So here’s an interesting story for you: three people charged with posting child pornography on everyone’s favorite demon, MySpace. I know, that doesn’t sound interesting, but here’s the twist:

It’s child porn, alright — naked pictures of themselves.

From the Providence Journal:

North Smithfield police have arrested a teenager and a 19-year-old woman who posted sexually explicit photos of themselves on the Internet.

The police say Elizabeth Muller of 6 Sorel Ave., North Smithfield and a 16-year-old female friend from Lincoln put the pictures on myspace.com…

During a routine patrol of the site, Lincoln High School Resource Officer David Waycott recognized the teenager from school and alerted the police department’s juvenile division.

“They were fully naked and posing together,” said Capt. Denis Smith of North Smithfield.

Under Rhode Island law, posting naked pictures of an underage person, even one’s self, constitutes child pornography.

Don’t get too excited: the photos have been taken down.

Congrats to Anna Lappé, friend of SMITH, and co-author with “food justice activist” and chef Bryant Terry, on the release of Grub: Ideas for an Urban, Organic Kitchen. Grub is a combo manifesto/tool book for healthy eating and sustainable agriculture. The small idea is the book, which features an intro by Eric Schlosser of Fast Food Nation fame. The bigger idea is the creation of a movement, spurred on by community-building dinners, “to share good meals and good energy.” We’ll eat to that.

A couple of years ago, Jason Bitner stumbled upon a stash of 18,000 photos in the back room of a diner in the small Midwestern town of LaPorte, Indiana. Jason’s good at finding rare and raw treasures: he’s co-creator of the bad, bold, and beautiful Found magazine. But still, he knew this was something extra special, what he calls his “greatest find ever.” “I immediately knew they had to be shared with more people—they’re totally awesome,” he says, enthusiastically as usual. Shelved next to the cases of ketchup and mustard were photos taken by one photographer, Frank Pease, shot after shot of one small American town from the ’40s to the ’60s— “revealing its public and private faces, its secrets and its stories.” The boxes and boxes that Bitner found were nothing short of a major cultural excavation. The result is a book, LaPorte, Indiana (Princeton Architectural Press), that SMITH is totally pleased to excerpt here.

Next: Faces on the pages start turning up. (more…)

“One Should Not Talk to a Skilled Hunter
About What Is Forbidden by the Buddha”

A gray fox, nine pounds three ounces.
39 5/8″ long with tail.
Peeling back skin (Kai
reminded us to chant the Shingyo first)
cold pelt. crinkle; and musky smell
mixed with dead-body odor starting.

Stomach content: a whole ground squirrel well chewed
plus one lizard foot
and somewhere from inside the ground squirrel
a bit of aluminum foil.

The secret.
and the secret hidden deep in that.

– Gary Snyder

Every year since 1976, on the 17th of June, Diego and Susy Goldberg and their family sit for individual portraits. The resulting album tells the story of their lives.

(via Plep)

Table 26 finishes their meal and signals for the check.
“I’ll pay for dinner,” the man says, taking the checkbook out of my hand.
“No,” his date protests, “Let’s split it.”
“I’ve got it.”
“Listen,” the woman says, opening her purse, “I’m paying my half.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the man replies, “I invited you out. I’m paying.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” the woman says, slurring her words.
“What’s your problem?” the man says, “I’m taking you out to dinner.”
“I want to pay.”
“It’s on me.”
“Well you’re not getting any,” the woman says boozily.

Another glimpse into the dark side of dining from the deliciously entertaining Waiter Rant.

Ladies and gentlemen, the most excellent Han Huggerbrugge!

from dong resin’s joint.

On one side, the soul wanders.
On the other, human beings living in fear.
In between, the pit of disappearance.

Some young girls ask me
if they’ll be safe near Averno–
they’re cold, they want to go south a little while.
And one says, like a joke, but not too far south–

I say, as safe as anywhere,
which makes them happy.
What it means is nothing is safe.

You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.

There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl,
from which you never return.

…

The girls are happy, thinking of their vacation.
Don’t take a train, I say.

They write their names in mist on a train window.
I want to say, you’re good girls,
trying to leave your names behind.

from Averno, by Louise Glück

“The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: it means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone who has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his being on a sheet of paper. But writing is not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time in torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea. The only real exercise of will is negative: we have toward what we write the power of veto.”

from Proofs & Theories, by Louise Glück