Sophianotloren

Jami Attenberg: I feel like I could talk to you about vaginas all day, Judy.

Is there anything you wish you could change about publishing? Is there anything where you think, god they’ve been doing this forever, why can’t they just figure it out already?

Judy Blume: Wait… can’t we just talk about vaginas?

At BuzzFeed, Rumpus contributor Jami Attenberg talks to Judy Blume about their upcoming books and their writing and publishing lives.

Want more? Check out our own recent interview with Attenberg.

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• Internet Fame Won’t Sell Your Books
• Writing While Black
• The Return of Judy Blume
• We Respectfully Decline
• Notable NYC: 6/6–6/12

By Matt Baume

A bill to allow North Carolina officials to refuse to serve any couple they don’t like is several steps closer to passing, even after the governor vetoed it. Texas is coming up with new excuses for refusing to issue marriage licenses. And with a federal ruling on marriage due any day now, Judge Roy Moore continues to speak out against the Supreme Court.

North Carolina’s close to passing a bill that would allow state officials to refuse to serve gay couples. Governor Pat McCrory vetoed the bill two weeks ago, but last week the Senate overrode his veto. The House could do the same any day now, which would present a huge problem — not just for gay couples, but for everyone.

This law essentially allows state employees to disregard their oath of office, and choose which citizens they do and don’t want to serve. And it doesn’t just apply to LGBTs — straight couples, divorced couples, interracial or interfaith couples could all be denied access to public services. That’s because anti-gay legislators know that they’re not allowed to single out LGBTs for discrimination. So what they’ve done written a law that just makes everyone’s life unpleasant, which is both clever and a real pain in the neck.

Couples in Texas could be looking at similar problems. State officials there are pointing fingers to explain why they might refuse to issue licenses even if the Supreme Court orders them to. According to local officials, they can’t issue licenses until they get updated forms from the state. State officials say they’re waiting for the Attorney General. And Attorney General Ken Paxton refuses to say if he’d obey a Supreme Court ruling requiring marriage equality. All of this could leave gay couples unable to marry, with nobody in Texas taking responsibility.

Meanwhile, Alabama legislators have failed to pass a bill that would take the state out of the marriage business. The law would have stopped the state from issuing licenses to any couple, gay or straight. But legislators voted it down by an overwhelming margin in committee, which means it’s off the table. For now.

Marriage equality starts this week in Guam, after a few weeks of arguing about whether or not a ruling from a US District Court requires the territory to issue licenses. It turns out that it does. Also last week Judge Roy Moore gave an interview in which he said that marriage equality will “destroy our country.” Moore, who currently faces an ethics complaint by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama. For now.

The post North Carolina Poised to Pass “Turn Away the Gays” Bill appeared first on Equality On Trial.

On the strange afterlife of Edgar Allen Poe’s hair.

Meanwhile, in I guess it’s a slow news day: Neil deGrasse Tyson denies your hoverboard dreams.

Everyone loves French film posters!

Everyone loves French ghost signs.

Wonders of an underground world (1909).

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• No related posts…

Yesterday. Evening. Walking around a large thrift store near me. Browsing more to kill time than anything else. As I was looking through the wall of dresses, pulling out various fabrics and patterns that caught my eye: wave of overwhelming emotion. So much mixed into one moment. Lust. Vulnerability. Smallness. Need. Lost and hurting.

Filled with need, and I saw myself in my mind running to grab the hem of a dress and bury myself in fabric and legs and comfort, which was impossible since I haven’t been that short in a very long time. And when I was that small, I hadn’t been given the gifts of knowledge of sex, but that need was also there. Of course like any huge emotional wallop, there was scent-memory in there too, or if not memory at least an association and a visualisation (which is completely the wrong word, but whatever.) I don’t have words for the scent, because it’s a fragment like most other things.

I have been so horny and so frustrated and so alone lately, for the most part. And it hurts being alone. I have needs, I have desires, I have appetites, and those can’t be sated by my hands.

Filed under: General

Mommy, please fuck me to sleep; I am tired
But my brain keeps on running around and my
Body is telling me how much it needs you
Inside me, or anyone else that you’ve found
Who can hold me and pet me and call me “sweet girl”
While she shoves herself roughly and deeply inside
So that I get all worn out and sleepy for you
Even better if you fill me up with your cum
Leave me dripping and happy and kiss me goodnight
And my dreams will be sweet, and my morning so bright,
And I’ll know that you love me… your daughter, your slut.

Filed under: General

You might say that Boston was to John Singer Sargent what Florence was to Michelangelo: though the painter never lived there, many of his greatest patrons — Isabella Stewart Gardner, for one — did, and his visits to the city were constant. He held his first solo exhibition there in 1888, and it was on the eve of a trip there in 1925 that he died; the story that ran on the front page of the Boston Daily Globe the next day was headlined, “Boston Claims Sargent, Great Master, as her Own.”

