Bay of Fires and Jervis

Various national trust towns around Jervis Bay have blossomed over the past few years. Bookshops, cafés and galleries have taken over most of the main street, making Milton, Braidwood etc pocket-sized delights. Set in lush farmlands and out of this world water views life is beautiful here ...,

We love the landscape dominated by the rock spires such as Pigeon House Mountain. The ascent to the top of any mountains is to come across amazing sublime views ... Bays of fire & views of south coast

7 New World No v e l

Seven Things Writers Can Learn From Stand-Up Comedians

Author and journalism professor Ben Yagoda recommends such mainstays of the comedian’s art as the power of surprise and (yes) panic.

Via The American Scholar

Why Are We So Attracted To The Idea Of A “Great American Novel”?

One of the central claims of “The Dream of the Great American Novel” is that novels are uniquely well suited to the task of representing what is quintessentially American because they are “carriers and definers of evolving ‘national imaginaries’”.

Via Times Literary Supplement

Hockey & Babbage

Interesting  revelations are included in a new biography of Joe Hockey - Hockey: Not Your Average Joe - to be released next week, and it shows the carefully managed veneer of unity that binds the Abbott cabinet. The biography - which Hockey cooperated on - traces his background as the son of a Bondi beauty queen and a Palestinian Armenian migrant who had grown up in a war zone. 

Debuting on the federal political stage at the age of 29, Hockey’s failures and triumphs are chronicled, along with the discussions that went on behind the scenes leading up to the budget, and the Treasurer’s lifelong battle with his weight Antipodean Politics MXIV AD

Eric Bana is in Deliver Us From Evil
Sarchie’s story asks the audience to take an enormous leap of faith, to believe that a ‘‘portal’’ to a realm of pure evil could exist, could be opened up through satanic possession, and could be closed down again by the rites of a Catholic exorcism
XO


From MH 370 tragedy to MH17 disaster

Scandinavian Film Festival Sydney 20014 AD

Easy Money (Swedish: Snabba cash)^[3]is a Swedish thriller film directed byDaniel Espinosa that was released on 15 January 2010. It is based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Jens Lapidus.^[4] Joel Kinnaman stars in the lead role of Johan "JW" Westlund, a rather poor man living a double life in the upper class areas of Stockholm. After meeting a wealthy girl, he is enticed into the world of organized crime and begins to sell cocaine to afford his expensive lifestyle. Easy Money was well received by critics and was a hit at the box office.
Snabba cash of Sweden / Highly Recommended

RIP Nadine Gordimer

Nobel-Prize Winner Fought Apartheid With Words New York Times. 

Sadly, Nadine Gordimer is dead.

Parliamentary Misbehaviours

Thinking Dangerously in an Age of Political Betrayal Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

CLIVE Palmer is being told to apologise to the Senate clerk after comparing her actions to “Stalinist Russia” and calling on her to quit if she can’t do her job. The Palmer United Party leader denied he yelled at Rosemary Laing during last Thursday’s chaotic carbon tax repeal day in the Senate Integrity and impartiality

A lobbying firm part-owned by Liberal powerbroker Michael Photios made donations worth almost $100,000 to the Liberal and National parties before last year's federal election.

But Premier State Consulting failed to declare the donations until last month – seven months after the official Australian Electoral Commission reporting date of November 17, 2013 and nine months after Tony Abbott's new Liberal-Nationals government took power, which Premier State is registered to lobby on behalf of private clients. Photios Firms

Element of Style of Self-Publishing

Yes Of Course You Can Self-Publish. But The Reality Is…

“While it is possible to create a do-it-yourself e-book, even those who have self-published their work do not recommend going it alone.”

Via BBC 

France Banned Free Shipping, So Amazon Now Charges One Cent

“This past October, French lawmakers decided it was time to show Amazon who’s boss. Frustrated by Amazon’s fast and cheap book-selling model, which poses a threat to France’s healthy ecosystem of indie bookstores, politicians banded together to approve a bill that prohibited Jeff Bezos’ company and other online retailers from shipping discounted books for free.” Far be it from Amazon to break the law …

Via Slate 

Facing Reality

“Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.”

~ Bertrand Russell, “Recrudescence of Puritanism”

Boston or Borneo, London or Lahore: The rise of global literature doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter where a book comes from. It does... Sydney or Sarajevo or Svit

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Seven reasons not to write novels and only one reason to write them, by Javier Marias.  Does this apply to non-fiction like Cold River?

Experimental Vancouver coffee shop with no WiFi, texting, cell phones, etc., only coffee.  You also pay by donation and you are…supposed to talk to the other people in the shop.

- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.fO1myxLK.dpuf

~ ACH ... Finding the most beautiful route across a city.

Eclectic Observers

New evidence that the "usual suspects" seek a warm conflict again

~ Cold War 2.0: The “old school” behind it failed evolution

Listen to the Oldest Song in the World: A Sumerian Hymn Written 3,400 Years Ago OpenCulture

"The irony is that a personality disposition normally seen as antisocial — disagreeableness — may actually be linked to 'pro-social' behavior,'" writes Psychology Today's Kenneth Worthy. "This connection seems to arise from a willingness to sacrifice one's popularity a bit to act in a moral and just way toward other people, animals or the environment at large. Popularity, in the end, may be more a sign of social graces and perhaps a desire to fit in than any kind of moral superiority."

