RIP Nadine Gordimer. Here’s an interview she did with the Paris Review in 1979-1980:
INTERVIEWER
What did you do after that year at university? Did you begin any political activity?
GORDIMER
No, you see I was writing then—a lot. I was concentrating tremendously on writing. I wasn’t really interested in politics. My approach to living as a white supremacist, perforce, among blacks, was, I see now, the humanist approach, the individualistic approach. I felt that all I needed, in my own behavior, was to ignore and defy the color bar. In other words, my own attitude toward blacks seemed to be sufficient action. I didn’t see that it was pretty meaningless until much later.
HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, PONYBOY. The worst possible thing that someone could possibly ever do is RUN WITH THE BULLS, then GET GORED, then try to blame SOMEBODY ELSE because a host of variables could result in you being KILLED POINTLESSLY:
“It was the worst possible thing that someone could possibly ever do. You know, to push someone in the Run who is… to push somebody into a bull is just insane. It’s ridiculous.”
Oh, God, like…no, you should not push someone when you are all running with the bulls, but, here’s the thing, I do not think that you are making great, conscious decisions when you are being chased by bulls? Like, I am sure I would shove a sweet old lady towards a bull in that eventuality in order to live another day, which is why I have chosen not to run with the bulls in Pamplona. Oh, hahahahaha, jk, WOMEN BASICALLY NEVER DO SOMETHING THIS STUPID. Look at this graph I saw in Men’s Health (sometimes I read Men’s Health okay) about who dies from drowning and tell me who is better equipped to hold public office?
My dad’s life in the wake of WINNING [not personally] the World Cup is like when people take MDMA on Saturday and then have to go to work on Monday, but he has soothed himself by finishing Top of the Lake.
Oh, look, epic fail in school administration and student safety!
But BuzzFeed’s investigation found that both schools had been aware that Koetters sent numerous inappropriate emails in 2011 to Mikaela Gilbert-Lurie, then a 16-year-old junior at Marlborough, who told administrators that although their relationship was never sexual, Koetters told her he couldn’t control himself around her.
When Mikaela and her family reported Koetters to the school in 2012, Marlborough responded by stripping Koetters of his English department chairmanship and forbidding him from contacting Mikaela, among other disciplinary actions. But the school did not fire him and Koetters remained at Marlborough alongside Mikaela for a full year.
Koetters did not respond to BuzzFeed’s repeated requests for comment.
Polytechnic knew about Mikaela’s allegations before hiring Koetters, thanks to calls from both Marlborough and Leslie Gilbert-Lurie, Mikaela’s mother. But Koetters did not leave Polytechnic until BuzzFeed contacted the school for comment. In a July 10 statement, Polytechnic confirmed that Koetters no longer worked at the school and that it “considered a range of information and perspectives” before hiring Koetters.
How Jessi of The Babysitters Club does money OH WOW BILLFOLD:
Then there are the theater kids, the ones who assume they’ll be famous someday and that Jessi is here, teaching theater movement at this state school, because she failed. Jessi didn’t fail. Her credits are there on her office wall for anyone to see. She was one of only three African-American dancers in the Brailsford Company. She danced Odette/Odile, Coppélia, and was the Arabian dancer in The Nutcracker more times than she cares to count. (A brown-skinned ballerina always gets the Arabian role, never the Sugar Plum Fairy.)
Jessi didn’t fail; she simply got older. Now she’s an assistant professor teaching a 5/5 course load at a state school and making less than she did as a ballet dancer, but she’s in the rural Midwest so she has a home — an actual house with a yard — for herself and her daughter, which was more than she ever had in New York.
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Organizing things is a skill. Oh, God, I feel terrible but I just want to read more stories about DashCon all dayyyyyy what a MESS:
“Featured artist Noelle Stevenson (a.k.a. gingerhaze, an extremely popular Tumblr artist and author) also found out that her hotel room had not been paid for, at which point she left the convention to sleep on a sofa bed constructed by one of the Night Vale writers.”
Oh, look, a HEAVILY REDACTED LETTER that is meant to prove something.
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Are you watching “American Ninja Warrior” because HOLY SHIT:
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Oh, man, what a great day, really:
I, for one, am prepared to take this account as the gospel truth. A couple issues nonetheless leap to mind. One: what kind of “friend” is this? Žižek’s got an underminer on his hands. “Oh, here, totally, you can use this stuff I just cut and pasted from a random webpage that the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an active hate group! No prob at all, happy to help, let’s get drinks soon.”
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Let’s make it perfect, here’s “Undermine” from Nashville, goin’ out to Slavoj Žižek:
