Thursday, June 30, 2011

Mount Tolmie Park

I recently was able to wander around Victoria, Canada, and I thought I'd share some of my pictures with everyone. This first set of pictures were taken in Mount Tolmie Park, which overlooks the city.
Tolmie Park was first concieved of in 1937, when people began making efforts to conserve the surrounding area. The last set of improvements were made last year, in 2010. It is the highest peak in the Bowker Creek watershed. The part has 1150 miles of trail, most of which lead up to the summit. There are fifteen mammal and thousands of different insect species that call the park home, in addition to other creatures.


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This is a Garry Oak, the only tree native to this area. Other fauna in this area include western buttercups and licorice ferns.
4457 The summit is a great place to see some of the other surrounding geography, including Mount Douglass. Unfortunately, on the day I was up there to take this picture, you really couldn't see anything that far away. Even so, the view was glorious.



The park has a mass every Easter Sunday at the summit, and I'm assuming this is the venue. I really hope this gets used more often than just once a year, as I think it would be a great place to have poetry readings at dawn or dusk.



A delightful bit of sidewalk art. I really love the color choices.
4455 The rock at the summit, with labels telling you what direction everything is in. Among other things, this plaque indicates where Seattle, Mount Douglass and even where Port Angeles is, which is probably now most famous for being one of the towns featured in the Twilight series.



I like how dark and forboddening the clouds are in this picture.






About 30 percent of the Bowker Creek Watershed is covered by things like roads and parking lots.






I had the opportunity to meet this older man while on my travels. He told me that he was a retired preacher. He's one of the more colorful and delightful people I've gotten to know. (And I will admit, if he was still preaching, I'd go to his church.)



He scrambled right up to the top of this rock, without reservations and without the need for help.






The preacher again. Look at that wonderful smile!



Are these perhaps those western buttercups that are a part of Mount Tolmie's ecosystem?









The reminder I needed.
I also have pictures of the Empress, the famed hotel near Mount Tolmie Park, posted on my Flikr page if you are interested.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Glass Making

Recently, I had the opportunity to sit in on and participate in glass making. Although I love glass and think it can be a beautiful artistic expression, previous to this, I did not know much about it.
In the beginning, the glass is heated on a pike in an oven. Then, other various colored glasses are attached onto the first, uncolored glass, then heated along with it. This forms a soupy-looking glass end on the pike.


At this point, techniques for adding designs into the glass come in. In this picture, you can see various little dots all over the glass. If the glass was left unmanipulated, it would simply come out covered in colored spots. Here, the artist has pulled down part of the glass at the top, farther away from the pike, down closer to the pike. This will create what is called a drape look. Only one drape has been added to this glass at this point, but typically artists add multiple drapes.


After the drapes have been added into the glass, it has to be reheated in the oven. This particular kind is referred to by artists as "the glory hole." (Glass artists were, up until the 70s, completely male, and this comes out sometimes in their choice of terminology.)


After being reheated, the glass has to be rolled again. The glass here is being rolled on a steel table, which absorbs much of the heat and cools it down again. If you look closely, you can clearly see one of the drape pulls in the design.


The glass is then rolled and reshaped with a wood bowl that looks similar to a spoon. The bowl sits in a bucket of water when it is not in use, and sometimes artists will redip the bowl while working with glass. This particular bowl is cheery, which is the kind preferred by glass artists, though any fruit wood works.


One of the last steps this artist chose was to add gold leaf. The gold leaf has to be rolled on, similar to the glass that has to be rolled on at the beginning of the process. Gold leaf is always one of the last steps of the process because it would vaporize if exposed to too much heat.


Next, the glass is blown to its full shape. The pike is howled out. Sometimes a tube is connected onto the opposite end of the pike and the artist blows to give the glass its full shape. You have to blow fairly hard at the beginning, and you have to blow harder as you go because the glass is stretching out and cooling down, making it harder to manipulate. At the same time the glass is being blown, the pike is being rolled in place so that the glass is even. (This is similar to working a pottery wheel, where the bowl is moving so that the designs will be even.)
As always, there are additional pictures on my Flikr page.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Jack Detroit's Leah Moss

There's a wonderful interview with Jack Detroit's Leah Moss. Moss founded the men's magazine about a year ago, and it launched in May.
I love what she says in the interview about how vibrant Detroit is, and how it could benefit from support. I hate encountering the negative attitudes about the city, especially when it comes from people who have never been there and are relying on what they see on television.
I love her choice in the name Jack Detroit. I'm not sure how intentionally it was, but it makes me imagine a savvy, stylish art thief.
Congratulations, Ms. Moss, on the launch of your magazine!

