Government Architecture

Famous People

School Construction

Waiting for Car Repair

Bandwagon Genre

Weird Dream Film

Student Science

Time to Shave

First Day in Class Waiting on Floor for Instructor to Arrive

No Use Crying

Warnings

Library Posters

Travel Toothpaste

Creative Writing Workshop Coffee Pot

A big hurrah to you!!!!! We’ve won for now — SOPA and PIPA were dropped by Congress today — the votes we’ve been scrambling to mobilize against have been cancelled.

The largest online protest in history has fundamentally changed the game.  You were heard.

On January 18th, 13 million of us took the time to tell Congress to protect free speech rights on the internet. Hundreds of millions, maybe a billion, people all around the world saw what we did on Wednesday.  See the amazing numbers here and tell everyone what you did.

This was unprecedented. Your activism may have changed the way people fight for the public interest and basic rights forever.

The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled.  “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA Chairman and former Senator Chris Dodd told the New York Times. ‘[PIPA and SOPA were] considered by many to be a slam dunk.’”

“’This is altogether a new effect,’ Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing ‘an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically’ in the last four decades, he added.”

Tweet with us, shout on the internet with us, let’s celebrate: Round of applause to the 13 million people who stood up  – #PIPA and #SOPA are tabled 4 now. #13millionapplause

We’re indebted to everyone who helped in the beginning of this movement — you, and all the sites that went out on a limb to protest in November — Boing Boing and Mozilla Foundation (and thank you Tumblr, 4chan)! And the grassroots groups — Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Demand Progress, CDT, and many more.

#SOPA and #PIPA will likely return in some form.  But when they do, we’ll be ready.  Can you make a donation to Fight for the Future, to help us keep this fire going?

We changed the game this fall, and we’re not gonna stop.  $8, $20, every little bit helps.

13 million strong,

Tiffiniy, Holmes, Joshua, Phil, CJ, Donny, Douglas, Nicholas, Dean, David S. and Moore… Fight for the Future!

P.S.  China’s internet censorship system reminds us why the fight for democratic principles is so important:

In the New Yorker:  “Fittingly, perhaps, the discussion has unfolded on Weibo, the Twitter-like micro-blogging site that has a team of censors on staff to trim posts with sensitive political content. That is the arrangement that opponents of the bill have suggested would be required of American sites if they are compelled to police their users’ content for copyright violations. On Weibo, joking about SOPA’s similarities to Chinese censorship was sensitive enough that some posts on the subject were almost certainly deleted (though it can be hard to know). … After Chinese Web users got over the strangeness of hearing Americans debate the merits of screening the Web for objectionable content, they marvelled at the American response. Commentator Liu Qingyan wrote:

‘We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics.’”

#######   (press release is here: https://fightfortheftr.wordpress.com/press-releases/)

[And now to consider something more serious, like the enfamous NDAA scandal]

Google launched a petition.  Wikipedia voted to shut itself off.  Senators’ websites went down just from the sheer surge of voters trying to write them.   NYC and SF geeks had protests that packed city blocks.

You made history today: nothing like this has ever happened before.  Tech companies and users teamed up.  Tens of millions of people who make the internet what it is joined together to defend their freedoms.  The free network defended itself.  Whatever you call it, the bottom line is clear: from today forward, it will be much harder to mess up the internet.

The really crazy part?  We might even win.

Approaching Monday’s crucial Senate vote there are now 35 Senators publicly opposing PIPA.  Last week there were 5.   And it just takes just 41 solid “no” votes to permanently stall PIPA (and SOPA) in the Senate.  What seemed like miles away a few weeks ago is now within reach.

But don’t trust predictions.  The forces behind SOPA & PIPA (mostly movie companies) can make small changes to these bills until they know they have the votes to pass.  Members of Congress know SOPA & PIPA are unpopular, but they don’t understand why–so they’re easily duped by superficial changes.  The Senate returns next week, and the next few days are critical.  Here are two things to think about:

1. Plan on calling your Senator every day next week.  Pick up the phone each morning and call your Senators’ offices, until they vote “no” on cloture.  If your site participated today, consider running a “Call the Senate” link all next week.

2. Tomorrow, drop in at your Senators’ district offices.  We don’t have a cool map widget to show you the offices nearest you (we’re too exhausted! any takers?).  So do it the old fashioned way: use Google, or the phonebook to find the address, and just walk in, say you oppose PIPA, and urge the Senator to vote “no” on cloture.  These drop-in visits make our spectacular online protests more tangible and credible.

That’s it for now. Be proud and stay on it!

–Holmes, Tiffiniy, and the whole Fight for the Future team.

___

P.S. Huge credit goes to participants in the 11/16 American Censorship Day protest: Mozilla, 4chan, BoingBoing, Tumblr, TGWTG, and thousands of others.  That’s what got this ball rolling!  Reddit, both the community and the team behind it, you’re amazing.  And of course, thanks to the Wikimedians whose patient and inexorable pursuit of the right answer brought them to take world-changing action. Thanks to David S, David K, Cory D, and E Stark for bold action at critical times.

