She had begun to get fat.
— Faulkner
A photo of JFK sailing about the Manitou in 1962 (Robert Knudsen/JFK Library)
Does anyone recognize the man in the white shirt?
(via ourpresidents)
Richard Nixon
President Obama seated in the bus where Rosa Parks initiated her quest for civil rights.
(via nehrujackets)
Gopnik looks ahead to the 2050s, when the Obama era will be characterized: A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were.
— http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/04/trickle-down-nostalgia.html
His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth.
— Faulkner
(Source: hewasacommonwealth)
It would be wrong to describe internet information as purely metaphorical or, worse still, purely linguistic. When accessed, online information does physically exist, though only for an instant as electrical impulses. We imagine, because it makes intuitive sense, that this information is stored as a sort of computer language and that the computer translates from computerese into a natural language for its users. However, the “computer language” from which it is translated does not exist. Translation (or metamorphosis) requires a start and end point: from Vulcan to Esperanto, say, or from man to cockroach. But the computer language, despite having reached such heights of complexity that no human could understand it without the machine, is not a language at all but merely instructions for a tool. Remember, the first computer language was “spoken” by punching holes into card stock. Translation and metamorphosis involve changing linguistic contexts while meaning remains unchanged. But the meaning of this sentence that I write now does not, cannot exist in computerese: The computer merely takes each keystroke as an instruction and then represents my instructions back to me.
The complexity of this task — and the misunderstanding that results — is where euphemism enters. When I hit a nail with a hammer, I think: Witness the power of my will! But when I google “How do I build a birdhouse?” it appears that I have asked Google a question and that it has answered — as though Google were a conscious entity, not the world’s most complex hammer.
- Willie Osterweil, “Internet as Euphemism,” The New Inquiry Magazine, No. 3: Arguing the Web
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(Source: presidentialtimeline.org, via ourpresidents)
On this President’s Day, let us never forget the moment Nixon met Elvis.
Presley indicated to the president in a very emotional manner that he was “on your side.” Presley kept repeating that he wanted to be helpful, that he wanted to restore some respect for the flag, which was being lost. He mentioned that he was just a poor boy from Tennessee who had gotten a lot from his country, which in some way he wanted to repay. He also mentioned he has been studying communist brainwashing and the drug culture for over ten years. He mentioned that he knew a lot about this and was accepted by the hippies. He said he could go right into a group of young people or hippies and be accepted, which he felt could be helpful to him in his drug drive. The president indicated again his concern that Presley retain his credibility.
After writing a six-page letter on American Airlines stationery asking for a meeting, Elvis visited Nixon at the White House on December 21, 1970. He gave the president a set of family photos and commemorative WWII Colt .45 pistol.