Monday, June 27, 2011

"Long Way Down" by the Goo Goo Dolls

My friend Carrie showed me this performance of the Goo Goo Dolls doing "Long Way Down."
The Goo Goo Dolls are one of those bands I am vaguely aware of. I hear their songs when I am watching movies or sometimes at parties, but they are not a band I have ever listened to beyond those encounters.
This performance is changing my mind. I love 90s rock, and this is an almost perfect little slice of the sound that I liked in 90s rock, which was heavily influenced by pop but also the sort of pop rock that Nirvana was on its way to perfecting before they took a detour with In Utero. (That's not meant to be a criticism of In Utero, which I actually really love. It's one of those perfect albums.)

Radiohead's "No Surprises"


In the few months since Radiohead has released their latest album, The King of Limbs, I've been listening to it nonstop. Eventually, I am going to have to sit down and write my thoughts on this album down, but in the meantime, I've been reviewing their older work.
"No Surprises" is so pop in comparison with their newer work; it is hard to imagine this band, writing a typical 90s pop song, would turn out much more experimental pieces that often were not songs so much as audible landscapes. Reviewing Radiohead's career, I find myself thinking of The Beatles, who started writing fairly basic pop songs at the beginning of their career, ones that fit in with other music at that time, and as the years went on, they became stranger, putting out albums like The White Album and Yellow Submarine. And like the Beatles, Radiohead's earlier, less experimental work is still delightful and just as perfect.
I'm just crossing my fingers that Radiohead doesn't break up.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

"Willy Loman: A Cataloge Poem"

Joel E. Jacobson recently published "Willy Loman: A Cataloge Poem" on his blog.
I really like the idea of writing a poem from the perspective of a literary character, or any character for that matter. Robert Browning famously perfected the idea of writing poems as monologues from characters who defined themselves as the poem progressed, particularly in his poems "My Last Duchess" and "Fra Lippo Lippi."
I love the phrase "faded like a bad TV show." That's a great description.
I also love the image at the end of this poem, where the miscellaneous material of capitalism creates a self-annihilating device. Nice.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

British Titles for Sale


Read this fascinating article about how various British titles are being sold off. As much as I am wary of British nobility, I am curious as to what it is like to have these titles in the modern world, especially since multiple tiles are currently or will be on sale soon, including " Lordship of Elrington in Northumberland, Lordship of Showell in Oxfordshire...Lordship of Grateley in Hampshire" and "Lordship of the Manor of Manaton." This last one was apparently the inspiration behind the Sherlock mystery of "The Hound of the Baskervilles."
Manor of Manaton could easily become one of those touristy places, where mostly non-British people come to see the house from the Hound of the Baskervilles.

Lady Gaga's "Edge of Glory"

Lady Gaga recently did this great performance of her song "Edge of Glory" in France.  As much as I loved her mermaid-meets-Salt-N'-Peppa look at the beginning of the song, I really loved her second outfit, which is a simplier dress that could have been one of the costumes in "Alejandro." 
It is high time Lady Gaga got her own boutique, because I would love to wear some of her costumes. 

Friday, June 24, 2011

Poor English

Afternoon Snooze recently posted this incredibly racist piece of advertising, involving an Asian restaurant.  Given the note at the bottom of the ad that the restaurant is in "Okemos," I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this is somewhere in the Lansing, Michigan area, where I went to school for four years.
I'm pretty disgusted by this.  It would be one thing if the ad subverted the racist notion that people of color "talk funny," but it instead outright states an incredibly nasty idea.  What's more, it's meant to be funny.  The tone and the poor production are meant to make this ironic.  Uncritical viewers are meant to realize how racist it is and laugh anyway.  Apparently it's okay to make racist jokes, as long as it's an obvious racist joke.  Yeah, okay, sure.
As usual, the comments are pretty disappointing too.  Most of the comments commend this ad, saying that they would go to a restaurant like this.  Two others comment that "Honesty is the best policy."  When did honesty become equated with white people's stereotypes of people of color?  White people are notorious for their incorrect grammar and general lack of literacy, but no one would ever even think to make a joke about white people, and if they did, it would be a class-based viewpoint.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Looking Presidential

