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Beauty is in the liver of the beholder, as demonstrated by a quote of Guy Debord inside Panegyric: I have written much less than most writers, but I have drunk much more than most drinkers...
Ach, Howard Mansfield describes the endless bric-a-brac of televised conversation:
The answers do not matter. The questions do not matter. The subject is only a pretext. The flow is all that matters. TV is about itself....it will eat anything it must to survive - no item of trivia is too small, no sorrow too vast, not to be swallowed entire.

The chief of staff of the Army, the General of the Library, issued a significant update to the Army's list of recommended books

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Libraries in Unlikely Places.
Something new to czech out at the mall: library books...
Typically, people go to malls to shop and to socialize. They may meet a friend for a quick lunch and then hunt for a new outfit. But at two malls in the greater Seattle area, they can also pick up a copy of the latest bestseller, do a computer search for a new job, and listen to a Spanish- language CD - all for free.
The freebies aren't some enormous give-away by the malls, but typical library services in a not-so-typical location.
Get your haircut and borrow books in one stop.
• It's so much better to talk about literature than to talk about people or gossip
[In the digital world almost everything is documented but little is effectively recorded for future access. This is true for digital books and digital photography. No wonder there is more than nostalgic respect for paper and film. No wonder that paper books, printed on demand, are the most popular kind of ebooks ; You are now an elitist if you believe all should have the opportunity to access the best culture Criticism of manufactured culture is the opposite of elitist ]
• · Art Metals [At the center of every culture is a group of people seated around a fire telling of the heroes whose struggles transformed and remade their world. That’s true whether the fire is the burning embers of a cooking fire in the Amazon basin or the flickering pixels of a cathode ray tube in Sutherland: Story telling: an art aggregation: stories talk to the gut, while information talks to the mind]
• · · Cultural Olympiad Artists and the Olympic Games ; [Olympic medallists in art competitions ; Olympiada]
• · · · A good book cover makes you want to pick it up. End of story The opening hook ; [ Imagine if one company controlled the card catalog of every library in the world]
• · · · · The taking of one’s own life is the most private of acts, but the incidence of suicide varies widely across societies and historical periods. The psychological dislocation that causes one to kill oneself has deep social roots ... the cold winds of egoism freezes their hearts and weakens their spirits. The bond attaching man to life slackens because the bond which attaches him to society is itself slack Sociology of Suicidal End ; And are 'little magazines,' those tip sheets on the literary future, an endangered species--or on the verge of a renaissance?
• · · · · · Why so many business books are awful ; [And sex, sex, sex up front in bookstores and cold rivers near you]