It’s fitting then, that the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), has finally created the John Singer Sargent Archive, making the city the official mecca for scholarship on the painter’s life and work. Its establishment was made possible by two large gifts of letters, photographs, and sketches from Sargent’s grand-nephew Richard Ormond and his wife, Leonée, and the art dealer Warren Adelson with his wife, MFA Overseer Jan Adelson.

For the past 30 years, Ormond and Adelson have been collaborating to compile a definitive list of Sargent’s entire output; with that project now coming to an end, they decided to give their collections to the MFA. “There is no institution better placed than the MFA to take charge of the Archive, to make its riches more widely known and to sustain the world of Sargent scholarship,” Ormond explained in a statement.

Sargent had a special relationship with the MFA. It began in 1905, when the museum purchased its first oil painting from him, and continued in 1912, when the institution bought a whole suite of watercolors. Over the next decade, the MFA commissioned him to design several murals for its rotunda and colonnade. That patronage continued after his death: in 1925, it held a memorial exhibition for him; in 1956, a centenary celebration; and in 1999, a full retrospective. In turn, Sargent’s family has donated nearly 400 works to the museum over the years, and today the MFA boasts an entire gallery dedicated to his paintings, including his 1882 masterpiece “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.”

“Perhaps no painter has been more identified with the MFA than John Singer Sargent,” explained Director Malcolm Rogers in a statement. “Of all the highlights of my time at the MFA, some of the greatest have been renewing the magnificent Sargent murals in 1999 and providing a beautiful new gallery for his ‘Boit Daughters’ in our Art of the Americas Wing in 2010. Now, as I near the end of my tenure at the Museum, it is wonderful to find a ‘home’ for the peripatetic Sargent here in Boston.”

The acquisition includes 100 letters that reveal aspects of his daily life, his social circle, and his business affairs — including 15 exchanged between Sargent and Claude Monet, whom he met in Paris around 1876 and admired throughout his life. In 1889, he wrote to the French Impressionist that he was “still haunted by the memory of your most recent paintings, full of unfathomable things.” There’s also one letter in which a certain Ms. Amélie Gautreau, the famed sitter for Sargent’s “Madame X,” describes the portrait as a “masterpiece.”

These fill out the museum’s already robust collection of correspondence related to Sargent’s watercolors and mural projects. “While some of the facts contained in these letters have been known, and the Monet letters have been published, there will be ample opportunity for scholars today and in years to come to make new connections and new discoveries,” Amelia Kantrovitz, a spokesperson for the MFA, told Hyperallergic.

The museum has also acquired drawings and photographs that feature Sargent — including caricatures by Max Beerbohm and Henry Tonks — and objects like a 19th-century oil lamp associated with him; he had borrowed it from the collector Charlotte Bywater to use in his 1900 portrait of her husband, Oxford University professor Ingram Bywater, and it also appears in his painting of Lady Russell.

All of these works will eventually all be accessible to scholars, students, and the public through the MFA’s Morse Study Room. They’ll go on view as well in the forthcoming exhibition (opening in July) Yours Sincerely, John S. Sargent.

“Why Boston? Aside from my sentimental prejudice for my home town, clearly Boston was an important city to Sargent. His first one-man show was in Boston at the St. Botolph Club in 1888, and it launched his career both critically and financially,” Adelson explained in a statement. “Boston launched my career on Newbury Street about 90 years later, and the MFA was where I first saw Sargent’s work when I was a teenager. It stuck in my mind and has ever since.”

Yours Sincerely, John S. Sargent opens at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Avenue of the Arts, 465 Huntington Ave, Boston), on July 25, 2015.

Now this is how you bullshit people with a “poll,” ladies and gentlemen:

The most ideologically hard-core elements of the party have tried to make the case that Republicans should do nothing at all. One libertarian organization commissioned a poll designed to show that voters would not blame Republicans for doing nothing in the face of massive suffering. The poll has an unusually blunt method for producing this result. It asks, in the event the lawsuit is successful, whom voters would blame. The choices are:

“Congress, for poorly writing the law”
“The IRS, for giving out illegal subsidies in the first place”
“States, for refusing to establish Obamacare exchanges”
“Unsure”

Notice that, even aside from the loaded terms (“poorly writing,” “illegal”), none of those choices allows voters to blame the current, Republican-run Congress for failing to fix the law. The only “Congress” voters can blame is the old Democratic one that wrote the law in 2009–10. The poll does prove that the public will not blame Republicans in Congress if it is given a fixed menu of choices, of which blaming the Republican Congress is not one.

And, of course, there’s en more glaring omission: the Supreme Court. (Or, as the equivalent question would be worded, “a bare majority of the Supreme Court for willfully misreading the Affordable Care Act and taking subsidies away from more than 6 million people.”) The hack pollsters anticipated John Thune!

