Buying a gun in our times, especially for self-defense, seems to me an aggressive or defensive act—a statement by the purchaser about how he feels about his community, his neighbors and his country. It means he doesn’t feel safe in his bed at night, that he doesn’t trust the police to stop the criminals, and he doesn’t trust his fellow citizens not to attack. You can mask it with talk of freedom or the Constitution but underneath it all is fear. Firearms have become a manifestation of a massive distrust of both government and the wider society, a physical manifestation of a deepening societal and political divide. I don’t mean to ignore the millions of hunters and target shooters, for whom guns carry none of this loaded symbolism. Partisans on either side unfairly dismiss these people, but, rightly or wrongly, guns have become a symbol for currents deeper in our national soul than discussions on hunting and skeet shooting, and we need to talk about guns, if just to work out where we want this country to go.
(via Bad Land)
Apr 22, 2013
“I spent so many hours, days, and weeks outside, waiting for the sun to come out, waiting for new snow, waiting for the clouds to go by or come in, depending on the photograph. So much time we spent just waiting, waiting, waiting.” - Thomas Stöeckli
(via A Sense of Snow)
Apr 15, 2013
“Photography is a lot like memory, which is to say it’s a very unreliable witness. Not the physical lenses and light of a camera (photography is good at depiction), but our relationship to images. I love photography but I definitely do not trust it at its word.”
William Miller, via Elegy to the Polaroid SX-70
Apr 8, 2013
Mike Brodie, #5060, 2006–2009 From the series A Period of Juvenile Prosperity (via Yossi Milo Gallery - Artists - Mike Brodie)
Mar 26, 2013Lev Grossman: “I read trade magazines like Publishers Weekly, I talk to people in publishing, I talk to other critics and authors, I read Twitter, I look at what people are reading on the subway. Beyond that it’s just a matter of remaining curious and hopeful. If you’re curious and hopeful enough, great books tend to find you.Curious and Hopeful: A Conversation with Tournamen… - The Barnes & Noble Review Mar 20, 2013
Mar 20, 2013The United States is a huge country, much too big for the nightly news. Our series continues where one of our editors randomly calls people in small towns around America to find out what’s really going on.
(via Odd People Here)
For the rest of the Tournament of Books, Barnes & Noble has ”Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down” on sale for NOOK, $3.99.
(via BARNES & NOBLE | Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down by Rosecrans Baldwin | NOOK eBook)
Mar 16, 2013
Landscape with a Village in the Distance Jacob van Ruisdael (Dutch, Haarlem 1628/29–1682 Amsterdam) (via The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Mar 15, 2013
Does he look at you blankly when you say you “really related to a character?”
Has he grandiosely claimed he could have written better versions of all the books you discuss?
When was the last time he brought food to the meeting?
Was he banned from his local library as a juvenile?
Did he show any guilt over spilling that spinach dip on your rug?
What about the time he kidnapped your niece?
How to tell if someone in your book club is just annoying, or a homicidal maniac: Eat, Pray, Murder
Mar 13, 2013Many of Munro’s stories feature people in conditions of geographic and emotional isolation. People living in quiet towns, living mostly quiet lives. Quiet, of course, does not necessarily mean peaceful: This is a quiet that can be suffocating at times, a quiet so pervasive throughout the stories that it’s almost part of the scenery. Call it the Munrovian Northern Atmospheric System, an extreme low barometric pressure that extends across all of these Canadian towns, connecting them, covering them under a blanket of emotional force per unit area exerted over the landscape, an invisible equilibrium of suppressed potential that can, after decades, suddenly and explosively burst into a downpour of violent and unpredictable weather.
Mar 12, 2013Charles Yu in The Morning News Tournament of Books - Presented by NOOK® by Barnes & Noble
I feel 100% connected to Jamaica. I was not embraced when I came to America and had difficulty adjusting. I faced culture shock and a battle to maintain my identity. As a young child, I did not have a choice in coming to America, so I kept Jamaica in the safest place that I knew.
(via The Guardians - The Morning News)
Mar 12, 2013You don’t read poetry. That’s fine. Nobody does anymore. I’m not going to make you feel bad about that. But if there is one book I’ve pressed on more people in the past decade, it is Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. And I’m here to tell you its sequel has just been published, and that it’s pretty much the biggest event of the year.Monsters, Myths And Poetic License In Anne Carson’s ‘Red Doc’ : NPR Mar 6, 2013
