It’s not hard to find articles about Nineties nostalgia, many of which begin with this kind of personal narrative about one’s emotional connection with a cultural object. Though enjoyable, such pieces often fail to ask a single critical question about Snick, Metropolitan, ‘NSync, Beanie Babies, or whatever. Their discussions remain rooted in emotional reactions, barely departing from claims like “I LOVE Land of the Lost and you should watch it on Netflix Instant!” They end up saying little about either the object or about nostalgia itself. Perhaps more importantly, readers often feel entirely left out of such articles if they don’t already have affection for the thing being discussed. Nostalgia pieces can seem incredibly defensive, precisely because they focus on feelings, and not on ideas. They defiantly insist that the joy in revisiting the near past resides in reproducing the experience of falling in love again. And if you’re not already in love, too bad....

....An overdose on nostalgia for the things we once treasured often does them injustice by simplifying our memories of them. In the worst cases, it prevents us from seeing what they actually say about the world.

--AJ Aronstein, Calvin and Hobbes and the Trouble with Nostalgia (via Ian)

So maybe this doesn't exactly fit my mood right now and maybe I've already blogged about this movie but when a clip like this shows up on your GoogleReader it's hard to ignore.

THE EARTH SLIPS

What are we going to do about Haiti?

HOLY MOLY

At 9:12, the ammonium nitrate reached an explosive threshold of 850°F. The vessel then detonated, causing great destruction and damage throughout the port. The tremendous blast sent a 15-foot tidal wave surging over nearly 100 miles of the Texas shoreline, leveled nearly 1,000 buildings on land, and sunk virtually every ship within the harbor. Two airplanes flying in the area were incinerated. A chain reaction caused an explosion on board the High Flyer and ignited refineries on the waterfront, destroying the Monsanto Chemical Company plant and several explosive facilities. Falling bales of burning twine added to the damage while the Grandcamp's anchor was hurled across the city. Sightseeing airplanes flying nearby had their wings sheared off, forcing both out of the sky. Ten miles away, people in Galveston were forced to their knees, windows were shattered in Houston, Texas, 40 miles away. People felt the shock 250 miles away in Louisiana. The explosion blew almost 6,350 tons of the ship's steel into the air, some at supersonic speed. Official casualty estimates came to a total of 567, but many victims were burned to ashes or literally blown to bits, and the official total is believed to be an underestimate. The entire volunteer fire department of Texas City was killed in the initial explosion, and with the fires raging, first responders from other areas were unable to reach the site of the disaster.

--Texas City Disaster, Wikipedia

In history today we talked about systemic failures; the world is a crazy sad place sometimes.

A BIG BIG BIG HEARTBEAT

Yeah, I don't really know anything about anything but that is pretty okay because I don't think I've ever really known anything about anything, and everything has worked out pretty well so far. I worry that my parents don't know how crazy I am about them, so if I die and they are sad someone please show them this. I worry about trash islands twice the size of Texas and men standing on hills in Kazakhstan, smoking cigarettes. I worry that you find me boring.

In a 2003 interview, when asked the softball question "How are you?" he [Vonnegut] answered: "I'm mad about being old, and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, O.K."

--Dave Eggers, One for the Good Guys

Enduring hunger became part of one's patriotic duty. Posters went up in the capital, Pyongyang, touting a new slogan, "Let's Eat Two Meals a Day." The North Korean government offered a variety of explanations. People were told that the government was stockpiling food to feed the starving South Korean masses on the blessed day of reunification, or that the United States had instituted a blockade against North Korea. North Korean television ran a documentary about a man whose stomach burst, it was claimed, from eating too much rice....The foreign press began reporting on North Korean's food shortages in the early nineteen-nineties, and in 1992 the country's news service issued an indignant reply: "All people live a happy life without worries about food in our land. The state supplies the people with food at a cheap price next to nothing so that people do not know how much rice costs. This is the reality of the northern half of Korea."

--Barbara Demick, The Good Cook

The reality of North Korea was that 10% of the population was dying of starvation. This article reminded me of the class I took on the USSR in which I learned how frighteningly easy it is to exercise control over a population. Constructions of reality, ya know?

For someone so averse to the idea of marriage, I am way too into weddings. But really, guys. Look at this. More importantly, look at this. The last picture is just magical.

On a somewhat related note, I would love love love to be a florist. Or a collector of stories for a show similar to This American Life or Radiolab. Or the owner of a cafe/bookstore. The thing is, I also want to make the world a less crappy place, and none of these are exactly Superman or Obama-caliber activities.

In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.

--Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, The Women's Crusade

I feel old.

--Bodie, The Wire

FINISH YOUR COLLAPSE AND STAY FOR BREAKFAST

“There is a parallel based on the same fundamental mechanisms of the economic collapse that we’re seeing now and the collapse of past civilisations such as the Maya,” he continues. “The message is that when you have a large society that consumes lots of resources, that society is likely to collapse once it hits its peak.”

...

“The average per-person consumption rate in the first world of metal and oil and natural resources is 32 times that of the developing world,” says Diamond. “That means that one American is consuming like 32 Kenyans.”

--David Pilling, Lunch with the FT: Jared Diamond

SHE IS TINY IN STATURE BUT HER DISILLUSION CAN FILL A ROOM

"The [Booker] prize," she says now, "was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class - they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country.

...

When I ask her where she places her hope, Roy shrugs. She is tiny in stature, but her disillusion can fill a room. She has no faith in conventional politics to change anything. Obama "might be a symbol," she concedes, but nothing "about the relation of American capitalism with the rest of the world will alter ... To answer your question, it's not about my hope, it's about my DNA. There are people who are comfortable with power and people who are distinctly uncomfortable and made to question it."

--Tim Adams, "What's exciting is that writing has become a weapon"

WE SIMPLY KNOW SO LITTLE ABOUT HUMAN BEINGS

THIS IS WATER, THIS IS WATER

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real -- you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

...

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

--David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College's 2005 commencement speech. Originally found here.

Please, please, read the whole thing.

WAR IS OVER

Now what?

The physical safety of women in a given country is a better predictor of its peacefulness than wealth, level of Islamic influence, or even strength of democracy. Violence against women...may account for more deaths than all the wars of the 20th century. This kind of cultural aggression likely sparks increased nationalism and, eventually, warfare.

--The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States

"NOTHING SHORT OF A CATASTROPHE"

So, this is my country.

:-/

It infiltrated my brain crevices and hasn't left yet.

No more reading The Savage Detectives while eating breakfast.

Too much heavy sadness, too early in the morning.