What Congress will do if the subsidies vanish because of some eternally unknowable cause is nothing. Which, alas, is better than any possible Republican alternative.

Liquid Midi - Pilot Test Run

Project from ejtechnology to create musical interfaces using screenprinted conductive ink on paper. This is only the first test but looks promising:

Link

ejtechnology has a Tumblr blog here

One of the most overlooked design casualties of global homogenization is regional lettering. The introduction of mass-produced signs is a relatively recent innovation, and in the past if you wanted to keep out trespassers or sell wares you either made the sign yourself or commissioned an expert.

“Before the proliferation of cheap vinyl printing, signage was created by artisans and sign-makers, and their work was naturally grounded in the local visual culture,” graphic designer Molly Woodward, the creator of Vernacular Typography, told Hyperallergic. The ongoing online archive gathers around 10,000 photographs of lettering from around the world, from Argentina to Japan, although the lion’s share is from New York City, her hometown.

Vernacular Typography is similar to projects like the M+ initiative to map the disappearing neon signs of Hong Kong and Stephen Banham’s 2011 Characters: Cultural Stories Revealed through Typography book on signage in Melbourne, Australia, which explored how the origins of the city’s signs reflect its particular social and economic history. In the 2013 book Field Guide to Typography: Typefaces in the Urban Landscape, designer Peter Dawson offered a birding-style navigation for deciphering the typefaces of signs, whether Franklin Gothic at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) or Baskerville on the Alexander McQueen storefronts. Even Walker Evans, the great chronicler of 20th-century American life, was drawn to regional signs, photographing them extensively throughout his career from the Great Depression until his death in 1975.

Vernacular Typography is omnivorous with its signage, including graffiti tags, fallout shelter signs, subway wayfinding, “ghost signs” for long-shuttered businesses, tombstone text, hand painted shop awnings, and any urban communication with a sense of place. There’s a great deal of appreciation here for the everyday in design, the details we overlook but that make our cities unique.

In See for Yourself: A Visual Guide to Everyday Beauty, out this month from Chronicle Books, Rob Forbes emphasizes how to better see the aesthetics of the urban world through its contrast and patterns. He writes:

Much of the man-made world I see is chaotic, random, banal, offensive, and frequently punished by the commercial interests of our consumer world. In efforts to make our lives more convenient and “modern,” we have made both great accomplishments and tragic errors in judgement. Surface-level downtown parking lots, undistinguished strip malls, and suburban sprawling communities are common examples. Our man-made world has suffered to a large degree because we simply have not taken the time to look at it closely and think about the consequences of our actions for the long term.

Like Forbes, Woodward is interested in preserving this regionalism that gives “a city a visual life and makes them look more like themselves and less like everywhere else,” which is why she believes photographing and sharing them is essential.

“Vernacular typography and lettering have a way of creating and preserving a sense of place, and when we lose these symbols, we lose a sense of our own history,” she said. “It seems like every day a sign is either being covered up or destroyed by new construction. If we don’t document and appreciate these signs now, they’ll disappear forever and we’ll sever our connection to the past.”

Explore thousands of photographs of regional lettering on Vernacular Typography. 

Bjork: ‘Black Lake’ Video Development

XREZ Studio reveal their part in putting together a music video for Bjork and her MOMA restrospective, utilizing various digital capture techniques such as drone-assisted photogrammetry, laser scanning, and dome projection.

First, they tested some techniques to combine landscape and film capture:

In this video, we see more material that was formed specifically for the finished video:

And here, released today, is the ten minute final version which was shown at MOMA:

xRez Studio had the great pleasure of providing digital terrain capture for Björk’s recent special venue film “Black Lake”, featured at MoMA NYC in her retrospective exhibition in spring 2015 and directed by the gifted designer and director Andrew Thomas Huang . The effort consisted of capturing several locations shot for the film, including a dark, narrow lava tube cave, a volcanic ravine, an open moss-covered plain, and various set pieces on stage. The creation of digital facsimiles of these locations allowed the post work done at Wolf + Crow to allow more flexible CG backplates, integration with Houdini effects elements, and direct use for subsequent VR pieces. Every method xRez employs was used, from carbon pole and UAV photogrammetry, laser scanning with Faro scanners, spherical gigapixel panoramas, time lapse fulldome skies, etc.

More at XREZ Studio here

What a difference 64 years makes. Two nights ago Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s Fun Home received the Tony award for Best Musical, the first time a musical with a lesbian protagonist has done so in the history of the Tony’s. Fun Home was adapted from Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir of the same title. Bechdel is best known for her so-called Bechdel Test that measures the presence of female characters in Hollywood films—to pass the test, a film must have at least two women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man.