Psychologists Have Uncovered a Troubling Feature of People Who Seem Nice All the Time NewsMic

Story at a Cemetery

“A Seventeenth-Century Story” — A. A. Milne

There is a story in every name in that first column of The Times- -Births, Marriages, and Deaths—down which we glance each morning, but, unless the name is known to us, we do not bother about the stories of other people. They are those not very interesting people, our contemporaries. But in a country churchyard a name on an old tombstone will set us wondering a little. What sort of life came to an end there a hundred years ago?

Stories

Reading Cold River Means Being On Your Own Little Democratic Island

Our best paintings look like screams of pain (Alasdair Gray’s Lanark)

“There was once a building boom,” said Thaw, growing excited, “In north Italy. The local governments and bankers of three or four towns, towns the size of Paisley, put so much wealth and thought into decorating public buildings that half Europe’s greatest painters were bred there in a single century. These bosses weren’t unselfish men, no, no. They knew they could only win votes and stay popular by giving spare wealth to their neighbours in the form of fine streets, halls, towers and cathedrals. So the towns became beautiful and famous and have been a joy to visit ever since. But today our bosses don’t live among the folk they employ. They invest surplus profits in scientific research. Public buildings have became straight engineering jobs, our cities get uglier and uglier and our best paintings look like screams of pain. No wonder! The few who buy them, buy them like diamonds or rare postage stamps, as a form of non-taxable banking.”~From Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark

Reading A Book Means Being On Your Own Little (Democratic) Island

Graham Swift: “Without getting pompous about it, fiction can perform a very important moral and social function. It is highly democratic.”

Via The Guardian (UK)

Byliner & CIA Style

Darkness Laughable: The Comic Genius Of Cormac McCarthy

“As one of our greatest living writers has his work lifted into the ivory tower, let’s reflect on how it’s the light, not the darkness, that keeps us going back for more.”

Via Pacific Standard 

How Byliner’s Long-Form Digital Journalism Subscription Service Fell Apart

“Byliner, which launched in 2011, was one of the darlings of the literary startup scene … Its original mission was to publish original e-singles, both fiction and nonfiction, and also to create a sort of archival home for journalists on the web.” Do the company’s problems “mean that longform journalism on the web is doomed? Or are Byliner’s problems specific to Byliner?”

Via GigaOm 

The CIA Has A Style Manual (And It’s Ruthless)

The darnedest things turn up from Freedom of Information Act requests: the Directorate of Intelligence’s Style Manual & Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications (eighth edition, 2011). “As revealed in the manual, the CIA is a prescriptivist scold, a believer in the serial comma, and a champion of ‘crisp and pungent’ language ‘devoid of jargon’.”

Via Quartz 

Blocking Words

A story can always end happily by stopping at a cheerful moment. Of course in nature the only end is death, but death hardly ever happens when people are at their best. That is why we like tragedies. They show men ending energetically with their wits about them and deserving to do it.

~ From Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark

Got Writer’s Block? Here’s What The Experts Say

“Not all typing is writing, and not all writing is typing; writer’s block subverts far more than the first sentence. Straightforward creative paralysis, or the inability to start typing, is merely the most literal-minded definition.”

And then, if I am particularly lost, I simply email a few friends, which is how I came upon all the lovely advice above, plus this colorful note from Evan Fleischer: “One way to deal with writer’s block is to walk until a strange flower grows in time-lapse-photography fashion out of your head.”

Via Pacific Standard 

Authors’ Incomes In Britain Are Falling To ‘Abject’ Levels: Study

“‘Shocking’ new statistics … show that the number of authors able to make a living from their writing has plummeted dramatically over the last eight years, and that the average professional author is now making well below the salary required to achieve the minimum acceptable living standard in the UK.”

Bia The Guardian (UK) 

Scholarly Journal Retracts 60 Articles In Review Scandal

“The reason for the mass retraction is mind-blowing: A “peer review and citation ring” was apparently rigging the review process to get articles published. You’ve heard of prostitution rings, gambling rings and extortion rings. Now there’s a “peer review ring.”

Vis Washington Post 

Talking About Books We (Love To) Hate

“I casually hate, in equal amounts, Ender’s Game, The Lovely Bones, Prep, and everything written by Stieg Larsson.”

Read the story at The Toast Published: 07.04.14

Coolest Trends

The birth of cool. What began as a word evolved into an attitude and then a way of life. Yet a question endures: What makes cool cool? ~ What make col river cool

From the Polish border to the Pacific, from the Arctic Circle to the Afghan frontier, authoritarian regimes are aglow with arrogant confidence Human nature ...

The conservative mind is unbalanced, says Adam Bellow. The best and brightest on the right go into politics. Literature has been abandoned to the left...Tea ..... Party

No one likes to be wrong, including intellectuals. A big thinker is hardly about to disavow his own theory. Butbeing wrong has its benefits... Story of Jozef Imrich's Life ...