Slate recently posted this short article comparing Republican candidates to B-list actors who play Presidents in movies.
This is sort of a nice switch from the usual way politics and appearance plays out. Female politicians are always being dissected for their physical appearance. Their hair, their clothes (skirts or power suits?), how old they look, and other markers that don't usually represent their skills or experience or even how good they might be at a particular job. So, finally, someone is letting female politicians take a break on the whole "but is she matronly enough?" debate and looking at men.
That said, there are much better ways to judge someone's fitness.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Living Room Design

Obviously, in addition to being nearly every other kind of nerd on the planet, I am a design nerd.  I love various kinds of art, even the interior decoration kind.  While surfing on the great I Love Old Magazines tumblr, I discovered this great living room set.
I like that (now) vintage look of this.  There's something about this that makes me vaguely think of someone's cool Grandma.  The yellow/green combination looks surprisingly nice.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Feminsim and Snow White

Reading that there is a new Snow White movie in the works (not to be confused with about four other Snow White projects going on right now), I found myself excited.   
What intrigues me most about this project is that there have been significant additions to the main character.  In this version, she apparently will be actively fighting to regain her kingdom and will wear armor.
Like a lot of other women, as a girl I went through my princess phrase.  And one of the plots that I always found the most fascinating to read about concerned young women who were stripped of their rightful inheritance and often exiled or locked up.  (It should also be noted that sometimes these things happened because they were women and their social status was inherently limited.)  The young women struggled to take back what was their's.  This occurred historically with princesses like Cleopatra, who spent two years in Rome or fictionally with characters like Rapunzel, who was locked up for reasons various authors have imagined.  Unfortunately, these princess tales of going out and getting what you want are few and far between, usually focusing on a passive woman who has to be rescued by a man, and often featuring other, older, unmarried women who are evil. 
I can't wait to see where these people take this movie.  I'm hoping it will be feminist in the sense that it will empower young women to seek out reclaiming their own "kingdoms." 

Monday, June 20, 2011

University of Gallifrey

One of my friends pointed me to this amazing University of Gallifrey t-shirt. This thing is terribly cute and fun.
I was wondering if Gallifrey possible had their own state school, because nothing would be better than a Gallifrey State shirt with a TARDIS on it.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Lesbians in Shakespeare

I find myself skeptical of this article about Shakespeare having multiple lesbian characters.  Or rather, the assumption that many of his female characters mentioned in this article were intended to be gay.
Using the colloquial definition of a lesbian, and not the one put forth by Adrienne Rich, the only characters who might actually be lesbians are Viola and Olivia.  And even there it's hard to determine how much of Olivia's affections was based on Viola or her made-up persona, one that was meant to be a man.  And then, of course, the question becomes one what that says about lesbian desires.  It would be easy to conclude that Olivia likes the male persona but wouldn't want the female body that comes along with it, which could be interpreted to mean that lesbians secretly desire masculinity, which is problematic.  
Hermione from A Winter's Tale, Cleopatra from Antony and Cleopatra, and Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing could be involved with their female servants or friends, but the evidence that they were is circumstantial at best.  I would be more convinced if there was some evidence that Shakespeare was inspired by historical events that involved women loving women or stories of women loving women, since so much of what Shakespeare wrote was based on other sources.  
This is not to say that modern stagings of Shakespeare's plays cannot choose to make characters explicitly lesbians, just that the text itself doesn't give such easy answers.  Given Shakespeare's time, where women and women's sexuality was always under male control, it's hard to see Shakespeare allowing such a marginalized group the true voice they deserved.  (And, one could easily argue that really giving lesbians a voice means allowing them to tell the stories they want to tell, and not a coded-as-straight white man.)  Choosing to stage certain characters as lesbians is a wonderful idea, especially in protest to how various marginalized groups were marginalized within literature.  What Jankowski, the scholar in question doing much of the work, says is correct, that there is a "lesbian void" in literature.  Lesbians were ignored by male writers, and lesbians who wrote were often ignored by readers.  
The Renaissance play that actually has one of the most interesting depictions of a woman who hangs out with other women is The Roaring Girl.  This play, too, has a problematic set of ideas about gender and women's place in the world. 