The musical Fun Home (so I’ve read—I haven’t seen it) concerns Bechdel and her relationship with her late father who she comes to learn was, like her, also gay. You see her attempts to unfurl the mysteries surrounding his life, especially when Bechdel reaches the age her father was when he died. As I understand it, the musical portrays Bechdel ultimately as inwardly triumphant and her family as a sanctuary of sanity, even if this touching number, “Telephone Wire,” when father and daughter awkwardly attempt to reveal their sexualities to each other, demonstrates how the wires can get crossed:

If only the sexually ambiguous Tom Rakewell in Igor Stravinsky’s 1951 The Rake’s Progress with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, could have fared as well.

Unlike Bechdel, Rakewell is not permitted understanding or triumph. Instead, he is lured into a dangerous quest by Nick Shadow, a demonic, post-war, apocalyptic, Mephistopheles. Rakewell struggles with sudden inheritance and wealth, inchoate, Edward Gorey-style debauchery, sexual identity—he marries a bearded Turkish mock-transvestite-like woman who epitomizes today’s Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner debate about what defines sexual identity and the consequences of women’s identity—and finally madness as if Tom Rakewell can reunite with his female love, Anne Truelove, only by going insane and believing he’s Adonis pining for an imagined Venus.

Last night, instead of watching the Tony’s—which, to be honest, I have never done and besides, I don’t have a television, blah, blah, blah—I was invited to attend one of the final dress rehearsals for Portland Opera’s The Rake’s Progress that opens later this week in order to participate in a live-tweet.

For audiences of both opera and poetry, the very music and language that we become attracted to actually begins in our bodies and minds long before the curtain goes up or the poem’s first words are uttered. In other words, one is predisposed at the outset. Both opera and poetry rely on an audience’s affection for imagination—before, during, and after the last word has been sung or spoken. Both opera and poetry enlarge and then enrich the crises and joys of the human condition. Both opera and poetry are mediums for a single voice to sing in the context of the social, the societal, and the civic—whereas opera relies on narrative action and a balance of solo and duet, poetry is all interior monologue with a balance of voice and metaphor. There are many obvious differences, of course. Poetry is to heightened speech what opera is to a bold shout from the top of the bell tower. The range of the opera singer’s voice requires singing to someone very far away, while the poet must only whisper in her ear.

The Rake’s Progress was composed between 1948 and 1951 based on a series of eight engravings by the painter William Hogarth, entitled “A Rake’s Progress.” The English artist William Hogarth produced “A Rake’s Progress” in 1735 on what Hogarth called “modern moral subjects.” Hogarth’s pictorials focus on a hearty rogue, named Rakewell, who after spending all his inherited money on clothes, women, and drink ends up in London’s notorious Bedlam lunatic asylum. Stravinsky, who was inspired by Hogarth’s morality tale, composed the music for a fabulist operatic version, even though it was the only opera he ever wrote.

As you might imagine, the chief interest of my tweets was with W. H. Auden’s libretto and the way it becomes a portrait of Auden’s own life after he leaves England for America in 1938. To give you a feel for the opera, here’s a sampling of my responses:

Auden’s opening echoes Romeo & Juliet. #RakesProgress

— David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Auden’s #RakesProgress: The woods are green and bird and beast at [play For all things keep this festival of May… — David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Shakespeare’s: Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene…

— David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Right! Plot of #RakesProgress mirrors Gawain &the Green Knight! Nick Shadow=GreenKnight. Plus Mephistopheles, of course. But TomR no Gawain. — David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Auden’s libretto. Devout socialist. MT @brianlibby #RakesProgress “Frtune so swift…may encourage his sins.” Stravinsky…Wall Street critic.

— David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Tom Rakewell earns his ‘manhood’ w “Lady Bishop.’ The homoerotic is in full force. 1950’s Auden/Kallman via Freud. #RakesProgress — David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

“Tom is weak, and needs the comfort of a helping hand.” W.H. Auden’s view of his life w Chester Kallman too. #RakesProgress

— David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

“Love cannot falter, cannot desert.” Theme of a lot of operas. Staged and soap. #RakesProgress — David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Anne Truelove to W. H. Auden as Tom Rakwell to Chester Kallman. #RakesProgress

— David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

A classic Jungian archetype MT @portlandopera Pittsinger says N. Shadow is dark side ofU. Doesnt exist w/o one to take him on #RakesProgress — David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Now Nick Shadow calls Tom Rakewell “master.” Auden’s “Lay your sleeping head/Human on my faithless arm” comes to mind. #RakesProgress

— David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

“Ye powers inspire / Tom Rakewell Esquire.” Best rhyme of the night. WH Auden. #RakesProgress — David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Doesn’t contrast betwn Anne’s lonely isolated arias& Tom/Nick’s camaraderie say a lot abt gay love in 1940-50’s mainstream culture? Discuss.

