The problem is always that, at the end of the day, I can sit on my butt and make things up and write them down, and get paid for it, so it’s hard to get me interested in doing in anything that involves leaving my house, or dealing with other human beings.
My hero.
The Angry Birds have been captured and illustrated out in the wild by artist Mohamed Raoof. With help with actual photographers (proper credit given on all illustrations), he gave each angry little bird a more “natural” look.
Something is missing from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. He’s left out the explicit sex scenes that were a signature feature of his four previous novels, and the absence amounts to something of a riddle. Why does Hollinghurst avoid the fleshy details? Why the sudden prudery?
If Alan Hollinghurst can be accused of “prudery,” who’s safe from the charge? Larry Flynt? I probably shouldn’t say anything, because a lede like this is just how Slate does business, but seriously: Have we come to a point where writing explicitly about sex is obligatory, at least for writers who have done so in the past?
Though, come to think of it, this may have less to do with sex per se than with the expectations readers bring to books. How dare Hollinghurst try something he hasn’t tried before? How dare he surprise me?
I can’t imagine this was the poem Will expected when he asked for one, but I’m committed to the idea that most of these postcard poems will grow from the actual odd conversations and experiences I’m having these days. So a conversation whispered during church, as the pastor talked about several playful Jesus interpreting scripture stories in Mark 12 sent me searching for info on the Sadducees. Given our shared antipathy towards angels, I might’ve made a good Sadducee. And if I DO believe in angels, it’s only the OT ones who scare the crap out of you.
The aforementioned Harold Davidson in the lion’s den.
One of the other things that a producer can do is to think of ways to get people out of their habits. Any group of people who has worked together for a long period of time tends to fall into habits about how things are done. One person always tends to be the person who leads the process; another is the one who supports the leader; another, the one who comes in late and who doesn’t say much until the very end; and another one is the stubborn one, counterbalancing the enthusiastic one. And that’s all fine—that’s part of the chemistry of a group of people working together. But it gets very habitual and it gets quite boring, so I think of ways of upsetting that, turning it into a game actually. So saying today, “You are going to give all the orders; and you, the person who normally does all the talking, you’re going to just do what you’re told. And you are going to play this instrument that you normally don’t ever touch, and in fact that you can’t play.” [Laughs] So sometimes that does actually yield an immediately usable result. But what does very often happen is that it loosens people up. And it enlarges the envelope of possibilities within which they navigate. I mean, if you tell somebody else to play drums, you have a very simple drumbeat normally, because the person who has taken over the drums isn’t the drummer, and, therefore, you start writing and thinking in a different way. It just immediately takes you out of the normal course you would have followed.
[The] protestations [of Harold Davidson, the “Prostitute’s Padre”] that he had been ‘entrapped’ by two press photographers were in all likelihood true. Offered money for posing with one of his young fifteen-year-old friends, he may naïvely have believed that publicity photos would be beneficial after the trial. The verdict of the court on 8 July surprised no one: guilty on all five counts of immoral conduct. Although formally deprived of his holy orders, Davidson continued to protest his innocence, and appealed twice to the privy council. He also tried to state his case at a meeting of the church assembly in 1936: Cosmo Gordon Lang, the archbishop of Canterbury, told him he had no right to speak.Notoriety unfortunately dogged Davidson until his tragic death. Faced with the need for another source of income, and showing how deep-seated was his theatrical bent, Davidson decided to use his reputation to draw the crowds at fairgrounds and circuses. He was first employed as part of the freak show on Blackpool’s golden mile, and was exhibited in a barrel or roasted in a glass oven while a devil prodded him with a pitchfork. ‘While I am in the barrel I shall be occupied in preparing my case’ he told the press (Parris, The Times). In 1937, as his popularity was starting to wane, Davidson was forced to sign up with a menagerie at Skegness amusement park. Billed as ‘A modern Daniel in a lion’s den’, he was expected to enter a cage holding two lions, and talk for ten minutes about the lack of justice in his case. Unfortunately, Davidson was badly mauled by one of the lions on 28 July. He was rescued, but died on 30 July 1937, in Skegness. He was buried in the churchyard at Stiffkey.
We knew instantly that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” signaled the dawn of a new era in pop music; it expressed our joys and fears, and pointed the way to a new future. We pledged to commit all the details of this moment (sorry, Moment) to memory, so that when our children asked us what it was like When The World Changed Forever, we would be able to pass down the tale.Oh, wait a second: It didn’t happen that way at all.
Yes, I saw “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video over lunch, but nobody seemed to know who Nirvana was when I got back to school. It wasn’t like my friends could just punch up the video on their iPhones after I told them about it; the clip was in heavy rotation on MTV, but you still had to watch the channel for an hour or two (and at certain times of the day) to see it. Once my classmates did see it, a number of them purchased “Nevermind,” as I did. But many of them didn’t. Some preferred Pearl Jam. Some liked N.W.A.’s “Niggaz4life.” Some didn’t care about music at all; they’d rather play Tecmo Bowl. Then there were the millions and millions of Americans who bought Garth Brooks’ “Ropin’ the Wind,” the best-selling album of 1991. If anything, that was the album that we as a culture were united behind — it sold 14 million copies, though I never heard it once blasting through people’s windows.
You’d think that people living in a monoculture would be able to agree on a soundtrack for all the shared experiences we were having. But guess what: People have always had differing opinions and tastes, even when they had fewer media options.
Fact 1: Enthusiasm for football has never been higher – not just for the NFL, but with young boys and teens. Participation in prep football has increased 21 percent in the past 20 years, by nearly 200,000 boys per year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. Many states have begun to allow what is essentially year-round football practice. Youth-league tackle football is expanding. American boys are devoting more time and effort to football than ever before.Fact 2: In higher education, student populations are increasingly female. Twenty years ago, there were more men in college than women. Now there are more women, and the ratio of college women to men is rising.
Women are taking more of the available slots in college at the same time boys are spending more time playing football. Are these two facts related?
A group that divides the world between the pure 99 percent and the evil 1 percent will have nothing to say about education reform, Medicare reform, tax reform, wage stagnation or polarization. They will have nothing to say about the way Americans have overconsumed and overborrowed. These are problems that implicate a much broader swath of society than the top 1 percent.They will have no realistic proposal to reduce the debt or sustain the welfare state. Even if you tax away 50 percent of the income of those making between $1 million and $10 million, you only reduce the national debt by 1 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. If you confiscate all the income of those making more than $10 million, you reduce the debt by 2 percent. You would still be nibbling only meekly around the edges.
The 99-versus-1 frame is also extremely self-limiting. If you think all problems flow from a small sliver of American society, then all your solutions are going to be small, too. The policy proposals that have been floating around the Occupy Wall Street movement — a financial transfer tax, forgiveness for student loans — are marginal.