This movie never gets old.
(Source: smokeandkissesspinningwhispers, via alternate-worlds)
For more than half a century, poet and essayist Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 — March 27, 2012) explored with equal parts courage and conviction such complex cultural phenomena as identity and ideology, gender and politics, oppression and freedom. The recipient of numerous honors, including the National Book Award for Poetry, two Guggenheim fellowships, and a MacArthur “genius” grant — Rich is celebrated as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.
For Rich, art was as much a tool of creative expression as it was a vehicle for empathy, for expanding one’s understanding of the world beyond the limits of the individual. In a 2005 conversation at the Kelly Writers House, she articulates her ethos with a beautiful definition of art:
One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.Rich’s own life was anything but ordinary. In 1953, she married Harvard professor Alfred Haskell Conrad, who fathered her three children. Over the decade that followed, her career exploded, in the process catapulting her into a spurt of personal growth, self-discovery, and political awakening. In 1970, stifled by the institution of marriage, Rich divorced Conrad. In 1976, she met and fell in love with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff, who became her lifelong partner and inspired Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), her first literary exploration of lesbian desire and sexuality, later included in one of her most celebrated works, The Dream of a Common Language (1978). The two remained together for thirty-six years, until Rich’s death in 2012. In a lamentable manifestation of the current failings of marriage equality, as of this writing, her Wikipedia entry still lists Conrad as her only spouse.
In 1997, in protest against the growing monopoly of power and the government’s proposed plan to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, Rich famously became the first and only person to date to decline the prestigious National Medal of Arts, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual artist on behalf of the people of the United States, previously awarded to such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Updike, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and fellow reconstructionist Maya Angelou.
But despite the strong undercurrents of political and sociocultural commentary, Rich’s work was driven first and foremost by the irrepressible stirrings of her inner life. She reflected in an interview:
A poem can come out of something seen, something overheard, listening to music, an article in a newspaper, a book, a combination of all these… There’s a kind of emotional release that I then find in the act of writing the poem. It’s not, ‘I’m now going to sit down and write a poem about this.’Learn more: Brain Pickings | Wikipedia
Few have done more to make women feel visible, heard, and included than Mary Thom (June 3, 1944 – April 26, 2013), founding editor of legendary feminist magazine Ms. and editor-in-chief of the Women’s Media Center, the think-tank co-founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and reconstructionist Gloria Steinem.
In her role as editor extraordinaire, Thom deliberately avoided the limelight herself while selflessly amplifying women’s voices and championing equal rights in all aspects of life, from career to sexuality. In the very first issue of Ms., “in a campaign for honesty and freedom,” fifty-three women signed a petition stating that they had had an abortion or standing in solidarity with others who had. Long before the era of digitally-driven political transparency, Thom created a system of grading politicians and their position on reproductive rights, which went on to become one of Ms. magazine’s most popular features. What reconstructionist Ursula Nordstrom did for the voice of children’s literature, Thom did for the voice of feminism.
To honor Thom’s legacy, the Women’s Media Center has announced a Mary Thom Art of Editing Award. Steinem, Morgan, and Fonda reflected on the award and its inspiration:
A first-rate editor practices a craft demanding great skill, one that doesn’t impose external meaning or agendas on a work but elicits the content and the creator’s voice all the more clearly. Mary Thom did this and more.For that and so much more, thank you, Mary.
Learn more: Women’s Media Center
100 years of Indian Cinema: A Century of Women - Part 1; Film Impressions
(via suchykins)
Bono on His Dad’s Final Days
“I’d go and usually have a pint of Guinness and a chaser to steady my nerves. Then I’d go to the hospital and I’d sleep beside my father.”
Interviewed by Anthony Bozza | October 2001 | By phone | Minidisc recorder
Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby and Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway in clothing by Brooks Brothers.
Carey Mulligan, pictured here wearing a dress by Catherine Martin and earrings from the Great Gatsby Collection by Tiffany & Co., stars as Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby,which opens May 10.
In August 1961, two young girls speak with their grandparents in East Germany over a barbed wire fence, a barricade which later became the Berlin Wall (U.S. Department of State)
Elizabeth Cline tells Terry Gross about how the competitive edge for Bangladesh in the garment manufacturing business is simply its low labor costs:
There is no other reason why a company would be doing business there. These deaths are happening because they are trying to step into the shoes of China. The cost of labor, the costs are going up in China and fashion companies are trying to maintain their margins and trying to maintain their cheap prices, so they want Bangladesh to do what China was doing. But Bangladesh can’t do that.
Image via ecoterre