— David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Baba!! has arrived!! Fully cross-dressed and “othered.” #RakesProgress — David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Baba the Turk, buried alive under a sheet in opening of Act III. #RakesProgress

— David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Beginning Act III #RakesProgress parallels Auden’s 1939 departure from England: 1/2 — David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Search for heterosexual love leads to Tom’s madness. #RakesProgress @bryonbeck, makes you want to ask, just who/what is Nick Shadow really?

— David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Can’t reject shadow. Finally, Auden rejects Freed and accepts Jung. #RakesProgres — David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Question: In keeping up the repressed gay theme, can Tom “love” Anne only by living a life of madness?#RakesProgress #explication

— David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

I’ve been thinking slowly that #RakesProgress is a tale of the imagination’s journey — Auden’s self-portrait. This ending is confirming it. — David Biespiel (@DavidBiespiel) June 8, 2015

Igor Stravinsky invited Auden to Hollywood in November 1947 so that the two men could meet and work on the projected opera. Auden, who had been listening to Stravinsky’s music since he was a teenager, was terrified because he was already in awe of Stravinsky’s prowess—while Stravinsky, on the other hand, was a neophyte when it came contemporary poetry and was relying on assurances from his Los Angeles neighbor, Aldous Huxley, that Auden was indeed an outstanding poet who might write a brilliant libretto.

In fact, just as Stravinsky had never composed an opera, neither had Auden written a libretto. Enter Chester Kallman, Auden’s lover since 1939, who was an opera buff. Music critic David Schiff takes the story from there:

Auden and Kallman, too, brought their personal histories to the opera. Auden met the stunningly handsome eighteen-year-old Kallman in 1939 and decided immediately that he had found the man of his dreams. But Kallman really was a rake, sexually incompatible with Auden and endlessly promiscuous. There ensued a lifelong folie à deux in which Auden played the role of perfect wife to Kallman’s philandering husband. The situation made Auden feel both absurd and virtuous. In short, he was Baba the Turk… Baba was Auden’s addition to Hogarth’s story, and she has been a source of misunderstanding from the start. According to Robert Craft, Stravinsky’s longtime amanuensis, Stravinsky’s lawyer advised him to drop the entire project because Baba was a “sexual hoax.” Yet homosexual composers didn’t seem to appreciate the hoax any more than ostensibly straight critics did. Virgil Thomson praised the opera but predicted—correctly, as it turned out—that Baba, “a character drawn from female impersonation,” would not be easy to make convincing. Benjamin Britten, whose works are full of homosexual allusions, reportedly termed the opera “perverse.” Today, after a decade or more of “gender studies” and androgynous rock stars, one might assume that a bearded lady would no longer kill a show, but perhaps wrongly. As Thomson’s remark indicates, there has always been confusion about whether Baba is supposed to be a woman or a man. Last year the Public Broadcasting System showed a Swedish movie of The Rake’s Progress in which Baba was clearly a man, sung by a male alto with a short goatee. Instead of solving the problem, the TV movie just showed that in our enlightened age a drag queen is less threatening than a woman with a beard—and proved that Baba makes no sense at all as a cross-dressed man.

Schiff wrote the above nearly twenty years ago in 1997 in the Atlantic. With the luxury of time, I think Schiff in his terrific essay simply could not predict the turn in today’s society toward greater acceptance of homosexual and transgender love and marriage, and so I can see why he diminishes the Jungian masks Auden puts into play to obscure both Rakewell and Baba’s sexual natures in the early 1950s. Baba the Turk’s “cross-dressing”or transitioning or gender complexities are presented by Auden as a coded message for human honesty in a world of madness—Baba owns her personhood—as you see here in this clip from the African premiere of Stravinsky’s opera at the Baxter Theater in 2011 when Baba the Turk is introduced as Tom Rakewell’s fully sexually-compromised wife:

When I watched Baba’s marriage entrance last night, I immediately thought of the feelings of duty mixed with “fevers” that you find in Auden’s great poem, “Lullaby”:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

But what of Anne Truelove, the stalwart, heterosexual, ditched lover of the sexually naive Tom Rakewell? Auden represents her as society’s stalwart. “Tom is weak and needs the comfort of a helping hand,” she sings at the end of Act I, and then concludes with these essential lines:

Though it be hurt,
If love be love
It will not alter.
O should I see
My love in need,
It shall not matter
What he may be.
I go to him.
Love cannot falter,
Cannot desert
A loving heart,
An ever-loving heart.

Anne Truelove’s full understanding of Rakewell’s divided identity, sexual or otherwise—“It shall not matter / What he may be”—compares to the lines above from “Lullaby” as well: “Soul and body have no bounds.” Auden’s mastery in The Rake’s Progress is to cast human love, regardless of sexuality, as boundless and universal. Stravinsky’s music calls on Anne Truelove, as played in the clip below by soprano Martina Schilling at Theater Dortmund in 2008, to hit high C at the end of her great aria, “No word from Tom,” quoted above. Anne Truelove’s is a cry of undivided clarity about love’s determination to exist in honesty:

And here opera and poetry find their grand communion. Like poetry, opera thrives in the extremes of emotion, music, language, and the geographies of exterior and interior experience where all life is at stake. As Auden says, “No opera can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”

So it is in poetry. The interior monologues of poetry honor the shadow natures of the psyche. A poet lives through the writing of poems inside his or her animal or sexual sides as a way to honor that aspect of our humanity. A poet does not ignore these energies of darkness mingled with light. I mean, Tom Rakewell tries to make a deal with his shadow side and suffers for it.

