “gruesome,” on The Daily Show.
Something to think about.
(via inothernews)
I felt pretty strongly about this until I read Stewart’s words. As part of a larger argument, I certainly makes sense to use the unique power of the photograph to reveal the truths of war. We think people have become desensitized by graphic television and film, but people might be surprised by their sensitivity to the realities of war. Within that context, the image of Bin Laden along with other gruesome photos might be worth making available. Of course, that would also require Obama to make the philosophical point explicit, since people obviously can’t be relied on to understand without guidance.
http://
I love Amy Poehler. She is wise and wonderful.
(Source: senojp)
He’s very committed to his Romanticism.
Spotted: James Franco, accompanied by an assistant carrying the Norton Critical Edition of Shelley’s Poetry and Prose to his appearance on Letterman.
