Fancy.Prose.Style.

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Thu Oct 22

oldhollywood:

Frances Farmer (via getty)
No one ever came to me and said, “You’re a fool. There isn’t such a thing as God. Somebody has been stuffing you.” It wasn’t a murder. I think God just died of old age. And when I realized that he wasn’t any more, it didn’t shock me. It seemed natural and right.
Maybe it was because I was never properly impressed with a religion. I went to Sunday school and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn’t believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true
…I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was… nothingness.
-excerpt from “God Dies”, the controversial high school essay written by Frances Farmer in 1931. The full essay can be read here.
“It was pretty sad, because for the first time I found how stupid people could be. It sort of made me feel alone in the world. The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.”
-Farmer, on reaction to her essay “God Dies”

Frances Farmer (via getty)

No one ever came to me and said, “You’re a fool. There isn’t such a thing as God. Somebody has been stuffing you.” It wasn’t a murder. I think God just died of old age. And when I realized that he wasn’t any more, it didn’t shock me. It seemed natural and right.

Maybe it was because I was never properly impressed with a religion. I went to Sunday school and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn’t believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true

…I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was… nothingness.

-excerpt from “God Dies”, the controversial high school essay written by Frances Farmer in 1931. The full essay can be read here.

“It was pretty sad, because for the first time I found how stupid people could be. It sort of made me feel alone in the world. The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.”

-Farmer, on reaction to her essay “God Dies”

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Wed Sep 16

thefamouschronicles:

vonhottie:

Vote here to see von Hottie NAKED in a future issue of Time Out New York!

Vote as often as you can through 9/26/09. Please reblog,tweet, and forward to your friends!

Voting for Von Hottie!

I love Eve’s face in the background here.

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Sun Sep 13

Boy, Oh, Boy - Maureen Dowd

” “A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.

“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,” Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree. “

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Sat Sep 12

pile:

Quite a view last night

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“

Barack Obama is the president now. Regardless of what you think of him as a politician or a man, he admirably refuses to engage in 9/11 rhetoric. He does not operate from the cynical assumption that his audience believes that America Can Do No Wrong, that to criticize a war is to be a literal traitor, that to not worship the president is to spit on the graves of soldiers, that the correct response to a tragedy is to create a thousand more. He doesn’t talk like that. And so, fucking finally, the anniversary belongs to the latte-sipping out-of-touch coastal elites who witnessed it.

On 9/12, people in New York (and DC) did not feel as “great” as Glenn Beck. They just felt like shit. They felt scared and confused and depressed. Many of them were drunk. And only an idiot or an actual terrorist would want to always feel like it was 9/12/01. And eight years later, normal people, with brains and souls, have decided that some emotional distance from that disaster is healthier and wiser than trying to recapture the dread.

http://gawker.com/5357371/happy-first-post+911-911, by Pareene. Read the whole thing, it’s spot on.

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Fri Sep 11

“He recognized that the struggle between low brutish beings and what he called “an almost fatal hunger for permanence” was both too solemn and too hilarious ever to be resolved.”

- Anthony Lane, Waugh in Pieces

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Sun Sep 6

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

charlsie:

For my senior honors thesis, I am going to look at American fiction for girls. My topic is going to cover the Evolution of the Girls’ Book, and I am planning to explore novels spanning from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women to present ‘girl’ novels such as the Gossip Girl series by Cecily von Ziegesar and how these novels can impact girl culture.

My question for you is … what novel changed your life as a young woman? And why? What books do you remember admiring as a young teen girl?

I want to know!

I think this is wonderful. I’m going to give you a list.

The Mozart Season - Virginia Euwer Wolf

Juniper - Monica Furlong

The President’s Daughter - Ellen Emerson White

Sister Light, Sister Dark - Jane Yolen

A Proud Taste For Scarlet and Miniver - E.L. Konigsburg

I still have all of them and the girls and women in them are still my role models and could probably kill Bella Swan with a look.

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Fri Sep 4

For the last 14 weeks Marisa Meltzer's serial novel "Managed Expectations" has unspooled itself on The Awl each Friday. If you haven't read it yet, now's your chance to get the whole thing in one go. Thanks, Marisa! I'm enormously proud that we were able to host this.

(via alexbalk)

Everyone should read this, it’s brilliant. I have a list of favorite quotes but I don’t want to spoil it.

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Tue Sep 1

Abolish the Death Penalty

squashed:

Two weeks ago, I wrote,

Scalia and Thomas think it is okay to execute an innocent person. So do you, if you support the death penalty. We know our judicial system isn’t perfect…. [I]f you think it is okay to execute somebody under the current law, you also think it is okay to execute somebody who might be innocent.

It happened. And it’s important that nobody mistake this for some freak coincidence of failures. We should not be surprised. Willingham’s court-appointed defense attorney lacked experience, time, and resources—which puts him about on par with court-appointed defense attorneys in most places. The testimony of eyewitnesses predictably shifted when Willingham was named as a suspect. The arson investigators are not the only forensic experts to rely on junk science or make simple mistakes. There will always be unethical psychiatrists who will diagnose somebody they haven’t met as an irredeemable psychopath. The the courts that denied Willingham’s petition routinely deny similar petitions on similarly dubious grounds, largely because they can’t sort the meritorious claims from the frivolous ones. Clemancy remains a rare exception. And, if not for the heroic of a number of private individuals with no connection to the justice system, Willingham’s name would never have been cleared. We would never know the mistake. There is no one easy fix that could prevent this from happening again.

We executed an innocent man. If we do not eliminate the death penalty, we will do so again.

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Sat Aug 29

Republicans, please stop lying.

squashed:

People are confused enough already. And now Sen. Michael Enzi, R-Wyoming is saying, “These bills would expand comparative effectiveness research that would be used to limit or deny care based on age or disability of patients.”

No, that’s not what comparative effectiveness research would do. Comparative effectiveness research would simply compare how effective one treatment is relative to another. Insurance companies could then use this information when considering reimbursal rates. Let’s try an example:

A Globodrug Corp. introduces a brand new Purple Pill to lower blood pressure. Since it is 1) safe and 2) effective it receives FDA approval. Globodrug sells its patented pill for $50 a dose. An alternative treatment, Teal Pill, is long out of patent and sels for $1 a dose. It also lowers blood pressure. The FDA does not currently ask whether the Purple Pill works better than the Teal Pill. Currently, nobody asks that question. As you might imagine, Globodrug sends out a bunch of advertisements praising Purple Pill. It maybe also ghostwrites some articles talking about how great it is. Comparative effectiveness research would simply ask whether Purple Pill actually works better than Teal Pill. It might determine that they both do the same thing. In that case, an insurance company might pay for the Teal Pill but leave a large copay for anybody who still wants the Purple Pill.

You could also get a slightly less uncontroversial case if it turned out that the Teal Pill makes you sleepy but the Purple Pill does not. Is it nondrowsiness worth a 50-fold price increase? If you’re paying for it yourself, it probably isn’t. And with Comparative Effectiveness Research, you’ll atleast have access to that information.

Nobody is trying to deny care based on age or disability.

I promise that one day this blog will stop being so overtly political. But until then, there are lies to debunk.