~ Dorothea Lange
Josh Barro offers this media dragon like example of the temdency to mistake "models" for real life ."
Our Collective Response to the Houston Tragedy Is Proof That Greed and Capitalism Aren’t the Only Ways to Run Society AlterNet
Category 5 Irma the 5th Strongest Atlantic Hurricane on Record Tony at Bahamas via Weather Underground
John Ashbery, for whom writing was an immersive experience, like taking a bath in cold rivers of words, is dead at 90... Christian Lorentzen... Evan Kindley... Larissa MacFarquhar... Rae Armantrout... Ben Lerner... Tania Ketenjian... Paul Muldoon... David Orr... Katy Waldman... Alex Ross... The Guardian... The TLS... AP... Poetry Foundation... ... more From Dust to Dust - Ashes to Ashes
Books, says Josephine Wilson, can be devastating. And that's why writers want their books to be read. "They want someone to get them, you want to be got and got not just as a kind of 'oh, yeh, blah'. And that's the remarkable things when strangers read you and not just your husband."
The judges described Extinctions as "compassionate and unapologetically intelligent ... a meditation on survival: on what people carry, on how they cope, and on why they might, after so much putting their head in the sand, come to a decision to engage, and even change."
Wilson said creative ideas were not ethereal elements to be conjured out of thin air. "This is not autobiographical, but (the ideas) have to be something that matters and for me there was a kind of puzzle, a desire to write about the beginnings and end of life.
"I was at the time caught up in family and my father's very steady and quite difficult decline and then my mother. At the same time, my husband and I were going through the adoption of our second child. I had these two things – life and death – together. They seemed incommensurate at the time, but these are things that we all face."
Josephine Wilson wins Miles Franklin for Extinctions, a matter of life and death
TIME GENTLEMEN TIME via Winston Hills Hotel... – “What a jagged image we use for women who achieve greatly, defining accomplishment in terms of the barrier rather than the triumph. There she is up where the air is thin, where men still outnumber women, but where the altitude is awesome. Our goal with Firsts is for every woman and girl to find someone whose presence in the highest reaches of success says to her that it is safe to climb, come on up, the view is spectacular.” Take some time to watch and listen to the videos that accompany each bio, in alphabetical order, in this presentation that drives home the range and impact what has been accomplished by women in every field of endeavor. This presentation, based on a book, also clearly illuminates the steep barriers and multiplicity of challenges that remain.
