Maggie 42

him: you split up all the song of ice and fire books

it has occurred me during this process that apparently not everyone thinks about books by what color they are? like, literally when i’m looking for a book, i picture it in my mind. i have a very…tactile experience with the books i read and idk! i thought everyone did that lol.

This actually is interesting in terms of information-seeking behavior, which is a thing librarians think about a lot and often actually study (some library jobs require you to publish, and academic librarians, for instance, will often use the students at the college they work at to study how they search for information in order to figure out how to best provide them services).

In the other [1979] profile, in Vogue, [Toni] Morrison spoke of a white American reader who had "told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books—it was so removed from his experience." She had responded: "Boy, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!" The Vogue interviewer, missing the wit in this retort, went on to comment: "Morrison has no patience with people who plead ignorance; but then, she does not pride herself on being a patient woman. 'I find myself being more and more difficult,' she says. 'It's something I really relish.'" Even Morrison's literary difficulty and the pleasure she took in it was translated here into personal difficulty, a moral failing: How dare she be impatient! Well, wouldn't you be?

I was missing English one day, American, really, with its pill-popping Hungarian goulash of everything from Anglo-Saxon to Zulu, because British English is not the same, if the paperback dictionary I bought at Brentano’s on the Avenue de l’Opéra is any indication, too cultured by half. Oh, the English know their delphiniums, but what about doowop, donuts, Dick Tracy, Tricky Dick? With their elegant Oxfordian accents, how could they understand my yearning for the hotrod, hotdog, hot flash vocabulary of the U. S of A., the fragmented fandango of Dagwood’s everyday flattening of Mr. Beasley on the sidewalk, fetuses floating on billboards, drive-by monster hip-hop stereos shaking the windows of my dining room like a 7.5 earthquake, Ebonics, Spanglish, “you know” used as comma and period, the inability of 90% of the population to get the present perfect: I have went, I have saw, I have tooken Jesus into my heart, the battlecry of the Bible Belt, but no one uses the King James anymore, only plain-speak versions, in which Jesus, raising Lazarus from the dead, says, “Dude, wake up,” and the L-man bolts up like a B-movie mummy. “Whoa, I was toasted.” Yes, ma’am, I miss the mongrel plenitude of American English, its fall-guy, rat-terrier, dog-pound neologisms, the bomb of it all, the rushing River Jordan backwoods mutability of it, the low-rider, boom-box cruise of it, from New Joisey to Ha-wah-ya with its sly dog, malasada-scarfing beach blanket lingo to the ubiquitous Valley Girl’s like-like stuttering, shopaholic rant. I miss its quotidian beauty, its querulous back-biting righteous indignation, its preening rotgut flag-waving cowardice. Suffering Succotash, sputters Sylvester the Cat; sine die, say the pork-bellied legislators of the swamps and plains. I miss all those guys, their Tweety-bird resilience, their Doris Day optimism, the candid unguent of utter unhappiness on every channel, the midnight televangelist euphoric stew, the junk mail-voice mail vernacular. On every boulevard and rue I miss the Tarzan cry of Johnny Weismueller, Johnny Cash, Johnny B. Goode, and all the smart-talking, gum-snapping hard-girl dialogue, finger-popping x-rated street talk, sports babble, Cheetoes, Cheerios, chili dog diatribes. Yeah, I miss them all, sitting here on my sidewalk throne sipping champagne verses lined up like hearses, metaphors juking, nouns zipping in my head like Corvettes on Dexedrine, French verbs slitting my throat, yearning for James Dean to jump my curb.

Studies show that approaching youth with a bystander-intervention model is actually a lot more effective for reducing sexual assault, and it is also more enthusiastically received than programs that bill themselves as anti-rape.