Wake Up
As a child, Herrera lived a nomadic life out of tents and trailers on farm roads throughout California. His folks, both migrant farmworkers from Mexico, moved with the seasons of agriculture for the often hazardous and thankless work in the fields.
Source: The new U.S. poet laureate will make your brain work. Plus 4 other great things to know about him.
I wish only the best for you.
Peace,
love,
joy.
When we have it all,
We turn over the next morning
To face the new day.
We put on our best clothes to impress someone,
We think we can feel a change,
We think that what we could not hold onto yesterday
We now have in our hands,
Then a bird lands on the window sill,
And stands alone
And makes us realize
What we grasped so tightly yesterday,
Is exactly what we are holding today.
Christopher Zurcher May 2015
The orange sunset
reflected on the glossy underside of the crow’s wing
caught my eye.
Hipsters rejoice! IM Global Television will be adapting Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical sci-fi novel Cat’s Cradle for the small screen, the studio announced Thursday.
The studio is looking for a “high-level writer/showrunner,” to develop the project alongside executive producer Brad Yonover and co-executive producer Sandi Love.
Published in 1963, Cat’s Cradle was Vonnegut’s fourth novel and focuses mainly on the topics of science, technology, and religion, satirizing in particular the nuclear arms race through the story of one family’s involvement with the atomic bomb.
Here at Open Culture, we don’t just feature education in your recommended daily servings of culturally wide-ranging video, audio, text, and image — we also feature it in a form that goes deep: whole courses you can download to your computer or mobile device of choice and experience at your own pace. If you never quite studied all the literature you wanted to — or if you simply can’t get enough study of the stuff — pay a visit to our collection of over 50 free literature courses online.
Photographer and food enthusiast Brittany Wright sets up intricate culinary still lifes that focus primarily on the differentiation of fruits’ and vegetables’ coloration. Wright captures a rainbow of colors in foods ranging from heaps of apples to carrots plucked freshly from the earth. Each photograph focuses on the produce against a stark white background, a way to display the food’s vibrant shades without distraction.
Source: Photographer Brittany Wright Captures Foods in Colorful Gradients | Colossal
Kurt would love irony. I love the irony. This is why my writing is sometimes sardonic.
The BP oil spill turned five years old on Monday, and as my colleague Tim McDonnell reported, we’re still paying the price: There’s as much as 26 million gallons of crude oil still on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. But the story of the Deepwater Horizon wasn’t just about environmental devastation—it was also a story about regulation.
via Politician Tasked With Oil Industry Oversight Gets a Paycheck From Big Oil | Mother Jones.
Spalding had spent more than thirty years on “the slippery slope,” as he called it, as a high-wire performer, a funambulist, and had never fallen off. He doubted if he could continue. While I expressed hope and optimism outwardly, I now shared his doubt.
On January 10, 2004, Spalding took his children to a movie. It was Tim Burton’s “Big Fish,” in which a dying father passes his fantastical stories on to his son before returning to the river, where he dies—and perhaps is reincarnated as his true self, a fish, making one of his tall tales come true.
That evening, Spalding left home, saying he was going to meet a friend. He did not leave a suicide note, as he had so often before. When inquiries were made, one man said he had seen him board the Staten Island Ferry.Two months later, Spalding’s body was washed up by the East River. He had always wanted his suicide to be high drama, but in the end he said nothing to anyone; he simply disappeared from sight and silently returned to the sea, his mother.
The news that the U.S. Postal Service was honoring Maya Angelou, poet, author and civil rights advocate, with her own forever stamp was welcomed by her fans. Angelou, who died last year, was a cultural icon and mother figure to a generation of writers.
Jabari Asim, associate professor of writing, literature and publishing at Emerson College in Boston, was excited. Until he read the quote on the Angelou stamp:
“A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”
Funny thing, he had always thought the quote came from Joan Walsh Anglund, the prolific children’s book author from Connecticut.
via Maya Angelou Stamp Quote Actually Came From Connecticut Children’s Book Author – Hartford Courant.
Ed: First of all, can you really blame the carbon monoxide for deaths?
Just six weeks before his death, he implored his friends to cherish the time they have: “life is never promise[d] no matter how you look at it.”
via Carbon monoxide blamed after father and his 7 children die in their sleep – The Washington Post.
The LIFE – TIME Archive is exactly what it sounds like. It’s am amazing collection of photography from the Time-Life series of periodicals dating back to I don’t even know when, but many years ago. Check it out. I’m sure you’ll see something that strikes your fancy.
Click on this blue link LIFE – TIME to visit this amazing resource.
