Here is this week’s list of blog posts, prints, quotes, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.
The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia. At least 130 women in a Mennonite community were drugged and raped for years before their attackers were finally caught. This article describes how the men who violated them were caught and what the victims have done since the trial. Trigger warning: there are graphic descriptions of the assaults in this link.
What Happens When You Hire a Craiglist Poet to Mock You? If I ever become wealthy I’ll hire artistic people to create personalized stuff for me. This is such a funny idea.
The Case for Quiet via Dan__Bennett. My mind can be a pretty noisy place. Cultivating quiet is so much more than how many words you speak.
Marriage Without Sex is Meaningless. On the one hand, I completely understand what the woman blogger spoke to is saying about emotional intimacy. It really is the glue that holds any romantic relationship together through the rough times. On the other hand, I can’t imagine ever growing so old that sex permanently becomes less enticing than a massage or other nonsexual forms of touch from your spouse. Even the idea of it makes me chuckle.
Something More Wrong. Life in a longterm, inpatient mental health hospital. Some of the stories of these women are disturbing, but the author did a wonderful job describing how they pass their days and nights.
My Name via dlboonstra. A modern-day parable about the things we say to and about ourselves.
From The One via Moonbeam McQueen:
They didn’t have the time
that younger lovers do,
so they blazed twice as bright
and their years together flew;
From Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Some Fucking Awesome Sex:
Look, I love sex. It’s fun. And because I love my daughter, I want her to have all of the same delights in life that I do, and hopefully more. I don’t want to hear about the fine details because, heck, I don’t want those visuals any more than my daughter wants mine. But in the abstract, darling, go out and play.
Because consensual sex isn’t something that men take from you; it’s something you give. It doesn’t lessen you to give someone else pleasure. It doesn’t degrade you to have some of your own.
What will future generations misunderstand about us if they only have access to a handful of random artifacts? A Canticle for Leibowitz explores this question by introducing the reader to a cloistered monk who ekes out a living hundreds of years after humanity is nearly wiped out by an atomic war.
This is speculative science fiction at its finest. The characters’ understanding of how the world works is quite different from what you or I would say about it, but it was a joy to slowly piece together the truth about what really happened to our species as we meet the people who live in this distant future.
Everything else I want to say about this book veers into spoiler territory, but I highly recommend it to anyone interested in philosophy, post-apocalyptic fiction or science fiction.
What have you been reading?