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Doug Sr. Home Library 

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Libraries Reinhard Görner

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Ursula K. Le Guin refuses to blurb a story collection with no female writers. 

“Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here.” This is what a badass sounds like. 

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Clever design of book spine, for Decline of the Roman Empire 

 (via ESSkOdv.jpg (1280×960))

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Library Porn

Admont Abbey Library, Austria

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For some reason this is the first time I’ve come to this room to study

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So during the Dean confessional scene the woman's name he mentions is Gina, right? So I'm just here casually listening to Bon Jovis' Livin' On a Prayer and guess what name appears in the song? "Gina works the diner all day... " You think that there's anything to do with the scene/Dean ?

Reasons to be delighted:

Dean knows Bon Jovi songs well enough to remember details from the verses off-hand

Dean automatically gets Livin’ On A Prayer stuck in his head in praying-related situations

Dean has prayed to Cas like a gazillion times

Every time Cas shows up after Dean prays for him it’s probably halfway canon that he’s clapped eyes on him and thought “WoooAH WE’RE HALFWAY THHHHEEEERE”

By extension it’s reasonably likely that through repeated association even when he hasn’t prayed to him Dean just has to look at Cas and start hearing “Take my hand we’ll make it sweeeaaar” 

This probably filters in through the Longing Retcon of Doom so that Cas constantly has a tinny sound of Livin’ On A Prayer stuck in his head every time it’s stuck in Dean’s since Dean is thinking about him

Reasons to be pissed off:

I have Livin’ On A Prayer stuck in my head 

kill me

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Sunlight through a tree during an eclipse. The tree leaves act similar to how pinhole cameras work, leaving these little eclipse casts

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It is disappointing to continue to hear the same misinformation about vaccination, based on studies that were not only discredited but intentionally fraudulent from the start. However, to respond only with the scientific data is a distraction from the real political issue. Yes, vaccines have no known medical connection with autism. That is the truth; but so what if they did? If the misguided belief that vaccines cause autism is a reason not to vaccinate, the assumption is that a dead child is better than an autistic one. That is the level of stigma which ASAN and other members of the Autistic community are working to combat.

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Onze-Lieve-Vrouweabdij Abbey, Oosterhout, North Brabant: the library.

> Photo by Loek Tangel (1992).

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Ahmed Mohamed isn’t the only student of color to be handcuffed for a science project 

In 2013, Kiera Wilmot, then a 16-year-old at Florida’s Bartow High School, was arrested and recommended for expulsion after a science experiment using aluminum foil and toilet bowl cleaner malfunctioned in her biology class. But the examples don’t end there. Just last year an L.A. teacher was suspended for his students’ project.

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the “lolita” covers

here’s a question: if vladimir nabokov’s “lolita” is truly the psychological portrait of a messed up dude and not the girl – let alone a sexualized little girl, as all of the sexualization happens inside humbert humbert’s head – then why do all the covers focus on a girl, and usually a sexy aspect of a girl, usually quite young, and none of them feature a portrait of humbert humbert?

here are nabokov’s original instructions for the book cover:

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. … Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.

and yet, the representations of the sexy little girl abound.

i became driven by curiousity. why did this happen? why is this happening?

i am not alone – there’s a book about this, with several essays and artists’ conceptions about the politics and problems of representation surrounding the covers of “lolita.” this new yorker article gives a summary of the book and its ideas, and interviews one of the editors:

Many of the covers guilty of misrepresenting Lolita as a teen seductress feature images from Hollywood movie adaptations of the book— Kubrick’s 1962 version, starring Sue Lyon, and Adrian Lyne’s 1997 one. Are those films primarily to blame for the sexualization of Lolita? As is argued in several of the book’s essays, the promotional image of Sue Lyon in the heart-shaped sunglasses, taken by photographer Bert Stern, is easily the most significant culprit in this regard, much more so than the Kubrick film itself (significantly, neither the sunglasses nor the lollipop ever appears in the film), or the later film by Adrian Lyne. Once this image became associated with “Lolita”—and it’s important to remember that, in the film, Lolita is sixteen years old, not twelve—it really didn’t matter that it was a terribly inaccurate portrait. It became the image of Lolita, and it was ubiquitous. There are other factors that have contributed to the incorrect reading, from the book’s initial publication in Olympia Press’s Traveller’s Series (essentially, a collection of dirty books), to Kubrick’s startlingly unfaithful adaptation. At the heart of all of this seems to be the desire to make the sexual aspect of the novel more palatable.

here’s a couple of kubrick inspired covers:

which very well could have, after tremendous sales, have influenced the following covers:

…straying so far from the intention of nabokov that the phenomenon begins to look more like the symptom of something larger, something sicker.

after a lot of researching covers, it was here, in this sampling of concept covers for the book about the lolita covers, that i found an image that best represents the story to me:

[art by linn olofsdotter – and again, this is not an official cover]

but why aren’t all the covers like that? even the ones published by “legitimate” publishing companies, with full academic credentials, with no intended connection to the film; surely they must have read nabokov’s instructions for the cover. and yet, look at the top row of lolita covers: all legitimate publishing companies, not prone to smut. and yet.

my conclusion is that the lolita complex existed before “lolita” (and of course it did) – a patriarchal society is essentially operating with the same delusions of humbert humbert. nabokov did not produce the sexy girl covers of lolita, and kubrick had only the smallest hand in it. it was what people desired, requested and bought. the image of the sexy girl sells; intrigues; gets the hands on the books.

as elizabeth janeway said in her review in the new york review of books: “Humbert is every man who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh.”

isn’t that our media as a whole? our culture as a whole?

the whole lot of them/us – seeing the world through humbert-tinted glasses, seeing all others as Other and Object, as solipsistic dream-reality. as i scroll through the “lolita” covers i wonder: where’s the humanity in our humanity?

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Actually they did? A botanist named Robert Fortune smuggled tea plants and seeds from China to India to start plantations for a higher quality tea variety than grew in India previously (which didn't sell well back in England) cheaper than the prices in China. So the British tea industry needed both colonialism and industrial espionage...

Enough with the “British people shut up about the way other countries take their tea, you stole it from China” jokes

They didn’t steal a tea leaf from China

Maybe we could stop ignoring the British colonization of India, just saying

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Old Library at St John’s College, Cambridge

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Looking For Alaska

It kind of frightens me that I occasionally find myself in the headspace that Alaska must have been in the night of her not!accident. (Possibly triggering content behind the cut.)

You fail at something in the general category of Human 101.

Depression starts yelling at you about it.

Eventually you conclude that yes, Depression is right. There have been moments in my life where, if there had been a jackknifed truck and police cruiser right there, I would have crashed my car into them, hoping to not survive the impact. (But oh, what a point Pudge made - what is an “instantaneous” death anyways?) The material the boys were looking at made it sound like suicide is so premeditated, like it’s something you think about and dwell on, but sometimes it’s a crime of opportunity. So she drove off with - since she went to the bother of getting the flowers - every intention of visiting her mother’s grave, and also Depression yelling at her, and Depression won. 

The boys couldn’t’ve recognized what was going on any more than Alaska could have recognized what happened to her mother, because Alaska had done such a good job of hiding it… she was “moody”, she blew hot and cold, but she pushed her friends away when she was down because she thought they didn’t love her when she was down. (She had to have been so, so wrong.) They couldn’t’ve helped her because she didn’t want help… maybe because she felt like she didn’t deserve it.