CGHS Library

Divine Comedy

A professor at the University of Texas at Austin has created an online readers guide to Dante's "Inferno," "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso." Called Danteworlds, it's an interactive accompaniment to his readers guide from University of Chicago Press. The online Danteworlds maps out Dante's physical progress to Hell and beyond, combining classic images by Botticelli with new (and truly terrifying) illustrations by Suloni Robertson. There are also audio snippets of Dante's work being read in Italian, including the classic "Leave behind all hope, you who enter": Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. (--taken from the LA Times blog)

Nick Thune

Well, I think he's funny.

Put on Your Party Hats

Kansas celebrates its 148th birthday today.

Eating Disorders I

Life in the Fat Lane

Sixteen-year-old Lara, winner of beauty pageants and Homecoming Queen, is distressed and bewildered when she starts gaining weight and becomes a fat girl.

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

When smart, sarcastic Sarah Byrnes was three years old, her face and hands were badly burned in a mysterious accident, and her father wouldn’t allow her to have reconstructive surgery.  High school senior Eric “Moby” Calhoune passed through his early years on a steady diet of Oreos and Twinkies, and he sports the girth to prove it.  When Eric turns out for the high school swim team, he begins to shed layers of extra poundage and fears he might lose the one friendship he treasures.

Keeping the Moon

Fifteen-year-old Colie, a former fat girl, spends the summer working as a waitress and staying with her eccentric aunt.

Fat Kid Rules the World

Troy Billings, at 6'1", 296 pounds, is standing at the edge of a subway platform seriously contemplating suicide when he meets Curt MacCrae, an emaciated, semi-homeless punk guitar genius who also happens to be a dropout legend at Troy's school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. 
"I saved your life," Curt tells Troy. "You owe me lunch."

Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self
After happening upon the diary she kept when she was 11 years old, Gottlieb decided to publish this chronicle of her struggle with anorexia nearly 20 years after she wrote it. Growing up in Beverly Hills in the late 1970s, Gottlieb's loneliness and concern about looking attactive to boys swiftly transformed into an obsession with dieting.

Am I Thin Enough Yet? The Cult of Thinness and the Commercialization of Identity

A cultural analysis of the rise of eating disorders in Western society. The author compares the value placed on thinness in our culture to that of a "cult" that controls the minds of young women.

I Like You. Duck.

Boys hit girls they like.  If you are something other than a boy, this is a fact you may not know.

Listen up cute girls, we think you're swell, but we don't know how to say it, so we figure hitting you is the next best thing.  We know that you like it, so just quit pretending.  Seriously.  What says, "I want to get to know you better," like a physical blow? Nothing.  It’s like poetry in motion, really.  There are no words, just desire and pain.  It’s beautiful, like an autumn moon, or a newborn baby is beautiful.  It’s like a courtship dance conducted on a grandiose scale; a romance of the gods.

Romance at this level should be carried past junior high, through adolescence and into adulthood.  Think about it.  You're at the office, and you have a crush on one of the typing girls, but you just don't know how to tell her!  Eureka! You walk up behind her and hit her across the back of the head.  She says, "How ‘bout lunch tomorrow?" and you give her the thumbs up, your best smile and a wink, and go back to work.  It’s simple, really.

This practice would essentially eliminate 90 percent of the problems that arise from dating, including conversation, personality, awkwardness, and body odor.  A few issues remain, including physical appearance, and also where you will go on your date, but really you don't need to go anywhere. Just stay home and hit each other.

-Scott

Young Frankenstein

Gene Wilder puts his finger on a crucial factor in Young Frankenstein's instant success in 1974 and its enduring position at the top of the Mel Brooks canon. He says that everyone involved understood that what the script was about — beyond the obvious sendup of Universal's classic Frankenstein films of the 1930s — was not, "how can we make fun?" Instead, he says, it was "how can we make it real, which will make it more fun?" That's key wisdom in comedy, especially when you're going for satire. "It wasn't as if we were doing a burlesque," Wilder says. "We weren't doing the Three Stooges." Wilder, who initiated the concept and began writing the screenplay while he was in production on Blazing Saddles with director Brooks, knew that turning his boyhood love of those old films into a comedy meant using humor to honor the subject of his affection, not to rudely debase it for easy and adolescent laughs. (Although obviously, as any random chapter-skipping through the film demonstrates, not to the wholesale exclusion of soup-in-the-crotch gags, "What knockers!", and the variable applicability of "doo doo.") The happy result is an unswervingly funny yet loving and beautifully crafted homage, something more artful and lasting than the usual pull-my-finger farce or focus-grouped Scary Movie lowballer. (Quoted from DVDJournal)

Poe is 200

In his own time, Poe was a failure, a victim of the cash-poor early American publishing industry, to be sure, but primarily a victim of his own spectacularly erratic behavior (see Peter Ackroyd’s Poe, 2009). Maybe he was mentally ill. He was a habitual liar or, if that seems harsh, a hoaxer who could gull himself. That gift (if that’s what it was) stood him in good stead in his writing. He knew very well how to write—to use an ironic contemporary term—truthily. He adopted the tones and narrative structures of newsmen and researchers, filled descriptions with physical and technical detail, cited real people, and in the piece later called “The Balloon Hoax” (1844), for example, convinced readers of the New York Sun that a famous hot-air balloonist had crossed the Atlantic in 75 hours.

(Taken from the Booklist article, Another Look At:  Edgar Allan Poe by Ray Olson)

Happy Winter

Alex P. took these photos during last winter's ice storm.

Some of you might not want to remember last winter's ice storm.

I think the photos are pretty, though.

Soulless

K. Siegrist says this is a graphic RESIDENT EVIL and that she enjoyed it, but be forewarned if you are not into this sort of thing.

Saving Zoe

In Alyson Noël's newest novel, one dead sister's secrets save the other's life—in more ways than one. 

It's been one year since the brutal murder of her sister, Zoë, and fifteen year old Echo is still reeling from the aftermath. Her parents are numb, her friends are moving on, and the awkward start to her freshman year proves she'll never live up to her sister's memory. 

Until Zoë's former boyfriend Marc shows up with her diary.