No, a poet knows that the extremes of the inner life are also what connect him or her to the human community.

***

For readers of Poetry Wire who live in Oregon and the Northwest you can see Portland Opera’s production of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress June 11th, 12th, and 14th. The performance features David Hockney’s legendary scene and costume designs. The Rake’s Progress staging is accompanied by a Portland Art Museum exhibition of Hogarth’s prints as well as a selection of Hockney’s original drawings watercolors and designs for the production.

Related Posts:

• Bechdel on Broadway
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Midnight in the Century
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Why Jihadists Love Postmodern Poetry
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Brief Inner Happiness
• Controversial Comics

I got paid to make this cartoon because of my Patreon supporters. Thanks, patrons!

Transcript of cartoon

Panel 1
There are two women talking. One has streaks dyed in her hair; the other has black hair.
STREAKS: We can’t talk about gay rights without talking about the history of homophobia which–
BLACK: Stop GAY BULLYING me!

Panel 2
STREAKS: Pardon me?
BLACK: Anyone who disagrees with the queer agenda gets called a “homophobic,” “intolerant” “bigot!” That’s BULLYING!

Panel 3
STREAKS: Look, I’m not talking about you. It’s not personal. But can I talk about the general social context?
BLACK: Of course!

Panel 4
STREAKS: Great! Like I was saying, in a context of bigotry and homopho–
BLACK: GAY BULLIES! I’m being GAY BULLIED! HELP! HELP!

 

Fifty hospitals in the United States are charging uninsured consumers more than 10 times the actual cost of patient care, according to research published Monday.

All but one of the these facilities is owned by for-profit entities, and by far the largest number of hospitals — 20 — are in Florida. For the most part, researchers said, the hospitals with the highest markups are not in pricey neighborhoods or big cities, where the market might explain the higher prices.

Topping the list of the most expensive hospitals is North Okaloosa Medical Center, a 110-bed facility in the Florida Panhandle about an hour outside of Pensacola. Uninsured patients are charged 12.6 times the actual cost of patient care.

Community Health Systems operates 25 of the hospitals on the list; Hospital Corp. of America operates another 14.

“They are price-gouging because they can,” said Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, co-author of the study in Health Affairs. “They are marking up the prices because no one is telling them they can’t.”

He added: “These are the hospitals that have the highest markup of all 5,000 hospitals in the United States. This means, when it costs the hospital $100, they are going to charge you, on average, $1,000.”

The researchers said other consumers who could face those high charges are patients whose hospitals are not in their insurance company’s preferred network of providers, patients using workers’ compensation and those covered by automobile insurance policies.

Carepoint Health-Bayonne Medical Center in Bayonne, N.J., for example, also charges rates 12.6 times the actual cost of patient care. But state law limits the maximum that hospitals can charge uninsured patients to 115 percent, a spokesman said.

By comparison, the researchers said, a typical U.S. hospital charges 3.4 times the cost of patient care.

Officials representing the 50 hospitals disputed the findings, saying they provide significant discounts to uninsured and underinsured patients to help cover their out-of-pocket costs.

Understanding hospital pricing and charges is one of the most frustrating experiences for ordinary consumers and health-care professionals alike. It’s virtually impossible to find out ahead of time from the hospital how much a procedure or stay in the facility is going to cost. Once the bill arrives, many Americans have difficulty understanding them.

Most hospital patients covered by private or government insurance don’t pay full price because insurers and programs like Medicare negotiate lower rates for their patients.

But the millions of Americans who don’t have insurance don’t have anyone to negotiate on their behalf. They are most likely to be charged the full hospital price. As a result, uninsured patients, who are often the most vulnerable, face skyrocketing medical bills that can lead to personal bankruptcy, damaged credit scores or avoidance of needed medical care.

Researchers said the main factors leading to overcharging are the lack of market competition and the fact that the federal government does not regulate the prices that health-care providers can charge. Only two states, Maryland and West Virginia, set hospital rates.

In the United States, hospitals have something called the chargemaster, a lengthy list of the hospital’s prices for every procedure performed in the facility and for every supply item used during those procedures, such as the cost of one Tylenol tablet, or a box of gauze.

Most patients don’t pay the chargemaster rates because the federal government and private insurers negotiate lower rates for their patients. The government almost always pays fixed amounts based mostly on patients’ conditions.

