50 or 60 people all managing to form a line on a narrow walkway waiting for the same building to unlock its narrow front door and yet still managing to appear alone and stand-offish is a strange sight, and if Don Gately had ever once seen a ballet he would, as an Ennet House resident, from his sunup smoking station on the fire escape outside the Five-Man bedroom upstairs, have seen the movements and postures necessary to maintain this isolation-in-union as balletic - DFW
Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.
For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.
I’ve been ‘working on’ my cv and portfolio for what seems like forever now. I’m good at this kind of thing, I’m a copywriter so the writing part comes easily to me, and my portfolio is as easy as sticking a bunch of screenshots in an InDesign file, but there’s something so fraught about the entire process that just keeps me paralyzed and unable to make much headway towards finishing this piece of shit.
I’m not career minded and at 25 (almost 26) I know if I don’t get my shit together soon, I’m fucked, but my analysis of this whole CV business traces the issue back to my hangups surrounding this whole notion of 'career’; namely, why vocations take on a defining role in how we’re perceived. In this kind of climate, my résumé becomes an extension of myself; just another representation of me that, divorced of the context that extensive interaction with me provides keeps me at the mercy of others.
I hate making résumés because it takes a lot out of me before I produce sth that I can trust to represent me standing alone, and if there’s one things I know about myself it’s that I hate letting people get too close. All I want is human interaction on my own terms, but unfortunately for the curmudgeon inside me, people don’t work that way, and like it or not, I’m going to finish that damn pdf file and get me a new job.
“If in our century there are still sacred things … if there was something like a sacred treasure of the cinema, then for me that would have to be the work of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.”
Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.
UK organization Hubbub’s aim is to maintain the streets of London completely clean through their #neatstreets campaign. The ingenious project prompts smokers to dispose of their cigarette butts into transparent divided containers in public areas.
The campaign also encourages gum chewers to play connect the dots on specifically designed boards to prevent further littering.
“Our public polling discovered that a staggering 86 per cent of people think littering is a disgusting habit yet only 15 per cent of us would actually confront someone and tell them that,” the organization writes on its webpage. “This is why from May to October we’re trialling a new approach to tackling littering on Villiers Street, Westminster, using the latest thinking on behaviour change and awareness raising from around the world.”
