Here is an excerpt of The Soul is not a Smithy, which can be found in the book Oblivion: Stories.

All of the school building’s windows had a reticulate wire mesh built directly into the glass in order to make the window harder to break with an errant dodgeball or vandal’s hurled stone. Also, the pupil to my immediate left in the next row in the ersatz arrangement was Sanjay Rabindranath, who studied maniacally at
all times, and also had exemplary cursive, and was perhaps the single best pupil to sit next to during tests in all of R. B. Hayes. 

David Foster Wallace......

  ¨ The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.¨

 

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest,  which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering the period 1923–2006). Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years.

Meet Richard Serra.......for further info read the article below :)

Richard Serra´s work impressed me deeply, as I was doing my internship at Dia: Beacon museum. Perceiving an art piece not only with the eyes, but also with your body, as you move in and around the pieces is pure ecstasy.

"What interests me is the opportunity for all of us to become something different from what we are, by constructing spaces that contribute something to the experience of who we are." - Richard Serra 

Serra was born in San Francisco and he went on to study English literature at the University of California, Berkeley and later at the University of California, Santa Barbara between 1957 and 1961. He then studied fine art  at Yale University between 1961 and 1964. While on the West Coast, he helped support himself by working in steel mills, which was to have a strong influence on his later work.

There´s one word that comes to my mind when I look at his work, harmony. Please, enjoy this short trip and meet Jack the Dripper´s art work.

It seems that the Yellow Kid wasn´t the first comic ever published in U.S. :D

Proto-comic books and the Platinum Age

The development of the modern American comic book happened in stages. Publishers had collected comic strips in hardcover book form as early as 1833, with The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, which appeared in New York in 1842, as the first example published in English.The G. W. Dillingham Company published the first known proto-comic-book magazine in the U.S., The Yellow Kid in McFadden's Flats, in 1897. It reprinted material – primarily the October 18, 1896 to January 10, 1897 sequence titled "McFadden's Row of Flats" – from cartoonist Richard F. Outcault's newspaper  comic strip Hogan's Alley, starring a character called the Yellow Kid. The 196-page, square-bound, black-and-white publication, which also includes introductory text by E. W. Townsend, measured 5x7 inches and sold for 50 cents. The neologism "comic book" appears on the back cover. 

History of Jazz -Part I. There´s so much material that I'll try to divide it in three parts. :)

Jazz is a music genre that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th century American popular music.  Its West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note. However, Art Blakey has been quoted as saying, "No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa".  The word "jazz" began as a West Coast slang term of uncertain derivation and was first used to refer to music in Chicago in about 1915.