(Source: enpersonasoymasdesagradable, via bbook)
To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.
— Marilynne Robinson, Freedom of Thought
Gwendolyn Brooks, the mother
I’ve been thinking about this poem a lot lately.
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births adn your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
I am writing to apply for the position of Pope. I recently received my Bachelor of Arts, or “artium baccalaureus,” from Dartmouth College, with a major concentration in Theatre Studies and a minor concentration in Computer Science. While I have been focusing on the technology and financial sectors, I have recently decided to widen my job search to include top non-profits, such as your organization. I became aware of the availability of the position of Pope through the Dartmouth listserv; I am greatly impressed by the achievements of The Catholic Church and share many of its goals. I believe my qualifications and outlook make me a unique and interesting candidate for Pope and I would be enthusiastic to grow with The Catholic Church.
— McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: I Would Like to Be Pope. (via ayjay)
(via ayjay)
Raymond Chandler's Private Dick →
The problem is that men can be hurt. Men can be rejected. More, men have no right to what they are raised to consider simple sustenance. In effect they must live as some approximation of what they imagine the weaker half to be. Women must live with sexual vulnerability, with the threat of rape. This makes a kind of sense when the whole society says you are weak. But how do you live with vulnerability when your identity is rooted in impossible strength? Being raped and being refused are not the same thing. But the tyrant’s gaze must be absolute, or it must not be at all.
Marlowe is forever slapping some woman, or seducing somebody’s wife within minutes of meeting her, or declaring his sexual invulnerability to still another woman, or berating some man for being gay—and thus being a woman. At all events, Marlowe triumphs with his unhurtable manhood intact:
She looked at me under her long lashes. This was the look that was supposed to make me roll over on my back.
If she’s as beautiful as you claim, Marlowe, and if you are the man you claim, then you dream of her rolling you over on your back. It’s not up to you.
I’ve consumed art like this all my life—men claiming invulnerability, against all I know of maleness and human attraction. Misogyny is not merely a moral problem, but a problem of art. It takes half the world and caricatures it. And then it caricatures the other half by proscribing the exploration of weakness.
I don’t recognize a single one of these dudes. It’s a kind of pornography, a humiliated boy’s idea of what manhood must be. I wish more of the art I loved, the art rendered by dudes, did not take sexual vulnerability as something to be defeated, but as an actual fact. You do not get the girl. More directly, you have no actual right to get the girl. Most times, she just don’t want you. And when she does, your reply is, very often, to pine after some other “her.”
-Ta-Nehisi Coates. This whole thing is fascinating.
[This] is our movement. We will not consider you a part of it, we will not work with you, we will not befriend you. We will heretofore denounce you as the irrational or immoral scum you are (if such you are). If you reject these values, then you are no longer one of us. And we will now say so, publicly and repeatedly. You are hereby disowned.
—
See, this is what I’ve been trying to explain to you: the unique power of religion to make people hate one another. Without religion to generate this exclusionary hatred, this loathing of everyone who does not agree 100% with the views of Our Crowd, people would finally be able to live at peace with one another!
(via ayjay)
(via ayjay)
Types of Poets
Peripatetic Poets
Maritime Poets
I’m not sure what peripatetic means, but omg corgis. Further incentive to eventually get a Glittahs. (that’s my corgi. in the future. with a rhinestone collar).
User Manual: It's OK to Be a Hater Because Everything Is Bad(via @Gizmodo) →
[Editor’s Note: I am not editing this. Because I do not know what it is. But you should read it. —Joe] Almost everything is bad. Usually, really bad, and not even bad in an interesting way.
Is this the best GIF of the millennium? We think, YES.
If this is a big part of the job description, I have renewed faith in my ability to be Secretary of State someday.
How does this not have 75,000 reblogs yet? P.S. Our Anne Gearan is in Africa with the semi-booty-dropping secretary.
My new life goal is to figure out the right words to say about this gif.
