Internet Lovelies

There's a librarian themed Ryan Gosling tumblr.

Through the long span of reading it and not reading it, just looking at it, or carrying it around, I kept thinking about art. It’s power, its lack of power, what it does to the hypercultured; I’d call most readers of this blog hypercultured. Does it blunt us to the real trauma around us? To the relationships and forms that are actually unavoidable? I wouldn’t be surprised. I do know that art really can “humanize” someone, in that it can make them really aware of other minds and ways of life, painfully & acutely aware, for the first time. It’s becoming harder to fight off the idea that art is best as a benign storehouse for excess energy, for ideas or behaviors that would normally be considered weird or offensive, and that, at its best and most beautiful, is contagious and hooks people into its practice and community, in order to grow itself as a form of human activity; but why fight this? In other words, art as/is the least harmful cultural node.

Ken Baumann on reading 2666, Link

Least harmful? Possibly. But there is this Flavorwire list of the most dangerous novels of all time.

The deep foundation of the US – so went my thinking – was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of church and state, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.
...

I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights: all had precedents, and many were to be found not in other cultures and religions, but within western society, and within the "Christian" tradition, itself.

Margaret Atwood on A Handmaid's Tale, Link

One day I'm going to spell "quince" in Scrabble. Until then I'll stick to the tried and true "qi".






MC Lars "Annabel Lee R.I.P." animated by "internet friend" John Sasser

Go to BetterWorldBook's Shop From Work sale and click the "Boss Button".

Graphic novelist Nate Powell answers the ShelfAwareness "Book Brahmin" questionnaire in an interesting way. I love his answers. A reader after my own heart.

Other updates:

- My laptop died so I bought a MacBook Pro. I'm scared of it and I feel like I'm supporting something evil. Like "the Empire" or something. And not the record store Empire.
- Driving home the other night I became momentarily convinced that I should drop everything and go back to school to become a screenwriter. I've never attempted to write a screenplay before. If I won the lottery I think I would try to write a screenplay and force someone to film it. How much would Tarantino cost.
- I've been reading nothing but trashy paperbacks and it's why I haven't had any quotes to share lately. Unless you want me to share passages with too many pronouns and descriptions of outfits in them. Sometimes I need to read bad things.
- My hair smells really good right now.
- Last weekend I went to a Tool concert. They're one of my favorite groups. I wrote my senior thesis while looping the album 10,000 Days. Someone commented that I didn't look like a Tool fan. Earlier in the week a patron refused to believe I wasn't a student. I still get carded at R movies. When in Best Buy, I'm typically followed by a trail of dudes in blue shirts who are convinced I don't know what I'm doing. One actually tried to talk me out of getting my DSLR last year. "Yeah this is a pretty advanced camera....here we got some pink ones over heeeeere...." I get called "sweetie" a lot. My appearance seems to be a constant source of disappointment to others. This isn't an emo moment. I just think it's funny that my baby face and gender will never allow me to be taken seriously outside of things to do with Miley Cyrus, sprinkles and rainbows.

Or it could be this cupcake shirt I'm wearing.