Here.
Experience, Meet Hope
[Video: “Wiley vs. Rhodes,” a live-action Road Runner cartoon]
From whiskey river:
Ten Thousand Idiots
It is always a danger
to aspirants on the Pathwhen they begin
to believe and actas if the ten thousand idiots
who so long ruled and lived insidehave all packed their bags
and skipped town
or
died.
(Hafiz [source: none canonical, as far as I can tell, but it’s quoted at various places around the Web, including here])
…and:
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. It’s true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.
(Carl Jung, from Memories, Dreams, Reflections [source])
…and:
They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?
(Jeanette Winterson [source])
When Bad Writing Throws Down with Good Intentions, Which Wins?
Bad Writing, per its production company:
…is a documentary about a wannabe poet who sets off on a quest for answers about writing — bad writing, good writing, and the process in between. What he learns from some leading figures in the literary world will inspire anyone who has ever dreamt of creating art.
Here’s the trailer:
It’s just gone into very limited release, at maybe a half-dozen cities so far. Bet it’s that pesky It Was a Dark & Stormy Night Fan Club keeping it from wider circulation.
This comes courtesy of our friend Marta, over at the fairy tale asylum, who calls it a horror movie. Oh yes.
Books Beyond Books
The whole e-books vs. traditional books debate spins crazily about one question: What is a book, anyhow?
Let’s pursue that question a step further: What is a reader?
Science-fiction (etc.) author Cory Doctorow tackles both questions in a very interesting project of his, called With a Little Help. It’s a self-published “book” — an anthology of short fiction — available in a dizzying variety of forms. For starters, he’s selling multiple physical editions of the anthology: paperback and hardcover print editions, and CDs of an audiobook version. He’s taken it a step further, though, by offering With a Little Help in multiple e-book formats (from plain text on up to EPUB, MOBI, and so on) and multiple audiobook formats (MP3, WAV, OGG)… and all the downloads are free.
He’s taking the free-digital-download release further:
The full text of all the stories in this collection is available as free downloads under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, meaning that you can copy them and make your own versions, but you can’t make money off them and you have to let others remix your creations. The audiobooks are likewise available as free downloads on the same terms.
I myself am not interested in remixing anything, but I thought you’d enjoy this story, “The Right Book” (read by Neil Gaiman). If you’d like to read along, the text is here (opens in new window/tab). It’s a tale reaching 150 years into the future, giving us a peek into not just how books (or “books”) might be sold, but how the readers (or “readers”) of books may change as well.
[Click Play button to begin listening. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 17:54 long.]
[audio:03-The_Right_Book_-_Cory_Doctorow_-_With_a_Little_Help.mp3|titles=’The Right Book’|artists=Cory Doctorow (reading: Neil Gaiman)]
Book Review: Who Hates Whom, by Bob Harris
My latest review is up at The Book Book. This time around, it’s a non-fiction title, Who Hates Whom. (Subtitle: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up: A Woefully Incomplete Guide.)
In brief, it’s a good overview of world “trouble spots” — where they are, how they became troublesome in the first place, who the major players are — as of the time the book came out, in 2007. One man’s “good,” though, is another man’s “Huh?” So let me rattle off what I liked about Who Hates Whom:
- It’s brief — 218 pages.
- It’s not tedious. Harris’s past includes a stint as a stand-up comic; his previous book was a memoir of his time as a (successful) game-show contestant. He’s smart enough, in this case, to know that the reader will need relief from time to time, from the page after page of more or less exclusively bad news: he includes jokes, many of them at his own expense.
- It’s informative. I left the book with a much better understanding of why Country X and Country Y have been at loggerheads for centuries — including the story, often, of what Country Z keeps doing to stir things up just as X and Y seem about to kiss and make up.
- It’s fair. Harris is not out to grind any axes; as he points out, you can’t honestly consider all these situations in hopes of identifying the “good guys.” (Who the good guys are changes from one day to the next: yesterday’s officially designated terrorist is today’s freedom fighter.)
- And ultimately — perhaps surprisingly — it’s hopeful. Harris points out, truthfully, that this is not the most dangerous time to be alive on Earth… not even close. Things keep getting better, on average. I like that.
Note for e-book readers: Who Hates Whom includes dozens of maps and photographs. You might want to consider that fact when deciding to go the e- vs. traditional book route. I read it on a Kindle, and didn’t mind it — but I know such things drive some people crazy!
The (Mostly Bogus?) War Between Men and Women
From Seems to Fit, Chapter 23(ish):
Bonnie loved her own laugh. Or rather, she loved that George and other men loved it, that spontaneous eruption of trills and musical bubbles which erupted from her throat and open mouth when something struck her as especially funny — especially when the something wasn’t meant to be funny. She loved the way it made men’s heads swivel in a restaurant or crowded train, looking for the source of sudden brooksound. This laugh always caught even her by surprise, the first blurt and the ripple of voice and breath which followed quickly on its heels: it felt like a rabble of schoolkids at recess, chasing after and tumbling over one another.
