Strong Female Characters
Rock on, Joss Whedon. Takeaway line: "Why aren't you asking a hundred other guys why they DON'T write strong women characters?"
(via Sociological Images)
June 27, 2009
June 26, 2009
"His favorite vegetable was peas."
I really enjoyed Maira Kalman's pictoral story of visiting Monticello.Read the whole thing! A brief portrait of one of the greats.
Anybody want to recommend a biography?
June 25, 2009
Blamin' it on the Boogie
Like many others, tonight I'm remembering just how great his music is, what a singular performer he was.
Doin' a little Blame it on the Boogie dance in memoriam, just like all those days on the leach field. Thinking hard on this: There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child.
UPDATE: Another good post on MJ, from Jill at Feministe.. and another one from my friend Brendon. They both say way more than I could.
June 13, 2009
Lots of Time to Walk and Mull on Poems this Weekend.
Reading Novalis in Montana
Melissa Kwasny
The dirt road is frozen. I hear the geese first in my lungs.
Faint hieroglyphic against the gray sky.
Then, the brutal intervention of sound.
All that we experience is a message, he wrote.
I would like to know what it means
if first one bird swims the channel
across the classic V, the line flutters, and the formation dissolves.
In the end, the modernists must have meant,
it is the human world we are weary of,
our arms heavy with love, its ancient failings.
But that was before the world wars, in 1800,
when a young German poet could pick at the truth
and collect the fragments in an encyclopedia of knowledge.
There is a V, then an L, each letter
forming so slowly that the next appears before it is complete.
The true philosophical act is the slaying of one's self,
Novalis wrote, and died, like Keats, before he was thirty.
They have left me behind like one of their lost,
scratching at the gravel in the fields. Where are they
once the sky has enveloped them?
I stand in the narrow cut of a frozen road leading into mountains,
the morning newspaper gripped under my arm.
But to give up on things precludes everything.
I am not-I, Novalis wrote. I am you.
If, as the gnostics say, the world was a mistake
created by an evil demiurge, and I am trapped
in my body, abandoned by a god whom I long for as one of my own,
why not follow the tundra geese into their storm?
Why stay while my great sails flap the ice
as if my voice were needed to call them back
in the spring, as if I were the lost dwelling place for the flocks?
June 12, 2009
Good Things, June 8-12
- Strawberry bonanza in the back yard! House sitting WIN.
- My Milk Toof (thx Sylvia)
- Opening day at the market: over 600 shoppers, 15 vendors, lots of sold out signs, sunshine, all those happy familiar faces back for the season! That warm, connected feeling you get from feeling plugged in to your community.
- Spicy pickled garlic cloves from Dickey Farms!
- A new Eels album!
- Lightning Dust - I Knew
- Hiring a 6-week summer farmers' market helper with economic recovery funds: your tax dollars at work!
Next up: Good Things, NYC edition!
June 10, 2009
A Fresh Start
Well, here we are. What do you think of the new look? Going for something a little more stripped down and clean and, well, functional. Archives are temporarily down, not that anyone wants to go digging in there anyway. Also need to re-do About page, Resume/CV page, all that. Again, not like y'all are in a hurry.
A little tweaked that I haven't yet gotten it to display an entry's category or tags. A lot tweaked that the wild woolly world of web design has passed me so far by that this shit's total Greek to me. It's been a long time since I tried to get in and wrangle with Movable Type.
Either way I'm happy to have a fresh start. It's a long while overdue, eh? This feels like a place I might like to visit more often.
Down for rebuilding
Back soon.