an aria in present tense

farewell-kingdom: Keiichi Tanaka

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 01:02:38 -0700

Keiichi Tanaka

"In all the Library, there are no two identical books. From those incontrovertible premises, the..."

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:41:00 -0700

“In all the Library, there are no two identical books. From those incontrovertible premises, the librarian deduced that the Library is ‘total’ — perfect, complete, and whole — and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite) — that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. All — the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus.”

- From “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges, translation by Andrew Hurley

theartofchina: © Feng Hai | 冯海 (b.1971), New garden...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 23:43:00 -0700

theartofchina:

© Feng Hai | 冯海 (b.1971), New garden fantasies.

aseaofquotes: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:13:06 -0700

aseaofquotes:

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

mingsonjia: 明鏡亦非台 - 左峰奇

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 01:25:28 -0700

mingsonjia:

明鏡亦非台 - 左峰奇

saotome-michi replied to your post: Back when I was in high school, I followed this… Oh wow,...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:18:00 -0700

saotome-michi replied to your post: Back when I was in high school, I followed this…

Oh wow, I read the same blog as well! Thank you for informing me of the update, I’m so glad to know she’s all right. And I agree with everything else. It pains me to hear people say that the US is the best country in the world…

Wow, I knew she had a large readership, but that’s still such a cool coincidence. I hadn’t met someone before who had also read her blog! America’s image was severely tarnished after that, both internationally and domestically. I could actually see it sliding downhill, especially when the recession hit and the country clearly wasn’t even reaping any economic benefits from the war. Now, for example, when Australia announced the discovery of large oil fields, the thread on Reddit was filled with people joking about how America might want to “liberate” Australia too. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago.

theartofanimation: Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:02:06 -0700

theartofanimation:

Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor

Back when I was in high school, I followed this blog called Baghdad Burning, run by a young Iraqi...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 03:55:00 -0700

Back when I was in high school, I followed this blog called Baghdad Burning, run by a young Iraqi woman (pseudonym Riverbend) who posted about the shitshow that was the Iraq War and the ruin and pain it was causing in ordinary people’s lives. She was eloquent, furious, and raw, and I admired her so much I wrote an essay about her for a contest.

In 2007, she and her family moved to Syria, and the updates just stopped. There wasn’t an entry for years. I thought about her a lot, especially when the Syrian civil war broke out. Turns out she’d updated again last week for the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. She had moved to another country before the civil war started. She’s all right.

It makes me so glad to know that. At the same time, reading her latest entry is horribly saddening. Iraq is still a bombed out shell of a country. The hundreds of thousands of lives lost can’t be returned. America might be ashamed now, but people ate it all up 10 years ago.

The Iraq War was a turning point in my perception of America. Before that, in elementary and part of middle school, I genuinely believed that it was the best country in the world. And then the government accused Iraq of having WMDs. They tried to link the government to 9/11. I was 13, and even then to me it was so obvious that they were making shit up. There were no WMDs. Saddam Hussein was a despicable human being, but he had shit all to do with 9/11. Every single national news network just spewed out lies and covered up atrocities. What sort of “liberators” threw bombs onto civilians and called the lives lost “collateral damage”?

I’m pretty sure a huge part of my conviction that the war was utterly morally abhorrent was because of Riverbend’s blog. I can’t describe how happy I was when I found out she had updated. She touched me on an incredibly deep level, and I still wish her all the best. Beyond that, there’s nothing more that can be said, other than, “Look at what we did.”

peonypavillion: Jiangnan Gardens, Suzhou, China.

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 03:17:30 -0700

peonypavillion:

Jiangnan Gardens, Suzhou, China.

"I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that - I don’t mind people being happy - but..."

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:32:12 -0700

“I actually attack the concept of happiness. The idea that - I don’t mind people being happy - but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down 3 things that made you happy today before you go to sleep”, and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position - it’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness”. Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.”

- Hugh Mackay (via armchairreasoning)

sevnilock: Album of Painting 《Flower · girl》By My friend ——...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:08:45 -0700

sevnilock:

Album of Painting 《Flower · girl》
By My friend —— 呀呀(YaYa)
I love her painting~they are so beautiful!