But she also knew the trouble which could follow when that laugh emerged at a moment not funny at all to those around her, to men especially, no matter how deeply ridiculous the moment (and the seriousness with which men regarded it) might be.
How different are men and women? And what, exactly — even approximately — takes place at the vertices where they bump into one another?
I’m not talking physical vertices, of course. (This isn’t that sort of blog.) It’s like… Well, a couple years ago I devoted a blog post to the importance of edges: those (sometimes invisible) lines where two disparate things meet. In simplest geometric terms, an edge occurs where one two-dimensional plane intersects another. (In order to intersect at all, the two planes must “differ” in at least one respect: their angles in space.)
But all kinds of things scrape up against all kinds of other things. The taste of one cupcake ingredient juxtaposed with another. The sound of a musical note against a silence. Countries. Cultures. Ideas.
Are you familiar with the word frotteur? It comes from the French word frottage, rubbing, and is a term applied to someone who derives physical — often sexual — pleasure from rubbing against someone else. While the pleasure isn’t physical (I’m not that far gone), I sometimes think of myself as a frotteur of ideas and facts.
So what the heck is it, exactly, that happens in that narrow, narrow, quark-wide little gap where men and women intersect? Is it a “war”? Is it even friction? Is it even confusion?
(In what follows, please understand that I’m certainly not ignorant of extreme cases — relationships of brutal violence, physical or otherwise, or weird power trips and perversions. I’m just not talking of them for now. I’m talking of “normal” relationships — whatever the hell that means.)
The World Turned Inside-Out
Just saw this on the BBC’s YouTube channel. Sobering, exciting, fascinating… and sobering. The economic progress of 200 countries over the course of 200 years — demonstrated and discussed in a four-minute video:
As always with simple presentations of complex issues, especially statistics, there’s such a thing as reading too much into this. Politicians and ideologues of all stripes can likely find support for their points of view here. For the rest of us, maybe it’s just the ideal opportunity to contemplate the age we live in.
(Coincidentally — and I swear this really happened — last night a monster cold-front rainstorm passed through. As I was getting ready for bed, I thought, Two hundred years ago, people would have thought it a miracle that I’m getting into a dry bed.)
I’ve been working on a regular post, off and on, for a couple days now. This was just too interesting not to pass on to you!
Update: For a really absorbing view of these statistics, go here. You can track individual countries’ paths of progress (or otherwise), change the statistics used, and so on.
Everybody* Believes in Music
Lyrics:
Atheists Don’t Have No Songs
(Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers
Christians have their hymns and pages,
Hava Nagila’s for the Jews,
Baptists have the rock of ages,
Atheists just sing the blues.Romantics play Claire de Lune,
Born agains sing He is risen,
But no one ever wrote a tune
For godless existentialism.For Atheists,
There’s no good news,
They’ll never sing a song of faith.For atheists,
They have a rule,
The “he” is always lowercase.
The “he” is always lowercase.Some folks sing a Bach cantata,
Lutherans get Christmas trees,
Atheist songs add up to nada,
But they do have Sundays free.Pentecostalists sing they sing to heaven,
Coptics have the books of scrolls,
Numerologists can count to seven,
Atheists have rock and roll.For Atheists,
There’s no good news,
They’ll never sing a song of Faith.In their songs,
They have a rule,
The “he” is always lowercase.
The “he” is always lowercase.Catholics dress up for Mass,
And listen to, Gregorian chants.Atheists just take a pass,
Watch football in their underpants.
Watch football in their underpants.Atheists, Atheists, Atheists,
Don’t have no songs!
Thanks, Jules. And thanks to Pacificvs (Adrian Covert) for the lyrics! (Also see John Kinney’s comment on the Pacificvs post, which stitches together a more complete version of the lyrics from several different performances he found online.)
______________________________
* …and not only Mac Davis and friends.
What You Think, What You Know, What You Can and Can’t Have
[Longer trailer for The NeverEnding Story (1981); you can see the whole film on YouTube, if you’d like, broken up into nine or ten parts]
From whiskey river:
I see human beings as a self-regulating system that wants us to discover our own nature. Our imagination, our deep mind, so to speak, wants to help us to do this. In part, that’s why it gives us the thoughts and feelings and associations it does. That’s why we dream what we dream and “think up” the imagery that comes to us. When we take all of this seriously, when we use it, that is, and are willing to risk releasing our tight grip on ourselves by writing what we don’t yet know, to paraphrase Paul Klee, we demonstrate to our own imagination that we can be trusted with its gifts. Of course, our imagination likes this. It says, “Hey. She’s serious. Let’s give her more.”
But when we turn our back on this powerful inclination toward completion, we risk losing contact with the gift-giving nature of the imagination. We risk damaging the relationship we’ve developed. Think of it as a relationship to “the muse,” if you will. As the poet Stuart Perkoff wrote in regard to abusing the gifts of the muse, “Be careful. It’s hers. She’ll take it back.”
(Peter Levitt, ZinkZine, Fall 2003 [source])
…and:
It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. [*] A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.
(Carl Jung [source])
Waiting for Raymond Carver
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- …
- 29
- Next Page »
