Category Archives: Smorgasblog

Favorite posts from other blogs.

Hansel and Gretel revisited

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ Artlog:

Gretel is careful to take the Witch’s cat with them when they leave the gingerbread house, explaining to Hansel that they must be responsible for it. Later, back at home, their parents aren’t exactly pleased to see them. It has been quieter without the children, and with more food to go around too. One day Hansel comes in from playing to find the parents missing, and the cat gone too. Gretel sits next to the stove, humming while waiting for the joints to roast.

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“The ephemerality of every hard moment”

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Tasting Rhubarb:

So now I know it’s not really going to get easier. But perhaps it can keep becoming more fluid. Perhaps I can feel my way into the ephemerality of every hard moment.

Somehow the ephemerality of the happy moments, the strong ones, the softly joyful ones, is always to the fore. But it’s not just the good bits, it’s all of it: here, blink, gone. Hard, but not fixed; never lengthy; a flickering, ever-changing string of moments.

I increasingly wonder if the enormity of confronting this is what lies behind so much of human madness, cruelty, masochism; behind our obsessive need to build boxes, lock our own cell doors as well as other people’s.

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Living at peace

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Velveteen Rabbi:

Yom Kippur is a rehearsal for the day of our deaths. Today we wear white, like our burial shrouds. (Some wear a white robe called a kittel, in which they will someday be buried.) Today we abstain from food and drink; the dead need neither. And today we say the vidui, the confessional prayers, as we will say on our deathbeds. As Rabbi Shef Gold has written, “For the whole day of Yom Kippur, we act as if it is our last day, our only day to face the Truth, forgive ourselves and each other, remember who we are and why we were born.”

Today is our chance to release all the karmic baggage we haven’t managed to let go in the last year. To set ourselves, and everyone we know, free. Not so that we can die at peace — but so that we can live at peace, with ourselves and with one another.

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Teju Cole on Instagram

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Double Take:

But the rise of social photography means that we are now seeing images all the time, millions of them, billions, many of which are manipulated with the same easy algorithms, the same tiresome vignetting, the same dank green wash. So the problem is not that images are being altered—I remember the thrill I felt the first few times I saw Hipstamatic images, and I shot a few myself buoyed by that thrill—it’s that they’re all being altered in the same way: high contrasts, dewy focus, over-saturation, a skewing of the RGB curve in fairly predictable ways. Correspondingly, the range of subjects is also peculiarly narrow: pets, pretty girlfriends, sunsets, lunch. In other words, the photographic function, which should properly be the domain of the eye and the mind, is being outsourced to the camera and to an algorithm.

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Speaking for the 47 percent

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Erin Belieu:

I see who you are, Mr. Romney: you’re the kid in the locker room who assaults a boy for being gay. You grew into the guy who thinks it’s okay to tie your family dog to the top of your car for a road trip. You’re a man who lacks a basic empathy chip in your hard wiring, the essential character to experience other beings as more than percentage points or likely voters in swing states. You have the suit. You have the haircut. You have more money than God. But you don’t have the soul to actually imagine others outside of your small and privileged experience. And this, I’m afraid, is your personal tragedy. Please, don’t make it ours.

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Factitious

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Idle Words:

And really, what are you supposed to do if you suffer from a factitious disorder? Go to the doctor? You’re already at the doctor! And anyone who wants to get better, by definition doesn’t have the disease.

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Why we need war stories

Posted on September 16, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Hoarded Ordinaries:

I suspect my students think they were assigned to read The Good Soldiers so they could be better informed about the war in Iraq, and presumably that is part of the common reading’s purpose. But a good book, like a true war story, does so much more than merely inform. Given the pictures that both Finkel and O’Brien paint of war, what does either writer want us to “do” with that information? Once you get a vivid taste of what war was like for a particular group of soldiers at a particular time, how does that awareness change you as a reader and a citizen?

A good book, like a true war story, can help you become better informed, but it also can (and perhaps should) make you a more earnest asker of questions. Forget about what happened in Vietnam or Iraq; instead, raise the question of why it happened. If there is a lesson to be learned in any war (or in any war story), what are those lessons, and have we learned them?

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Why poets need experimental filmmakers

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Peter Wullen:

Poets are egotistical and selfish creatures. They don’t like others to play with their words. But in these videopoems the ego is finally abolished. The words stay visible and primary but somehow they disappear inside the videopoem. The viewer or reader has to look very carefully to find them. The meaning of the videopoem is the perfect integration of word, sound and image.

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September day

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Dave Bonta

The Rain in My Purse:

The day was September, cool oozing from the dying wildflowers.

Cease beeping, we said to just about everyone.

We put up a sign outside the church: Park your car, forget your anger.

The leaves clattered, practically metallic, the café tables round as coins.

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They built it

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Hoarded Ordinaries:

This year, the right is rallying behind the cry of “I built this,” a shorthand slogan pointing to the importance of individual initiative and industry. Labor Day is a holiday to acknowledge the workers whose collective effort make our individual accomplishments possible: I am able to build this because they worked so hard to build that. When you drive to work every day, who built that road? When you negotiate orderly, crime-free streets, who protects your safety? When you go to the grocery story to spend your hard-earned paycheck, who stocked those shelves?

Whenever I’m grocery shopping and see a delivery man stocking shelves, I smile because my Dad did that, driving a bread route for years. If there was bread on the shelf when you went grocery shopping this week, it was because some hard-working Teamster like my dad drove a truck to deliver it: it didn’t just appear there by accident or chance.

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