TVP: The River

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 20:30:50 -0700

TVP: The River :

ecstasis:

This is my formula for the fall of things:
we come to a river we always knew we’d have to cross.
It ferries the twilight down through fieldworks

of corn and half-blown sunflowers.
The only sounds, one lost cicada calling to itself
and the piping of a bird that will never have a name.

Now tell me there is a pause
where we know there should be an end;
then tell me you too imagined it this way

with our shadows never quite touching the river
and the river never quite reaching the sea.

John Glenday

"A Poem" by Robert Hass

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 11:14:49 -0700

“You would think God would relent,” the American poet Richard
Eberhardt wrote during World War II, “listening to the fury of
aerial bombardment.” Of course, God is not the cause of aerial
bombardment. During the Vietnam War, the United States hired the
RAND Corporation to conduct a study of the effects in the peasant
villages of Vietnam of their policy of saturation bombing of the
countryside. That policy had at least two purposes: to defoliate the
tropical forests as a way of locating the enemy and to kill the enemy if
he happened to be in the way of the concussion bombs or the napalm
or the firebombs. The RAND Corporation sent a young scholar named
Leon Goure to Vietnam. His study was rushed by the Air Force which
was impatient for results, but he was able to conduct interviews
through interpreters with farmers in the Mekong Delta and the
mountainous hillside farm regions around Hue. He concluded that the
incidental damage to civilian lives was very considerable and that the
villagers were angry and afraid, but he also found that they blamed the
Viet Cong—the insurrectionist army the U.S. was fighting—and not
the United States for their troubles, because they thought of the Viet
Cong as their legitimate government and felt it wasn’t protecting them.
Seeing that the bombing was alienating the peasantry from the enemy
Vietnamese, Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, General
William Westmoreland, the commander in charge of prosecuting the
war, and Lyndon Johnson, the president of the United States, ordered
an intensification of the bombing. In the end, there were more bombs
dropped on the villages and forests of South Vietnam than were
dropped in all of World War II. The estimated Vietnamese casualties
during the war is two million. It was a war whose principal strategy
was terror. More Iraqi citizens have now been incidental casualties of
the conduct of the war in Iraq than were killed by Arab terrorists in
the destruction of the World Trade Center. In the first twenty years
of the twentieth century 90 percent of war deaths were the deaths of
combatants. In the last twenty years of the twentieth century 90 percent
of war deaths were deaths of civilians. There are imaginable responses
to these facts. The nations of the world could stop setting an example
for suicide bombers. They could abolish the use of land mines. They
could abolish the use of aerial bombardment in warfare. You would
think men would relent.

trungles: purenonsens: Trung sisters My piece for the upcoming...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 22:52:45 -0700

trungles:

purenonsens:

Trung sisters

My piece for the upcoming Lady Warriors zine (debuting at MOCCa) put together by Abby, Julia and Roxie!!! Check out more submissions wandering around, they’re awesomeee *w*

Hai Bà Trưng

My dad used to tell me stories about them when I was a baby, historical badass ladies of Vietnam.

Photo

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:03:33 -0700

victongai: Love Hunter Victo Ngai Maybe it’s spring time, or...

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 14:27:00 -0700

victongai:

Love Hunter

Victo Ngai

Maybe it’s spring time, or the lack of it in NY, I have been drawing more flowers and women than usual.

“Love Hunter” runs in today’s NYtimes Business section. The story is about modern day Chinese matchmaker, and how much love cost in today’s materialistic China. It’s a very interesting and depressing article, you can read it here, I highly recommend it!
Funny I got this assignment, I had dinner with some remote relatives just a couple weeks ago and got schooled about marriage. They told me I should find a lawyer, doctor or a banker as husband, quit my job and concentrate on being a good wife and mother. I was pretty upset but couldn’t speak up against them as they were the elders. I later told my non-lawyer/doctor/banker white illustrator boyfriend about it and he found the conversation very absurd and hard to believe, so I made him read this NYtimes story.