Saturday, June 18, 2011

To all of the kick ass, beautiful fierce femmes out there...


This is an amazing poem by Ivan Coyote. I love all the details in this. I love that he acknowledges how painful heels are sometimes. And I love his catalogs, especially of the various, so-called "imperfections" on the body.
There are so many amazing lines like "Please don't stop looking at me." I also loved his "sometimes my chest is a field of landmines."
And finally, the wonderful sense of humor that Coyote has here. His comments about accidents involving pendants was great.
The political message, about queer pride and acknowledging how we fight oppressions in our everyday life.

Friday, June 17, 2011

Turban Experiments

Multicultural Steampunk has this great post that talks about the use and history of the turban.  Turbans are stereotypically associated with Muslims, though in fact they have been used by other groups, like Sikhs. 
I tried making one of these turbans myself, and I can't decide if I like mine or not.  I used brightly colored scarves and decorated it with mardi gras beads just as an experiment (they went with the bright colors).  I'm not sure I liked how it looked on me, but it was a fun experiment.  

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp

Wuthering Iris posted this amazing (and relatively simply, from the looks of it) recipe for Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp. Sounds delicious.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Jerusalem Day 2011


This is a really fascinating video that depicts parts of Jerusalem Day 2011. 
As with so many YouTube videos, usually the most fascinating thing is the comments underneath the video.
One of the more common things said about this video was that they were probably not Israelis but Americans.  There's probably some truth to it.  That said, the point of the video was not to necessarily criticize all Israelis but Zionists, and although many Zionists may live in Israel, you can believe in the absolute right of Israel as a theocratic state and not actual be a resident of the country.
There was a lot of debate over what this means, but it obviously depicts a certain culture of fear.  In doing this, Zionists send the message that non-Jewish homes will not be respected, and that Zionists have the right to everything there.  For an American example, if white people charged into a predominately African American neighborhood at night, singing songs about the superiority of white people and how white people own the land, and then shouted phrases that called for the slaughter of those African Americans, that behavior would be unacceptable.  It would instill a sense of fear to those African Americans about the safety of their community and the wider world's sense of being against them and seeing them as less than human. 
What's important to take away from this video is the intersections of nationalism and racism.  Nationalism is a tool of the state to make its citizens loyal to them no matter what atrocities they may commit (often worded rhetorically as "for the best of the people" etc.)  States encourage racism because it create an "us versus them" mentality, further reinforcing loyalty to manipulative and oppressive forces.
This video also highlights the importance between separation between state and religion, because most of the problems depicted here are specifically problems that happen in a theocratic society, where one set of religious beliefs is endorsed by the state.  Israel doesn't even endorse Judaism per se but an extremely right-wing, nationalistic version of Judaism, similar in some ways to the nationalistic versions of Christianity (currently used by most members of the American Right Wing Christian groups) and the nationalistically-influenced strains of Islam.  Religion is a tool of numerous states, and its use is not only detrimental to the people who live under that state, a member of that religion or not, but it obfuscates the actual problems. 
Being Jewish is seen as a requirement of Israeli citizenship.  What would be really revolutionary is for citizenship not to be based on religion or ethnic identity.  

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Historical Film Costumes

Enchanted Serenity has this intense gallery of costumes that have been used in various movies and are about to be auctioned off.
Where to even begin with how lovely some of these dresses are?  So many of them look like they are in decent condition, despite being used in old movies like The Virgin Queen, Marie Antoinette, and Pride and Prejudice.  I love so many of these dresses.  Too bad they don't have patterns and other information to help make them. 

