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Beginning as a teenager, Hornaday made many perilous trips around the world to hunt exotic animals to stuff. He claimed, during these adventures, to have survived a jaguar attack, wrestled a crocodile, captured an orangutan named Little Man (and given it as a present to Andrew Carnegie), and sailed past a manta ray so large he mistook it for a small, volcanic island. After shooting an elephant in India, he climbed atop the carcass and popped a Bass Ale.
That’s one bad-ass taxidermist. The Last Buffalo Hunt
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I wish I had a roof over my bed
to pull down on my head when I feel damned
by wanting you so much it looks like need.—from Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons by Marilyn Hacker
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Check your shelf before you wreck yourself!
~ a public service announcement for the reading public (via wwnorton) -
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Meet the comfort dogs, a team of five golden retrievers that are dispatched to different areas in the aftermath of a tragedy. They’re currently in Boston visiting victims of Monday’s marathon attack.
In love.
(via bsalminen)
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No lie, it’s been a while since a thug has been in the kitchen. So I log into the tumblrverse today to check my shit, maybe dust off the dash and get some new content out. Son, I’ve got a TON of fucking messages (I’m going to try to reply to them all, I promise) and I’m seeing my shit posted all over the god damn place.
I’m glad all you healthy/sexy mother fuckers kept the kitchen warm while I was away. I’m officially back and stepping up my game. Seriously, all the love I’ve got from my followers makes me want to post the best content I can for you. Thug Kitchen undergoing reconstruction as of right now. I’m so fucking heated right now. Shit.
(Source: scintillatingjelly)
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But legalizing consensual adult polygamy wouldn’t legalize rape or child abuse. In fact, it would make those crimes easier to combat.
Right now, all polygamous families, including the healthy, responsible ones, are driven into hiding (notwithstanding the openly polygamous Brown family on TLC’s Sister Wives, that is). In the resulting isolation, crime and abuse can flourish unimpeded. Children in polygamous communities are taught to fear the police and are not likely to report an abusive neighbor if they suspect their own parents might be caught up in a subsequent criminal investigation. In a United States with legalized polygamy, responsible plural families could emerge from the shadows—making it easier for authorities to zero in on the criminals who remain there.
Many people argue that there is no such thing as a “healthy, responsible” polygamous family, particularly for the children born into one. “Children are harmed because they are often set in perennial rivalry with other children and mothers for the affection and attention of the family patriarch,” argued John Witte Jr. in the Washington Post. “Men with lots of children and wives are spread too thin,” agreed Libby Copeland in Slate. The earnestness of these arguments is touching but idealistic. Men in monogamous marriages can’t be spread too thin? Children in monogamous families don’t rival each other for the attentions of their parents? Two-parent families are not the reality for millions of American children. Divorce, remarriage, surrogate parents, extended relatives, and other diverse family arrangements mean families already come in all sizes—why not recognize that legally?
Legalize Polygamy! -No. I am not kidding. Jillian Keenan for Slate
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Munich has a ludicrously luxurious law library.
Can we live here for a bit?
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To tweet or not to tweet. And not to tweet is to be left behind.
And that raises a question: What is this? What are the kinds of prose, and the kinds of thinking, that result from the imposition of the tweet form and other such brief reactions to extremely complex realities? My feeling is that there are millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs, and that they are not getting and will not get the critical attention that prose anywhere should have unless we find a new form of criticism.If a novel is published, we have a novel review. If poetry is produced, if a play or a movie or a TV show is produced, there are the forms of criticism we know. With the new social media, with much of the content of the Internet, there are very few if any critical forms that are appropriate. They are thought to be somewhere partially in a private world. Facebook is a medium in which privacy is, or at least is thought to be, in some way crucial. The premise, at least, is that of belonging to a family, a circle of friends. And there’s another premise, that any voice should have its moment. And so there seems a resistance to intrusive criticism.
But this means that billions of words go without the faintest sign of assessment. And yet, if one cares about language, if one cares about the sensibility in which language is expressed, and if one cares about the values that underlie our use of language, such as affection, privacy, honesty, cogency, clarity—then these media, it would seem to me, should qualify as the subject of criticism. We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words, an ocean growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to bear on it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence.
In Conversation: Robert Silvers. NY Magazine 4/7/13.
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Denice Frohman - “Dear Straight People” (WOWPS 2013)
“I don’t like closets, but you made the living room an unshared space. Now I feel like a guest in my own house.”
Denice Frohman, demonstrating why she just won the Women of the World Poetry Slam. (It’s because she’s awesome.)