There were good news and bad news during the creation of this piece. When AD Minh proposed to me the idea of having the hunter looking for the most exotic and beautiful woman-bird, I thought it’s brilliant and perfect because it talks about how women are being objectified and their appearance is the only thing that matters.The editor was skeptical about the concept initially, but we got the green light eventually after pushing hard for it. That was the good news. The bad news - this cover image bumped by a photo and became an interior page last min.

Thank you Minh, always a pleasure!

Funny, I just read another, very insightful article on Aeon recently that touched on this a bit. It was mainly focusing on the huge values and worldview gap between the generation born after 1980 and their parents. (A lot of young people want to be more civic-minded and charitable and live more idealistically, but just the basic rules of society and their parents’ perception of what measures need to be taken in order to be able to live well are constantly pushing against that.)

The NYTimes article is definitely really depressing. From the rampant materialism to ingrained sexism — yeah, shit is messed up. But I also don’t know how useful it is to focus so entirely on outlier practices like these “love finders” for millionaires without talking about the historical and societal context. (In that regard, I think the Aeon article did a better job giving a wider perspective.) The fact that “love finders” can exist at all is due to China’s current chaotic state, which you always have to consider if you talk about anything related to modern China. In 40+ years, it went from being a poor but relatively equal society to a global, economic juggernaut. People who lived in areas that got the benefits of the shift to a market economy saw everyone around them shoot up in terms of wealth by using every imaginable combination of guanxi (connections), manipulation, sheer luck, and, yes, hard work. So the mindset that took hold was that you had to scramble and do everything in your power to take what you could, because if you missed out on the opportunity and ended up with an inferior residency status and socioeconomic situation, then it was your own damn fault. People couldn’t trust each other anymore, because everyone had to be assumed to be after his/her own gain; ideals and worldviews broke down and had to be tossed aside if they weren’t profitable.

So in about 40 years, this country, with the largest population in the world, turned its entire society on its head and reshuffled the deck and redealt all the cards. It’s like if everyone had been waiting in line for rations, and suddenly they were told there was no line anymore and it was just a free-for-all. Well, yes. People are going to run and push and mob to get what they can. I feel like a lot of people aren’t aware of the sheer magnitude and speed of this change. You can’t modernize so quickly with a country so big and a population so complicated without encountering some giant problems. The bottom line is, I don’t think it’s going to be fruitful to tackle these attitudes and outlooks until China’s economy actually stabilizes, and it stops changing so much. If somehow the Communist Party can survive that shift from double digit growth from industrial, unskilled labor to a service economy, then these things can be addressed. But who knows if the CCP, considering how rigid they are, can weather those challenges when their very legitimacy as a party is founded on improving people’s material conditions. In my admittedly non-expert opinion, another big shift is going to hit China a decade or two down the line, and only time can tell where it goes from there.

my-place-of-recovery: ❤

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 20:28:21 -0800

my-place-of-recovery:

❤

From Lonely Planet photographer mossikan on Reddit: A group of...

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 10:45:37 -0800

From Lonely Planet photographer mossikan on Reddit:

A group of friends in the hills above Tehran.

Many (every single one I met) young Iranians feel deeply embarrassed by their government, and the way the nation is perceived abroad. Zac Clayton, a British cyclist who will finish a round-the-world cycle on March 23 describes Iran as having the kindest people of any country he cycled through. “I found most Iranians - particularly the younger generation - to be very aware of the world around them … with a burning desire for the freedoms they feel they are being denied by an out of touch, ultra-conservative religious elite.”

bhagatkapil: Science Day in India, posting whole series of...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 23:27:57 -0800

bhagatkapil:

Science Day in India, posting whole series of Scientists, their inventions or discoveries.

8 Studies That Debunk Male Gender Stereotypes

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 07:48:27 -0800

8 Studies That Debunk Male Gender Stereotypes:

nevver:

Between infancy and first grade, boys express their emotions more readily than girls. [here]

Worldwide, boys aren’t any better at math than girls. [here]

Young men are more emotionally vulnerable to troubles in their relationships than young women are. [here]

Men are less rational investors than women. [here]

Men aren’t worse than women at reading emotional cues. [here]

Men monitor their partners more than women. [here]

Men are twice as likely as women to commit suicide after divorce. [here]

In anonymous settings, women are more aggressive than men. [no shit]

more