Author: lia

the jarvis bark

I had a few YouTube gems saved up to share this afternoon but YouTube is under the weather, so instead you get to see a video I uploaded to Vimeo and my Vox blog a while back. Jarv barks so rarely that I figured I should capture the moment, so here are 29.01 seconds of my dog doing his fortnightly existential barking at nothing bark:

I love his bark because it’s fairly low pitched and very macho, i.e. not what you’d expect from a small dog, even a fat one. Also: one of his nicknames is wao-wao.

foster care cinderellas

Foster Care Cinderellas Spend a Fairy-Tale Night. I was really moved by this piece in the LA Times about a life-skills camp for teenage girls and young women leaving foster care, many for the first time in their lives. Eva, who’s been in the system since birth, “doesn’t like it if someone says she’s blossoming like a flower. “I’d much rather be a tree,” she said. “Trees stand still and I just want to stand still.”

out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing

My favorite poem from this year’s MTA Poetry in Motion selection is by Rumi, the highly influential 13th century Persian Sufi mystic and poet.

Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.

After Rumi’s death, his followers founded the Mevlev Sufi order, which you probably don’t know that you know about but you do because we know them today mainly as the whirling dervishes. I’ve always found them visually arresting (photo essay, short video clip) but never knew the story behind it.
The dance, or Sema, is a mystical journey in which “the seeker symbolically turns towards the truth, grows through love, abandons the ego, finds the truth, and arrives at the “Perfect”; then returns from this spiritual journey with greater maturity, so as to love and to be of service to the whole of creation without discrimination against beliefs, races, classes and nations.” Which is a fancy way of saying that Rumi was big on humans evolving past all the classifications we cling to—even those of religion. Not something you’d expect from a religious leader today, let alone one born seven centuries ago. I wonder if we’ll ever get there.

beautiful shivs


Dangerous Beauty: The Art of the Shiv
, a collection of shivs confiscated from a maximum security prison in the 70s. “By law, prisoners must be provided materials to have an opportunity to prepare their own legal defenses. In the 1980s, typewriters were made available for this purpose: the long, notched “spear” here is the carriage return from a prison-issued typewriter.”

smb literary criticism

Super Mario Bros: A Literary Criticism. “Right after he has apparently slid down a flagpole (a strong reference to receiving anal sex), he finds himself in the proverbial sewers, already feeling a deep low from his initial hits wearing off. But after more anal sex, he is high in the mountains, which psychadelically appear as gigantic mushrooms, an obvious result of his hallucinatory state.” [ via Negatendo ]

more than we let on

From Miranda:

I think in life, everyone loves everything more than they let on, and maybe we’re also more afraid than we let on. I’m proud at how many times a day I say ‘I love you.’ But I think maybe I don’t fight enough. I think we should always be telling each other our feelings, all the time. We ought to be always asking each other the hardest questions and answering them as hard as we can.