Monday, June 13, 2011

Outlining Harry Potter


Given that the last Harry Potter movie is coming out soon, I thought I'd share a bit of Potter stuff with you. Months ago, the internet posted an outline J.K. Rowling wrote for The Order of the Phoenix.
What strikes me is how ordinary this outline looks at first glance. It honestly looks like a lot of the charts I drew as a kid, the only difference here being it charts the plots of a novel. And once you get looking at it, you see that the multiple plots are planned out, and that progress was being made in these plotlines, even if we as readers didn't hear about them.
A few years back Rowling mentioned she was interested in writing mystery novels, and, considering that each Potter book contains a fair bit of sleuthing and larger mysteries tie together the whole series, Rowling would clearly be able to pull off a mystery novel. Mystery novels involve pretty intense planning, and this outline proves she knows exactly how to do it.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Abandoned Yugoslavian Monuments

LeRoy's Pink Fist recently posted this really fascinating collection of monuments created during the existence of Yugoslavia that have since been abandoned.  Apparently there isn't much information left on them, but I find the one above, that looks like it has been a building shattered by a bomb, to be compelling.  Given that these were on sites of things like concentration camps and battles, I wonder if this building is meant to symbolize the shattering of normal human creations. 

Saturday, June 11, 2011

They Don't Make Them Like They Use To

American Duchess recently posted a review of the shoes she wore at a Ren Faire. As someone who has been known to tromp around in historical clothing, shoes are a practical problem. On one hand, you want something that is historically accurate and on the other, you're worried about what would be best for your feet. She found these particular shoes to be amazing, proving that old shoe designs still work.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Anne Carson Interview

The Paris Review has a great interview tradition to the point where the interviews have been collected in books. I really enjoyed the interview with Anne Carson, a Canadian poet who now teaches at the University of Michigan.
One of the things that interests me about poets is what they do on their off time, that is to say the time when they are not doing "poet" things like reading and writing. The vast majority of poets teach, and that is interesting to, but I want to know about the smaller details of their lives like their hobbies, the things that don't necessarily come out in their poetry. Frank O'Hara, for example, once said he liked movies, and in this interview Carson mentions she does shadowboxing. I can't think of any poet who has done boxing, or anything close to boxing.
One of the other hobbies of Carson is making books, things that she gives to one another person. The tradition of bookmakers being poets and vice versa is well documented, the most famous being Emily Dickinson, who would collect her then-unpublished poetry into little books that she'd give her neighbors. Someone is going to have to do an academic study of Carson's book creations one day.
I also love it when poets talk about other poets. I really enjoyed Carson talk about Catallus, who I've always loved. She talks about his infamous 101 poem, which is my favorite Catallus poem. Later on, she quotes Sappho's Fragment 31, which I also love.
I also love the Lacan quote that she uses, "The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom." Once again, Lacan manages to get it right exactly. Carson has some great one liners too, like when she says "Model yourself on Oscar Wilde and you just lie all the time."

Thursday, June 9, 2011

"A Good Man Goes to War"

(Just as a friendly note, there might be some spoilers for the episode in this post.)
So I finally sat down and watched the latest Doctor Who episode, "A Good Man Goes to War."  I'm not going to formally review over at my review blog because really, I was a bit disappointed in the whole thing.  Doctor Who has increasingly turned into a hot mess, and although certain things remain impressive and fun, I find myself often wondering when the show will do something that emotionally gets to me.
My friend Christine has an excellent little rundown of what we still don't know as audience members.  And those questions aren't really all that compelling to me.
What I do want to know is if Steven Moffat and company were influenced by other science fiction and fantasy, because I find the similarities between River Song as a superbaby similar to all the superbaby storylines from about ten years ago when shows like The X-Files (alien DNA and can float things about its head), Angel (born of two vampires and is strong and fast) and Charmed (the baby of a witch and whitelighter and was performing magic from the womb) were all doing it.  It seems a little tired, really. 
Also, isn't the relationship now between Amy, Rory, the Doctor and River now exactly like the relationship between Bella, Edward, Jacob and Esmee?  The only difference here being the Doctor is the main character, not Amy in the Bella roll. 

