This overachiever’s mentality has also determined campus attitudes toward sex. Few notice the connection, because the end result—sexual permissiveness—is the same as it was in the sixties and seventies, when the theme of campus culture was not overachievement but liberation, and the eighties and early nineties, when it was postmodernism and the overthrow of all value judgments. The notorious Yale institution known as Sex Week—a biennial series of sex toy demonstrations, student lingerie shows, and lectures by pornographers—wouldn’t have been out of place in either of these eras. Consequently, Yale’s sexual culture is often mistaken for mere depravity by outside observers who assume that it is just another byproduct of moral relativism.It would be more accurate to say that Yale students treat sex as one more arena in which to excel, an opportunity not just to connect but to impress. Every amateur sonneteer secretly believes his verse to be as good as the United States poet laureate’s, and every undergraduate programmer suspects his code rivals the best in Silicon Valley. It’s not very different for Yale students to say that, if pornography is the gold standard of sexual prowess, then that is the standard to which they must aspire.
Imaginary View, landscapes by Rachel Thomas and Dan Tobin Smith (via things)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYg6eIH7qR8?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
Bill Callahan, “Riding for the Feeling”
Dear Unthinkable Mind students,Why memorize poetry?
“The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.”
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/why-we-should-memorize.html#ixzz2JHJp2MNRSpecial thanks to Unthinkable Mind’s AMYGDALA for bringing this to our attention.
From Rhizome’s review of Alessandro Ludovico’s Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1864.
Tessa Newcomb, a painted four-drawer chest (via Bonhams)
We put out the fire but there were, um, side-effects.
On Erasmus and his reed pen, via Anne Trubek on Twitter.