Inspiration of the Day

"Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music."
- William Stafford

Woman with a Lettuce

In honor of Sharon Olds, who spoke today about her life, poetry and sanitary practices.

Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds was much funnier than expected - she elicited quite a few laughs from the audience. Her life story, about her feminism and growing up with Calvinist parents reflected so much about her work. She writes about family, aging and death, and her views on the world seem so enlightened compared to what is heard daily in the media. To me, Sharon Olds is a kind of modern Simone de Beauvoir, who channels her thoughts into beautiful, inspiring poetry.

Diagnosis
by Sharon Olds

By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she though in truth, that I was Possessed.
It wa sjust these strange looks on my face-
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She's doing it now! Look!
She's doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.

Inspiration of the Day

"There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world that is crazy."
- Henry Miller

Movie review: Entre Les Murs [The Class]

Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Cantet takes viewers into a year of François Bégaudeau's (French teacher and novelist) class, located in a "tough racially mixed inner city school."

The film uses improvisational cinéma-vérité style to try to convey the adolescent lives. Except two students and a parent, all students in the film were untrained children essentially playing themselves.
The magic of The Class is of course that it doesn't feel like a movie, but like something real, tangible - a slice of life, if you may. The students aren't acting, they're living, which is quite a nice breath of fresh air. Unfortunately the subtitles are poorly done, for it is impossible to translate the French slang most of the film is in. The film preaches nothing. It simply shows.

"You teach best what you most need to learn."
- Richard David Bach

はる

Despite the fact that the pagan New Year has come and gone, and the sun should have already peeped through the clouds of April, we have found ourselves with a conundrum. How do you stick out among all the North Face rain jackets and Patagonia fleeces?

The answer lies in Japan.

Clear, vinyl umbrellas are cheap and immensely popular over there. The West saw this umbrella in the movie "Lost in Translation", with Scarlett Johannssen carrying it all over.

You can take this look to an even more intense level by making it a form of apparel:

tfs
So whatever, you wear, keep it transparent. Modestly.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
- Robert Frost

Inspiration of the Day

"Cultures grow on the vine of tradition"

- Jonah Goldberg