"Despite the perpetual rain, the sordid merchants, and the Homeric vulgarity of its carriage drivers, she would always remember Paris as the most beautiful city in the world, not because of what it was or was not in reality, but because it was linked to the memory of her happiest years."

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Marquez Garcia

(Source: poojabharat.wordpress.com)

Taken with instagram

paperimages:

Salvador Dali, The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, 1933

This might be a philistine’s question, but… are these women having orgasms?

Life can get lonely for an umbrella in a rainy big city. 

Racism begins at home, too. →

“To be dark in India is not necessarily to be invisible. Instead, in this country, it is everyone’s business to correct it or cover it up. The personal is open to public opinion, whether it makes you squirm or not.

Few Indians seem to be comfortable in their dark skin. The matrimonial classifieds every weekend ask for or offer prospective brides who are never described as dark; at best (or worst) they are “wheatish.”

 So it is no surprise that a multi-billion rupee market in fairness products thrives in India. Bollywood superstars such as Shah Rukh Khan and Priyanka Chopra are complicit in the act, appearing in airbrushed, whitened versions of themselves, urging you to pick up a tube or two of the latest product. From lotions and soaps to whitening underarm deodorant; every body part it seems is could be a few shades lighter.”

True story. One of the saddest things about the way the world generally works - the best-selling beauty product in India is called ‘Fair & Lovely’. Its entire premise of course being that using that cream, you too can be fair, and consequently, lovely. Astonishingly horrible; celebrities are (as above-mentioned) complicit; people are ultimately thoroughly interpellated into demeaning themselves.

paperimages:

Mark English

Review of Haruki Murakami's 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' (ねじまきどりクロニクル) →

61 essential postmodern reads: an annotated list - latimes.com →

Love the little key at the bottom. Isn’t it just seeming that-a-way: like a checklist. 

theeconomist:

Penelope Umbrico’s giant array of photographs of people in front of sunsets was produced by searching for the tag “sunset” on the photo-sharing site, Flickr. It’s just one of the internet-inspired artworks in a New York exhibition entitled “Social Media”.

Fantastic idea. So many little bits & pieces of the world have been snapped, captured, stolen, appropriated throughout the world by a multitude of people in any number of locations - it’s only fit that someone celebrates it.

photojojo:

Of J. R. Eyerman’s famous LIFE magazine photo of filmgoers watching a 3- D movie, Stalman says:

What strikes me right away, of course, is the repetition of faces, so that individuals no longer stand out, and the image instead creates this remarkable, almost abstract pattern. You get a certain impression of the image from a distance, and then as you look closer, you suddenly begin to see the individual faces. Compositionally, the image works really well on different levels when seen at different distances.

Photo Tip #3: Look for Patterns

This post is by LIFE as part of Photojojo’s Show & Tell Week.

What strikes me is the difficulty of picking out individuals in this photo. It reads like a day in the life of a dystopian hero. 

"I think the West missed a trick, because it adopted — certainly in Africa and many of the poor emerging economies — an attitude of “do what we say and not what we do.” The whole idea of incentives, which has been the backbone of the success in Western economies, is not something the West transplanted into places like Africa. The approach to economic development in Africa has been focused on aid; it’s been focused on what someone called “learned helplessness."

From article, ‘The Seesaw of Power‘ (Dambisa Moyo in the NYT)

A really interesting debate on the future of sociopolitical & (of course) economic power. I have my own little rant about aid & charity, and the way it’s often conducted, here. Feedback of course is very warmly invited. I need to hone my thoughts! 

Tonight I’m singing along to my favourite song!!! 

Salman Rushdie: A Globe of Heaven: the whole story →

salmanrushdie1:

A GLOBE OF HEAVEN by Salman Rushdie

A celestial globe is a portrait not of the earth but of the skies. Globe-makers in many cultures - Persian, Mayan, Indian, European - over the centuries made many such representations of the heavens and of the pictures they saw there, working in papier-mâché,…

A new story from Rushdie - as revealed on Tumblr! Now to some extent I can’t help feeling that all the intellectual mystique of that shrouded figure, The Writer, is done away with through consistent updates on Twitter and Tumblr and all these little ‘net things…but. More often than not that mystique is replaced only by a greater opening up of that previously-shadowy figure & its ideas. That can only be a good thing. 

theeconomist:

Daily chart: excess female deaths. Women and girls die prematurely in greater numbers than men. Over a quarter of all excess female deaths occur in China at birth, says the World Bank. The practice of sex-selective abortion is partly to blame. 

Oh dear lord, will any news ever be good news? Where are all the great feminist academics saving our land en masse? Or are the people who know what’s right too busy writing convoluted sentences to enlighten the little people? 

photojojo:

Paleontologists discovered 78 million year old dinosaur and bird feathers preserved in amber.

Dinosaur Feathers Discovered in Canada

via Kottke