The Real Test Of Aung San Suu Kyi’s Democratic Credential Lies Here.

Gabriel García Márquez’s Formative Reading List: 24 Books That Shaped One of Humanity’s Greatest Writers

"Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it."The most reliable portal into anoth

"In India all religions hold in common the idea of two indivisible elements, a male and female principle, Purusha and Prakrti, or Shiva and Shakti. The two elements originate in a single primordial being which manifests a 'desire to create'. From a unitary state of repose this emergent, but creative, tension gives birth to the universe and the multiplicity of beings and things of this world in a state of unceasing instability and flux, of time and constant change, of birth, reproduction, decay, death and rebirth. Out of a permanent coition of opposites the many are born, and with them confusion, antagonism, separateness. But the universe longs to regain its primordial state of oneness, and seeks to reverse the fragmentation. The return path, or restoration of lost unity, is the business of religion, yoga, ritualized sex, and its opposite : rigorous asceticism. These comprise a tool-kit of diverse, and divergent, religious techniques."

Richard Lannoy and Harry Baines, 'The Eye of Love', Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1976.

With capitalism, the excess ..becomes the rule, that is, the elementary form of buying is the act of buying things we ‘don’t really need’.

Slavoj Zizek (via alterities)

“Atomization is advancing not only between men, but within each individual, between the spheres of his life. No fulfilment may be attached to work, which would otherwise lose its functional modesty in the totality of purposes, no spark of reflection is allowed to fall into leisure time, since it might otherwise leap across to the workaday world and set it on fire. While in their structure work and amusement are becoming increasingly alike, they are at the same time being divided ever more rigorously by invisible demarcation lines. Joy and mind have been expelled equally from both. In each, blank-faced seriousness and pseudo-activity hold sway.”

— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 84

Mummiform Figure of Osiris

The inscription identifies this figure as Osiris. He wears the crown of ostrich feathers, a sun-disk, and the ram’s horns that identify him as a king. Yet he is also in the form of a mummy with the curled beard worn by the dead.  The figure stands on a hollow base. Originally, a papyrus with a spell written on it was stored in the base. When this figure and papyrus were placed in the tomb, the deceased enjoyed the protection of Osiris and of the spell.

Medium: Wood, painted

Place Made: Egypt

Dates: 664-332 B.C.E.

Period: Late Period (probably)

Brooklyn Museum

Lacey Roop - “For Billy” (WoWPS 2014)

"Crack the glowsticks in your halo. Burn so beautiful that if the sun ever looked at you he’d go blind." Performing during prelims at the 2014 Women of the World Poetry Slam.

The immense hope, and forbearance Trailing out of night, to sidewalks of the day  Like air breathed into a paper city, exhaled  As night returns bringing doubts  That swarm around the sleeper’s head  But are fended off with clubs and knives, so that morning  Installs again in cold hope  The air that was yesterday, is what you are,  In so many phases the head slips form the hand.  The tears ride freely, laughs or sobs:  What do they matter? There is free giving and taking;  The giant body relaxed as though beside a stream  Wakens to the force of it and has to recognize  The secret sweetness before it turns into life—  Sucked out of many exchanges, torn from the womb,  Disinterred before completely dead—and heaves  Its mountain-broad chest. “They were long in coming,  Those others, and mattered so little that it slowed them  To almost nothing. They were presumed dead,  Their names honorably grafted on the landscape  To be a memory to me. Until today  We have been living in their shell.  Now we break forth like a river breaking through a dam,  Pausing over the puzzled, frightened plain,  And our further progress shall be terrible,  Turning fresh knives in the wounds  In the gulf of recreation, that bare canvas  As matter-of-fact as the traffic and that day’s noise.”  The mountain stopped shaking; its body  Arched into its own contradiction, its enjoyment,  As far from us lights were put out, memories of boys and girls  Who walked here before the great change,  Before the air mirrored us,  Taking the opposite shape of our effort,  Its inseparable comment and corollary  But casting us further and further out.  Wha—what happened? You are with  The orange tree, so that its summer produce  Can go back to where we got it wrong, then drip gently  Into history, if it wants to. A page turned; we were  Just now floundering in the wind of its colossal death.  And whether it is Thursday, or the day is stormy,  With thunder and rain, or the birds attack each other,  We have rolled into another dream.  No use charging the barriers of that other:  It no longer exists. But you,  Gracious and growing thing, with those leaves like stars,  We shall soon give all out attention to you.

—John Ashbery, “Spring Day” Art Credit Lottie Hedley

Li Huayi, ink and color on paper