In determining the size of markups, researchers used as their benchmark what Medicare allows for the costs of care. That includes direct patient costs, such as emergency room and operating room care, and indirect costs, such as administration and pharmacy. It does not include private doctors’ costs.

The study looked at government reports for all Medicare-certified hospitals between May 2012 and April 30, 2013. To calculate those with the highest markup, they tallied up the total charges, then divided by the patient care cost, which they defined as total costs Medicare agrees to pay for those with its government-subsidized health insurance.

“For-profit players appear to be better players in this price-gouging game,” said Ge Bai, an assistant accounting professor at Washington and Lee University and a co-author.

Carepoint Health, which owns the Bayonne Hospital and two other hospitals in Hudson County, N.J., said charge-pricing affects less than 7 percent of total patient interactions system-wide. Without it or adequate reimbursements, “our safety-net hospitals risk closure,” Carepoint said in a statement. Urban hospitals are reimbursed by insurers at lower rates than suburban ones, a spokesman said.

Officials at Community Health Systems of Franklin, Tenn., which operates 25 of the hospitals, and Hospital Corp. of America, based in Nashville, which operates 14, said hospital charges rarely reflect what consumers actually pay. They said their hospitals offer significant discounts to uninsured patients and charity care for those who qualify. Community Health Systems said in a statement that it provided $3.3 billion in charity care, discounts and other uncompensated care for consumers last year. It also noted that several of its hospitals were not owned by CHS at the time the data were reported.

Anderson said researchers chose to show the current ownership status because the company bought the hospitals knowing about the inflated prices.

HCA said in a statement that its uninsured patients are eligible for free care through its charity care program or they receive discounts that are similar to the discounts a private insurance plan receives.

The Federation of American Hospitals, which represents for-profit hospitals, said the listed hospitals provided nearly $450 million in uncompensated care in 2012 alone. Including the discounts “would have had a significant effect on the charge-to-cost-ratio reported, and therefore the implications of the study’s results,” it said in a statement.

Anderson said it made little economic sense to “mark something up 10 times what it actually costs and then give a discount.” He added: “Clearly they expect someone to pay these inflated prices.”

He noted that the cost of workers’ compensation and auto insurance polices are higher in the states where hospital charges are unregulated because companies have to pay the higher rates.

The idea for the paper came when co-author Bai received a hospital bill six years ago after her son was born. “I realized that I could not understand the bill,” said Bai, a certified public accountant. She thought to herself that if she couldn’t figure it out, how could the average American? Bills for other items that consumers buy are relatively easy to understand, she noted.

“But we do not understand the bills for this, our most valuable asset,” she said. “This is ridiculous and sad.”

[How Maryland’s hospital rate-setting system works]

The Great Wave (based in Hokusai artwork). Tattoo made by Santa Perpetua at Black Sails tattoo (Brighton, UK)

instagram: santa_perpetua

facebook: Santa Perpetua graphic art

@ProJared are you pumped for the ReBoot reboot? http://t.co/NnuTCJaxxP

— Tom Hazelton (@Tom_Hazelton) June 9, 2015

*Reboot was the first CGI tv show, started in 1994
*“The new ‘ReBoot’ will feature the same action and comedy mix viewers loved in the original series, but with an updated technological universe that will fascinate a new generation of kids,” said Corus Kids content director Jamie Piekarz in a news release."

Promo image for "Reboot: The Guardian Code" pic.twitter.com/TL0y1ozCMs

— Todd DuBois (@GWOtaku) June 9, 2015

Source
Source
Source

Never seen Reboot? Here's their official summary!




WHAT ARE YOUR BEST MEMORIES OF REBOOT? FAVOURITE EPISODES? FAVOURITE CHARACTERS??? IS YOUR BODY READY FOR THIS???

How do you do, fellow kids? I’d like to talk to you about how stupid full-time employment is. In today’s economy, extremely profitable corporations will let you compete to give your services to them for pennies on the dollar. Pretty cool, am I right? I, for one, think all millennials should do it!

Security? Benefits? Dude, those are things your grandparents wanted from work. You’re not a total lame-o, like your grandparents, are you? Don’t be lame, man. Crowdsource. Be part of a crowd. That sources. Profitability. For other people.*

*Corporations.

And, did I mention the flexibility? When you don’t actually have a job, you have a ton of free time to do whatever you want! Except, pay rent. Or eat. Or have any dream of retiring. But, again, you’re not old or lame, and only old lame people retire, so who cares? Not you, because you’re having brunch on a Tuesday. Or, you would, if you could afford to. You’re keeping your options open, and I respect that.

The best part of all of this? You get to choose who you want to work for, and when you want to work. Now, of course, the person paying you also has quite a bit of choice (free market!) and isn’t compelled to do anything boring like pay a minimum wage or follow anti-discrimination employment laws when hiring an independent contractor. And, get this, they can terminate your contract at anytime, for no reason, without paying severance! Freedom!

