Here are the rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. They don't have to be the greatest books you've ever read, just the ones that stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.
Listicle! But seriously, you should read all of these books. Except for Derrida, he might make your brain snap in two. And fuck the haters, Ayn Rand rules. She made me want to be an architect for a couple of months, until it occurred to me that I couldn’t even draw decent stick figures.
1. The Master & Margarita - Bulgakov
2. Dry - Augusten Burroughs
3. Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco
4. Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
5. That Hideous Strength - C.S. Lewis
6. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
7. She’s Come Undone - Wally Lamb
8. Sophie’s World - Jostein Gaarder
9. The Book of J - Harold Bloom
10. Of Grammatology - Jacques Derrida
11. The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
12. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
13. The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
14. Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche
15. The Elements of Style - William Strunk, Jr.
A Women's Studies Moment
This is probably well-tread territory, but I just had a powerful moment of insight: homophobia is about women! Homosexuality overtly removes the subjugation of women from the equation. It upsets a well-established power paradigm.
Yes, I had a glass of wine. What? Sunday is for musings.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere”. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part… What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
— Richard Feynman (via nihilnoetia) (via booklover) (via saturdays) (via ronmarks) (via pukomuko)
according to blue cross blue shield of maryland, if you get a brain tumor while already having cancer, it is considered preexisting. so they deny your every claim.
just an fyi if you needed another reason to hate them.
Fucking death panels.
It’s a nice day for a white wedding.
OMG, I think I went to a wedding here. Alexandria?
So I read the Bowden VF piece. →
Brutal, fascinating, and based on what I’ve experienced and seen in the killing fields of Internet Sodom, spot fucking on:
He is embarrassed. He has been humiliated.
But he has stayed angry. The classes he attends as a condition of his probation demand that he admit a sexual desire for children. It is considered an essential step toward recovery. J told his instructor that he has no such desire. He never did. He was told that if he persists in this denial he will jeopardize his probation and could be sent back to jail.
So he pretends to be something he is not. He is good at it.
Granting that it is possible (although not as likely in certain quarters) to get HIV by behaving like a typical college-level slutpuppy, they kind of gloss over the 20-30 years between getting sick and dying. You don’t go straight to a hospital bed once you seroconvert for fuck’s sake.
It’s missing about 100 little pictures in the 5th row, in other words.
Oh, great. One year after voting to make it illegal, a majority of California voters now favors gay marriage. But a bigger majority opposes putting it back on the ballot next year.
Exactly. We like the idea of you having rights.
Eagles - Take It Easy
This is what we listened to in the ambulance to Cornell!
Sent from the future to destroy the Hadron - with carbs. →
This collider nonsense is getting creepier. Maybe we should just take the hint, already.
Follow These People, Goddamnit
fek:
- Rohin Guha is BlackBook’s ace in the hole: he’s putting up more posts than any of us, and is basically the last working freelance in New York, as I understand it. But really: he’s a gay Indian blogger who’s incredibly strange take on pop culture resembles something between the culinary creations of the guys from Ace of Cakes if there were to consume copious amounts of acid and do tribal raindances to obscure Sugababes B-Sides all throughout the night. I could not appreciate this person more.
I concur! He and I share an obsession with all things Gaga, and he’s got a smart, trendy voice that never veers into pompous territory. Very unusual.
I wanted to read my personal statement on paper once before I start submitting applications today, but my broke ass is out of computer paper. So, yes, this is printed on lined notepad paper. Don’t judge me!
I think this looks very cool, actually. If you moved your margins just a tad so that the text didn’t cross the red lines it would look even better.
NY TIMES: Authorities identify gunman in Ft. Hood shootings as Lt. Major Malik Nadal Hassan; he was about to be deployed to Iraq or Afgfhanistan →
So tragic.
At least one gunman killed 11 soldiers and wounded 31 others on Thursday afternoon at Fort Hood in Texas. Authorities then killed the gunman, who was identified as Malik Nadal Hasan, an Army major who was about to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Lady Gaga // Alejandro
<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3!!
This is an instant classic.
