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Unsexy Halloween costumes, via Matt Novak and John Clifford on Twitter
[gallery] deckerlibrary:
Today is Ursula K. Le Guin’s 85th birthday!To celebrate, we are taking a look at Aaron Johnson and Michael Bixler’s artist book Direction of the Road (N7433.4 .L42 D57 2007 Cage) which takes it’s inspiration and title from Le Guin’s short story contained within it.
Direction of the Road by Le Guin is a tale of perception and perspective, told from the point of view of an oak tree which must adapt to its changing surroundings.
The artist book contains an example of an anamorphosis image. An anamorphosis image is seen by the naked eye in distorted perspective. The true image is only revealed when looking at the image with a device, often a cylindrical mirror, which in this case reveals a large tree with two birds flying overhead.
And be sure to check out Le Guin’s other books in our collection here!
So if selfhood implies individuality, or if our undeniable individuality justifies the sense of selfhood, then there is another mystery to be acknowledged: that this impulse to deny the reality, which is to say the value, of the human self should still persist and flourish among us. Where slavery and other forms of extreme exploitation of human labor have been general, moral convenience would account for much of it, no doubt. Where population groups are seen as enemies or even as burdens, certain nefarious traits are attributed to them as a whole that are taken to override the qualities of individual members. Again, moral convenience could account for this. Both cases illustrate the association of the denial of selfhood with the devaluation of the human person. This would seem too obvious to be said, if it were not true that the denial of selfhood, which is, we are told, authorized by the methods of neuroscience and by the intentionally generalized reports it offers of the profoundly intricate workings of the brain, persists and flourishes.There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of our selves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader’s store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about—“Where did all this come from?” or “Why could we never refrain from war?”—we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, “Whose voice is this?” We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were.
Thank you for your lovely and thoughtful submission to the magazine, which we are afraid we are going to have to decline, for all sorts of reasons. The weather is dreary, our backs hurt, we have seen too many cats today and as you know cats are why God invented handguns, there is a sweet incoherence and self-absorption in your piece that we find alluring but we have published far too many of same in recent years mostly authored by the undersigned, did we mention the moist melancholy of the weather, our marriages are unkempt and disgruntled, our children surly and crammed to the gills with a sense of entitlement that you wonder how they will ever make their way in the world, we spent far too much money recently on silly graphic design and now must slash the storytelling budget, our insurance bills have gone up precipitously, the women’s basketball team has no rebounders, an aunt of ours needs a seventh new hip, the shimmer of hope that was the national zeitgeist looks to be nursing a whopper of a black eye, and someone left the toilet roll thing empty again, without the slightest consideration for who pays for things like that. And there were wet towels on the floor. And the parakeet has a goiter. And the dog barfed up crayons. Please feel free to send us anything you think would fit these pages, and thank you for considering our magazine for your work. It’s an honor.
On the left, Ryan’s getting called a hypocrite. Salon’s Joan Walsh became an instant hero when she claimed Ryan was getting “credit for something a woman could absolutely never ask for.” And several media outlets outright called Ryan a hypocrite — or an “enemy of women” — for asking for family time for himself while opposing federally mandated paid family leave and other policies that liberals believe are important for family support.
This makes no sense. Ryan is identifying a problem that millions of Americans face and shouldn’t have to — and forcing people to acknowledge the problem is the first step to solving it. If you believe parents in two-parent households should share the responsibility of raising a family, it is a good thing when high-profile men acknowledge it’s their responsibility, too — especially when those men represent groups that tend to favor traditional gender roles. And if you believe raising a family shouldn’t impede career advancement, it’s a good thing when someone points out that right now, it still does.
The university was once a microcosm, a miniature world offering the whole of knowledge in a restricted arena. Every discipline represented had its professor who was the supreme local authority on the subject. That supremacy faded long ago as the growth of our great libraries over the last [i.e., the 19th] century brought the world to our door and students found more ways to learn about their subject than to sit and listen to the local professor, but the structure of our institutions of higher learning still reflects that origin. The old model may still be powerful and useful, and we should think carefully about how to adapt it to the future, while remembering that new metaphors can be useful as well.The real roles of the professor in an information-rich world will be not to provide information but to advise, guide, and encourage students wading through the deep waters of the information flood.
[gallery] via Adam Roberts
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A man herds sheep with the help of his collies in Scotland, 1919. Photograph by William Reed, National Geographic Creative
However, Downs offers readers far more than just a historical record and campaign manual. He explores the social and political developments that have resulted in censorship being seen as a progressive rather than an authoritarian force. He tells me that when a society has a strong sense of itself and of its own culture, it can afford to be tolerant of dissent. When society is not strong, but ‘existentially insecure’, ‘illiberal elements can come to the fore and people become dogmatic’. He argues that this pervasive insecurity, which began to afflict the Western world in the late 1980s, has also had an impact on individuals. ‘People have begun to feel more insecure and vulnerable. They readily identify as victims and define themselves by traumas, real or imagined.’ He argues that many of the original advocates of speech codes shared a view that students needed an ‘administrative apparatus to support their self-esteem, psychological wellbeing and identities’. He is clear: ‘In reality this represented a return of in loco parentis legislation to campus in a new and politicised guise after its banishment in the 1960s.’