LOVED this interview about being gay in publishing in the 1970s:
What else did you acquire and edit initially, and how long was it before you decided there was a market for LGBT lit?
That took a while—I was a bit dense, I guess. The first books that really hooked me on publishing were political. I might not have known much about editing or publishing, but politics was what I knew from the ’60s, and the earliest books I really got involved in were political.
I soon came to see that this could be an interesting job, and I started feeling my way into it. The most notable book I edited in the beginning was probably for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf. It was actually Ntozake Shange who raised the issue of gay books with me, saying, “You’re publishing all these women’s books and black books, how come you aren’t publishing more gay books?”
Which was a good question.
The utter nonsense spewed by those jerks who hassle women outside Planned Parenthood:
Outside the Worcester clinic, demonstrator Fred Delouis, who is in his 80s and has been protesting abortion for more than 30 years, wears a sandwich board sign with a bloodied fetal head and the words “STOP ABORTION” on the front, and an image of a fetus in utero on the back. He also points to social change as destructive.
“Society was great before they had abortions,” he says. “Because there wasn’t as much evil in the world. They weren’t murdering God’s babies, which is the most important thing.”
I am incapable of wearing contacts or thinking about contacts so this THING on fears about contact lenses had a lot of Personal Resonance for me:
4. I misidentify the contact disinfectant with 3% hydrogen peroxide for normal contact solution again. Once, a roommate of mine had a 3% hydrogen peroxide lens cleaner called Clear Care. It is apparently supposed to be used with a special contact lens holder that neutralizes the peroxide. Hmm. Because the bottle and label and most of the language included on the label looked identical to that of non-cornea-burn contact solution, I used it as if it were non-cornea-burn contact solution. Trouble was, it was cornea-burn contact solution. Lesson learned, I guess. I never used my roommate’s contact solution again and, after several rounds of eye-flushing and screaming (genuinely), my eyes were left without permanent damage (as far as I know). In this fear, they are left with permanent damage. I am blind. Why didn’t I just buy more of my own contact solution when it ran out? Why didn’t I read the label more carefully? Why was I born with imperfect vision when some were born with perfect vision?
Here is an informative and horrifying article about starfish wasting disease:
In June 2013, Steven Fradkin stumbled upon a grisly scene at Starfish Point in Washington, northwest of Seattle. About one in four of the park’s namesake animals were contorted and covered in white lesions. The seriously sick starfish were crumpled and sagging, their internal organs beginning to rupture through their skin. But that wasn’t what really stuck with Fradkin, when I spoke to him a year later. What really affected him were the arms that had ripped loose from the animals’ bodies. “There were individual arms just roaming around in a Walking Dead kind of way,” he says.
I never read Salon anymore but a LISTICLE brought me back into the fold today:
5. David Brooks: Research Is for Liberals
6. Well: How to Burn Calories While Getting Your Kid Into a First-Tier College
7. The Pour: Using Oenophile Jargon to Rationalize Ordering the Second Cheapest Bottle on the List
8. Thomas Friedman: I Kinda Wanna Make Out with China
9. Maureen Dowd: Inscrutable Fake Dialogue Utterly Devoid of Context
10. A Thing Happened at Harvard
11. Magazine Preview: A Slightly Different Take on an Increasingly Common Diagnosis
A TWOFER in deleted comments of the day:
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