so many good thoughts. amazin' eighteen:
"Scavenging is basically always keeping your eyes peeled. If there’s something on the curb, it’s almost always worthwhile to check out. My friends and I have gotten so many ridiculous things for free this way. There’s a culture of free boxes around here, where folks just put stuff on the curb with a sign, and usually it’s all cleaned out come next day. There’s also a transient student population because West Philly is connected to several college campuses. The trash is plentiful, especially when the U Penn students move out in May. Good lord. We call that Penn Christmas. My housemate makes about $2,000 easy every year just from selling their old thrown-out textbooks.

"As for the stigma attached to re-use, that’s some bullshit rich people made up to control the non-affluent. Like back in feudal days when the starving peasants living on the king’s land couldn’t shoot a deer to eat because it already 'belonged' to the king. It really all goes back to power dynamics and maintaining control over the oppressed. Why can’t I eat the day-old dumpster food that is going to a landfill? It’s because it fucks up capitalist order and power dynamics. It’s about maintaining the made-up idea of scarcity so a few motherfuckers can stay in control.

"And let me just say that I am no crust punk. I listen to disco music and R&B and wear Mickey Mouse sweatshirts. It’s a shame that crust punks are the face of dumpstering, because I feel that a lot of people depend on the discarded world—they just don’t brag about it."

bookmarkin this for "They've got white of egg in their veins"

"I don't want IBM or the National Rifle Association providing me with a funded spectacular when I open my paper. I want to read what the editor and the publisher have managed to dig up on their own—and paid for out of the till."

JUAN GONZALEZ: On Monday, El Libro-Traficante is set to launch a small caravan to bring carloads of ethnic studies books into Arizona that were banned by public school officials in Tucson after the city suspended its acclaimed Mexican American Studies program due to a state ban on the teaching of ethnic studies. The banned books include Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, edited by Bill Bigelow and Bob Peterson; Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire; Occupied America: A History of Chicanos by Rodolfo Acuña_; and Chicano: The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement by F. Arturo Rosales.
...
TONY DIAZ: Evidently, he wanted to replace Mexican-American studies with a real, live class on doublespeak, because that’s all doublespeak. Huppenthal knows that Americans would not tolerate a direct ban on literature. So he has actually taken oppression and updated it. At the end of the day, yes, there is actually a law, America, in Arizona, to prohibit courses in high schools. Let that sink in.

"You have nothing but a dead carcass left on your hands."

"Maybe we should be using this interview for a site for people who don’t like the internet or something."

"[Laughs] Like a site where you have to write a letter to somebody and they’ll print it out."

self-deprecato'brien

ヴィスワヴァ

picked up Diary finally. yay

hasn't been updated for seven years, but I'm glad this site is still up!

people over grammar

"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again."

from back in my high school browsing days