Nov 07
From The New Yorker.
I’m off to New York for two weeks! Bye!
"Light-fingered highjinks..."
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Nov 06
Language of Flowers
The language of flowers, sometimes called floriography, was a Victorian-era means of communication in which various flowers and floral arrangements were used to send coded messages, allowing individuals to express feelings which otherwise could not be spoken. The nuances of the language are now mostly forgotten, but red roses still imply passionate, romantic love and pink roses a lesser affection; white roses suggest virtue and chastity and yellow roses still stand for friendship or devotion. (via Eva)
Nov 06
“It’s all about tone. The reviewer’s condescending and dismissive tone is what has angered people, and has brought them here to give their opinion. Of course not everyone has to like the production. No one’s saying it’s best thing they’ve ever seen…. Katherine is not being criticised because we disagree with her. She is being criticised because of the manner in which she has written her opinion.&rdquo
— A debate rages about the credibility of a Brisbane Times review of Queensland Theatre Company’s The Crucible.
Nov 05
(via planettampon)
i hated the idea that to avoid being caught by these fabulous dames you weren’t supposed to bathe.
(filed under: confessions of a childhood faggot)
The Witches read absolutely like naturalism to me as a child. Part-fiction, part-manifesto. I already knew my grade one teacher was a witch. And the two milk bar ladies. And that friend of my parents in London who gave me un-branded chocolate wrapped in gold foil. So thanks to Dahl’s brave social insight, I was justified in sleeping with the covers pulled up over my head.
Nov 05
“A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet.&rdquo
— Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Nov 04
“You know those days when you’ve got the mean reds…. the blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re sad, that’s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is.&rdquo
— Character of Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Nov 04
“When a culture of modernity becomes partially dominant in the world that still runs on closed cultural systems, that raises all sorts of problems. If we feel we must do something about female circumcision in Africa, why do we still allow Queensland to jail women for seeking a safe abortion? Is the way in which we impose modernity rationally steered – or running off a set of closed meanings no less arbitrary than a Dreaming myth. One of the first things the US did in Iraq was to institute an anti-smoking campaign — rational, or simply a bunch of Plymouth Rock rejects recreating their puritan bodily rituals in a new setting? Whatever will now be said in the ritual ceremonies of the Right, you can’t understand the world without a working knowledge of Levi-Strauss, without understanding how necessary it is to think differently. Incredibly, he survived to see that he had become an era.&rdquo
— Guy Rundle on hearing of the death of Claude Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist and founder of structuralism, at the age of 100.
Nov 04
“It’s a very specific, regimented format. You sort of learn the Onion language by rote. We spend hundreds of hours in the room deconstructing the jokes. I don’t think there’s anything comparable to the amount of material we generate and reject just to come up with the week’s headlines.&rdquo
— Dan Guterman, head writer for The Onion, in the New York Times. “Headlines [in The Onion] tend to function both as punch line and setup, in that order. They are the heart of the paper, and not only the first thing anybody reads, but also, unlike headlines in real newspapers all over the world, the first things to be written. The staff devotes the first two days of every week to composing headlines, then assigns the articles that will run beneath them and provide a body of supporting jokes.”
Nov 03
Full Moon
I went to primary school with a boy named Marz, who told me that when he looked at the patterns of craters on the moon’s surface he saw not a human visage but a rabbit making pancakes.
I still always think of that when there is a full moon.
Nov 03
“Traditional Halloween imagery revolves around death, the occult, evil and monstrosity, but it also has elements of carnival — the temporary suspension and profaning of ordinary morality. In this context, offensive Halloween costumes make more sense. They tend to fall into several strands: burlesques of shocking news stories and controversial celebrities; childish delight in sex and bodily functions; and deliberate flouting of social taboos.&rdquo
— Mel Campbell, “Offensive Halloween costumes: a Crikey round-up”
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