Anyways, everyone knows that employee protection laws are just a scam perpetuated by the useless paperwork industry.

Here’s a tip for anyone who is just starting out: I recommend that you work for free for a while to prove to future employers that your work is good. A sure-fire way to convince people to pay you for your work is to produce high quality work, over and over, without being paid. That’s commitment.

Welcome to the sharing economy! And we all know that sharing is good. So, logically, this piss-poor recession/recovery cycle—that has taken so long we’ve forgotten that stable work for a majority of people is inherently beneficial for society—is a good economy!

Sharing is caring, you guys.

A version of this post originally appeared as a comment in response to an article on Medium, “The Full-Time Job Is Dead.” You can follow Steven on Twitter at @steven_harrell. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

When Apple released its Health app in September 2014, something was conspicuously missing: It didn't include functionality for tracking menstruation or fertility. It was a problematic oversight, but it's the type of thing companies correct quickly, right? Haha, nope. When Apple updated the Health app in March, it was still period-free.

Finally, on Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi announced that the Health app in iOS 9 will include reproductive health tracking. A category for "Menstruation" briefly flashed across the demo screen, before Federighi moved on to talking about smarthomes. Apple's liveblog noted, "The Health app can ... now also track reproductive health, how often you’re seated, and UV exposure."

There aren't any other details yet about what exactly the addition of a "reproductive health" category will mean, and no one said the words "period" or "menstruation" out loud on stage. Recognizing a standard component of health and health monitoring for a pretty important (!) demographic group is apparently a learning process for Apple.

With a keen sense of humor and superb control of a spray can, Swiss artist Remo Lienhard (aka Wes21) covers both walls and canvases with his playful sythesis of science fiction and the natural world. The artist imagines a hybrid spaceship ladybug as it blasts into the sky and pair of airborne lighthouses are revealed to be the bodies of ominous looking squid. Lienhard works in a variety of mediums from smaller acrylic and spray pieces on canvas to larger murals that often make use of surrounding objects.

Lienhard is a member of a collective of graffiti artists and illustrators called Schwarzmaler and is represented by SOON, and you can see more recent work on his Facebook.

Wes21 & ONUR

Wes21 & ONUR

Oklahoma City Public Schools

While undergoing renovations last week, workers at Emerson High School in Oklahoma City made a surprising discovery: when removing several old chalkboards they found an even older set of chalkboards hidden in the walls. Apparently the school didn’t remove or even bother to erase the oldest boards they replaced back in 1917, leaving various lessons and illustrations untouched for nearly a century.

The images and writing depicted on the boards include a list of hygiene tasks, an unusual mathematics lesson, music, and several references to pilgrims, probably correlating with the time of year the boards were last used around December. A school district spokesperson says they are working with the city to preserve the chalk drawings. You can see several more of the educational time capsules over at the Washington Post. (via Neatorama)

Oklahoma City Public Schools

Oklahoma City Public Schools

Oklahoma City Public Schools

Oklahoma City Public Schools

Filmed in December of last year, this specialized laser system at LasX Industries in Minnesota is capable of drawing on surfaces at a rate of up to 6 meters per second. In this example, a design by Andy Gikling is executed in a two-step process. First, the laser moves back and forth in a more familiar raster mode similar to an inkjet or typical laser printer, but at the 1:40 mark things get insane as the system switches to a “vector” process and starts drawing all over the place in real time. If I understand this correctly you’re seeing almost 100,000 vectors drawn in about two minutes and thirty seconds.

View

hobbies

i have become quite adept at hand-stuffing olives with blue cheese. if this IT management gig doesn’t work out, i have fallback skills.

for our martinis we’ve grown fond of st. agur blue cheese stuffed santa barbara olives tucked into an icy martini glass that has been coated in dolin dry vermouth before being lovingly filled with hendrick’s gin.

you can take the girl out of bartending, but…

via http://log.erdemgultekin.com/post/2617192887

“Don’t let your illness become your personality, you’re so much more than the thoughts in your head.”

- my favorite person | last year (via dryyoureyes-startbelieving)

The bespoke, designer Whaletone piano looks like the oceanic offspring of the 1969 Fender Rhodes Student Piano. (more…)

shitpeoplesaytowomendirectors:

Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, and Scarlett Johansson Have an Older-Man Problem

No. Hollywood has an older man problem.

How do you see that graph, know who has the most say in film making, and STILL manage to blame women? How? 

{The man playing my lead actor’s husband in Laundromat, my senior thesis film, is younger than she is. It’s insane how much flack I’ve gotten for it. If it were the other way around, nobody would bat an eye. I’m prepared to take the heat if I have the chance to change perception. ~ Rose Mendonca}

Bravo, Rose. — SPSTWD

(via tastefullyoffensive:youphoric)