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Rihanna's "Man Down"

It's been well over a week since Rihanna's controversial "Man Down" video premiered on tv.
What gets me is that there is controversy at all over this video. There are lots of violent music videos out there, but almost none of them seem to have received the attention that this particular music video has.
I'd like to take us back a couple of weeks (ages, in the 24 hour news cycle) to the Common Controversy. Basically, the rapper Common was invited to the White House for a poetry reading by the First Lady. Fox News began accusing the White House of all sorts of bizarre things, mostly that Common's lyrics were unfit for the President to support. It was mostly a non-controversy, which is to say, anyone with even a basic understanding of art was able to see through this as an obvious non-issue. Common is one of the least violent rappers around, often calling for an end to violence in his lyrics.
But the idea, that black men are violent, is a pervasive aspect of American racist rhetoric, one that has its roots in the antebellum period, where those who supported slavery would assert that African Americans had to be enslaved, otherwise their "savage blood" would cause them to commit acts of violence. A bunch of white, wealthy men picking on Common as violent without any proof or justification (not even in his art) is just another round of American racism at its finest: obscuring the actual issues through disinformation and fear.
And then there's Rihanna's video, which is perhaps one of the least violent videos I've seen. In it, Rihanna shoots an unarmed man in a train station, and later the video goes back in time to reveal he raped her. This is apparently a problem because, well...wait, why?
Because we can't handle a black woman using an act of violence as revenge against her attacker, nevermind the circumstances over which she was attacked first. (I notice no one else was offering to do anything about her rapist in this video; like most rapes, it went unnoticed by anyone else other than the rapist and the victim.)
It's not as if these revenge fantasies, in which a woman destroys her attacker, are new. Take Lady Gaga, for instance, who kills her attackers in several videos. In "Paparazzi," Lady Gaga's boyfriend uses her body and sex as a way to increase his own fame, and then throws her from a balcony. She poisons him. Lady Gaga herself explained that her video for "Bad Romance" is about her being kidnapped and forced to work for as a prostitute for a bizarre fashion house-brothel. At the end of the video, she sets a man (the one who is coded to look like the head of this house) on fire right before she enters his bed and presumably is about to have sex with him. Nowhere have I heard any discussion about the violence in those vidoes, where a white woman could apparently take revenge against her rapist without certain people calling for it to be a problem. When it's a black woman, racist rhetoric about violence which ignores context comes out.
(Ms. Magazine also makes some good points about rape culture, but mostly ignores that racism that is implicit in this so-called critique of a black violence.)

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

The History of Lady Gagas

Slate recently posted this short history of the other Lady Gagas that have all apparently vamped up and down history. (The author draws various parallels to historical Gagas and the current superstar diva/avant garde artist, some with more success than others.)

Monday, June 6, 2011

Bill Idol and Lil' Wayne

I've been blogging and tweeting for Arthur all about mashups lately. I love this smaller, simpler piece, mashing up Bill Idol's "Rebel Yell" vocals with Birdman and Lil' Wayne. I love Idol's "Rebel Yell" and it really changes the song to hear a hip hop beat over it.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Blackmagic


Every month or so a new song hits me and I have to listen to it constantly.  Right now, that song is "Blackmagic" by Jose James. 
Where to begin with what makes this song so wonderful?  The slow beat and the great piano just slightly in the background would be a good place to start.  James has a voice smooth and sweet like caramel.  And the lyrics are dark and seductive.  There's something about repeating the line "in the darkness" that turns my mood to drawing shades and quietly closing the door behind me. 

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Tolkien Chart

As a literature nerd, I always like a good webcomic that makes a reference to canonical literature. A few days ago, someone posted this amazing chart that talks about books and Tolkien's made-up words.

Friday, June 3, 2011

Gil Scott-Heron's "Lady Day and John Coltrane"


With the recent death of Gil Scott-Heron, I've been listening to his great poetry and music.  I love the beat of this particular song.  This is one of less-overtly political songs, which I think is fascinating, because Scott-Heron is so famously associated with his political art. 

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Love Like Hate Wins Fiction Prize

Linh Dinh, better known as a poet but also a fiction writer, has just won the Balcones Fiction Prize for Love Like Hate, which explores characters in Vietnam. Dinh himself was born in Vietnam and often depicts characters who are marginalized because of their race or place within a national framework.
I reviewed Dinh's poetry performance in New York City last December, if you're interested in hearing more about him as a poet.
Congrats Dinh!

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Marriage Laws in the U.S.

The Advocate has this great article and map documenting two different kinds of marriage laws in the U.S.  They compare first cousin marriage and gay marriage, and unsurprisingly, it is easier to get married to a cousin of the opposite sex than to anyone of the same sex.