flakkery

“

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

—Mary Oliver, from “Mysteries, Yes” in Evidence

(Source: litverve, via crashinglybeautiful)

Tammam Azzam, Freedom graffiti
‘Kiss by Klimt’ painted on the remains of a building hit by bombs and bullets.

Tammam Azzam, Freedom graffiti

‘Kiss by Klimt’ painted on the remains of a building hit by bombs and bullets.

(via ferfluffle)

Select artworks from Nigerian artist Njideka Akunyili:

“Nigeria is almost a third character in my work,” she said. “A lot of my work is about investigating my love for Nigeria and my life in America.

“I met my husband at college and there was some anxiety that if I married outside my culture I would lose my identity, but there is a space in my work where these things come together.”

Akunyili is hoping to help change attitudes to art in Nigeria, where she said appreciation is growing slowly.

“If I hadn’t left Nigeria, I wouldn’t be an artist, I would be a doctor,” she said. “When I told my parents I wanted to be an artist, they couldn’t get their heads around why an educated person who went to college in America would want to be an artist.

“If people think of artists, it’s somebody by the side of the road painting signs.”

[…]

“When I was young, the less Nigerian you were the cooler you were, but now we have gone back to tradition,” said Akunyili. “There’s a nice energy about the country that’s finally coming into its own.”

(Source: dynamicafrica, via becauseiamawoman)

Posted 5 days ago

“

You know those moments, at school or college, when suddenly the cosmos seems like one vast plan after all, patterned in such a way that the novel you’re reading at bedtime connects to your astronomy lecture, connects to what you heard on NPR, connects to what your friend discusses in the cafeteria at lunch – and then briefly it’s as if the lid has come off the world, as if the world were a dollhouse, and you can glimpse what it would be like to see it whole, from above – a vertiginous magnificence. And then the lid falls and you fall and the reign of the ordinary resumes.

—Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs.

(Source: somethingchanged, via rememo)

“

You mean the generation that paid three times as much for college to enter a job market with triple the unemployment isn’t interested in purchasing the assets of the generation who just blew an enormous housing bubble and kept it from popping through quantitative easing and out-and-out federal support? Curious.

—When comments are better than the article, Atlantic edition (“The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials aren’t buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy”)

(Source: bostonreview, via ferfluffle)