The finalists of the 12th Annual Smithsonian.com Photo Contest have just been announced. Selected from over 26,500 entries, these photos were submitted by photographers from 93 different countries. Smithsonian’s photo editors selected ten finalists per category—Natural World, Travel, People, Americana, Altered Images and Mobile—and it is up to you to determine the Readers’ Choice winner. The photograph that receives the most votes between now and March 30, at 5 p.m. ET, will receive a $500 cash prize and be announced alongside the Grand Prize and category winners on March 31.
The finalists range from a serene sunrise canoe in Minnesota to a train ride in Myanmar to a vicuña wandering the grasslands of the Andes. Some moments were sought out, others captured by chance. Votes are limited to one person per 24 hours.
Our friends at Smithsonian were kind enough to share a selection of the finalists in the amazing gallery below. You can see all 60 finalists at Smithsonian.com!
via The 12th Annual Smithsonian Photo Contest Finalists «TwistedSifter.
by Christopher Zurcher
I think of the miracle of life.
The beauty of nature.
I get home and on my way from the garage to the house
I hear a chirp. It’s a cardinal chirp and, sure enough, he’s there in the tree next to the feeder.
My friend the brilliant red crested finch is calling me from the pine tree.
“Hey. Man-With-The-Seeds. We’re waiting on you.”
It’s been two days and all that’s left are some husks
in the bottom of the feeder and on the ground below.
“Alright. I’ll be right out.”
As I approach the feeder with my bucket of seeds,
the birds go crazy in the bushes.
I’ve never heard them this excited.
I pucker my lips and fake some bird sounds
as if I can tell them how pleased I am they’re here.
They continue to tweet and chirp and flutter about in the branches.
I turn up the driveway to walk back to the garage. The commotion stops.
I put the seeds on the floor of the garage and turn to watch
them return to the feeder.
At the very top of the same pine tree, the cardinal chirps
the short, shrill cardinal chirp, as if to say “thanks.”
If only I could tell him how beautiful he looks,
Bright red, dignified, important.
I go inside wondering if I he might not already know.
Have camera, will travel? Then Guardian Travel’s annual photography competition is for you. It’s an opportunity for you to capture the essence of your journeys around the world, and for us to showcase your work online and – at the end of the year – in an exhibition at Guardian HQ.
And the overall prize is pretty great too.
The winner of each month’s competition (who must be a UK resident) will see their shot mounted and displayed in the end-of-year exhibition for the public at the Guardian’s offices in London. Once the exhibition is finished digital printers Point 101 will send you a copy of your shot to place with pride on your own wall.
via Readers’ travel photography competition 2015 | Travel | The Guardian.
Long before Robert Stone became a National Book Award–winning novelist, he tried selling encyclopedias in rural Louisiana, only to be arrested on suspicion of being an outside agitator. Regrouping from that calamity, he pondered joining a traveling theatrical troupe putting on a Christ play. In March 2009, at our Narrative Night in San Francisco, Bob gave a hilarious and moving reading of youthful tales, included in his memoir Prime Green.
Schools, universities and all forms of educational institution should be centers for the discovery and development of every individual’s innate and inherent skills, talents, abilities and interests.
When asked why he enjoys photographing wildlife, Kislov told The Huffington Post Wednesday that he “just likes to watch the animals.”
He added that he’s enjoyed taking photographs ever since he was a child.
Scroll down to see more of Kislov’s photographs. Visit his website and 500px page for a more complete collection.
via Amateur Photographer Captures Intimate Photos Of Foxes Living In One Of The World’s Remotest Regions.
Women get water for their families and cattle from a 20-metre-deep borehole, in Kaitede village, in the Turkana region.This image is part of a series, Drought in Kenya, by Stefano De Luigi, one of the six shortlisted finalists in the Syngenta Photography Award 2015: Scarcity – Waste which will be on show at Somerset House, London, 10 March – 11 April 2015 Stefano De Luigi
After years of taking striking photos of Gypsies, the Czech photographer stood before the tanks during the 1968 invasion. He smuggled out his images, they went round the world and he fled to Britain. Here are his most poignant and powerful shots
A can with a little hole and some duck tape. It sounds simple, but that’s where the paradox resides. To photograph with a digital camera in auto mode, all you need to do is click. But a pinhole, the mother of all analog cameras, requires much more than that: a good dose of patience and concentration, for a start, but also an understanding of the basic principle of photography, which is controlling light. After that, some imagination, inspiration and encouragement will do the rest.
At least that is what the “Mão na Lata” (Hand on can) project is about. It consists of distributing pinhole cameras to teenagers from 12 to 18 years old in Complexo da Maré, a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro comprising of 16 favelas where about 130,000 people live. From the crafting of the cameras, made with powdered milk cans, to the developing of the negatives, everything is done by the participants themselves, who are asked to document their community’s daily life in black and white.
via See Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas Through the Lens of Young Residents’ Pinhole Cameras · Global Voices.
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