P.P.S. If you haven’t already, show this video to as many people as you can. It works! http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/

Upcoming Readings

Hope the new year goes well for everyone!

In order to qualify for a post-baccalaureate degree in English, one has to be read in certain, specific areas of literature. After grueling over these for the past six months, I thought it was nearly insane when, standing in front of a committee, they asked me questions like, “What’s your view on socio-economics?” Questions about texts were hardly asked, but if they had been, I would’ve been ready! 

British
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales: “General Prologue” and Prologue/Tales told by the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, the Nun’s Priest
Shakespeare: Othello, Merchant of Venice
Spenser: Book I of The Fairie Queene
Milton: Books 1, 2, and 9 from Paradise Lost
Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, Book 4: “Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms”
Pope: Epistle I from “An Essay on Man”
Austen: Emma
Blake: “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” “The Little Vagabond,” “Holy Thursday,” “The Chimney Sweeper” (from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience).
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn” & “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear”
Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey” & “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”
Shelley: “Ode to the West Wind” & “Defense of Poetry”
Browning: “Andrea Del Sarto” Rossetti: “In an Artist’s Studio” & “Winter my Secret”
Hardy: Jude the Obscure
G. M. Hopkins: “God’s Grandeur” & “Pied Beauty”
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

American
Anne Bradstreet: “The Prologue To Her Book,” “Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of our House,” “The Flesh and the Spirit,” “The Author to Her Book”
Phyllis Wheatley: “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” “To his Excellency G. Washington,” “On Imagination”
Dickinson: selections (numbers as listed in Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of ED):
49, 106, 165, 173, 178, 181, 216, 255, 258, 371, 426, 974, 985, 994, 84, 106, 175, 184, 185, 193, 204, 216, 280, 299, 1036, 1071, 1056, 1116, 70, 124, 185, 186, 230, 252, 284, 302, 319, 521, 1184, 1219
Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Thoreau: Walden, “Resistance to Civil Government”
Hawthorne: “Young Goodman Brown,” “Rappacini’s Daughter,” “The Birth-mark”
Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Melville: The Piazza Tales
Roth: Call It Sleep
Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!
Ellison: Invisible Man

Modernist Poetry:
Wm. C. Williams: “Spring and All” entire work, parts I-XXVIII; “Young Sycamore,” “Paterson: the Falls” & “The Dance”
Ezra Pound: “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” “Canto I,” “Canto XIV,” “In a Station of the Metro,” “Sestina: Altaforte”
T.S. Eliot: “The Four Quartets,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
H.D. : “’Sea Rose,” “Chance Meeting,” “White World,’ “Phaedra,” “The Shepherd,” “A Dead Priestess Speaks”
Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons
Mina Loy: “Lunar Baedeker” & “Moreover, the Moon”

Contemporary Poetry:
Lyn Hejinian: My Life
John Ashbery: “Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror”
Robert Creeley: “Something,” “Words,” “The Finger,” “The Act of Love,” “The Pattern,” “The Language,” “Distance”
George Oppen: “The Forms of Love,” “Boy’s Room,” “Of Being Numerous”
Alice Notley: from The Descent of Alette: [“a car” “awash with blood,”] [“I stood waiting”], [“I walked into”], [“Presently”], [“The water, of the river”] & “At Night the States”
Yusef Komunyakaa: “Facing It,” “My Father’s Love Letters,” “Believing in Iron”

Literary criticism
Saussure: “The Object of Study”
Jakobson: “Linguistics and Poetics”
Lacan: “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious”
Woolf: A Room of One’s Own, Chapter One & Two
Derrida: “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
J. Hillis Miller: “The Critic as Host”
P. Schwieckart: “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading”
Greenblatt: “The Circulation of Social Energy”
Geoffrey Hartman: “The Interpreter’s Freud”
Julia Kristeva: “The Ethics of Linguistics”
Raymond Williams: The Country and the City, “Country and City, and A Problem of Perspective”
Stuart Hall: “New Ethnicities”
Edward Said: Orientalism, “Crisis”
Meyda Yegenoglu: “The Battle of the Veil: Woman between Orientalism and Nationalism”
Judith Butler: “Critically Queer”

In addition to the list, for other classes:
Italo Calvino: If on a winter’s night a traveler
MM Bakhtin: Speech Genres
Fae Myenne Ng: Bone
Octavia Butler: Kindred
MH Kingston: The Woman Warrior
Gary Soto: Living Up the Street

In addition to all these, my personal readings:
R.L. Stevenson: Treasure Island
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin: American Prometheus The Oppenheimer Story

The past six months have been busy.

Poem of note (aside from the many others): “Lunar Baedeker” by Mina Loy — the vocabulary is spectacular:

A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah’s tombstones

lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

Stellectric signs
“Wing shows on Starway”
“Zodiac carrousel”

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And “Immortality”
mildews …
in the museums of the moon

“Nocturnal cyclops”
“Crystal concubine”

Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes