Pages

Wednesday, January 05, 2005



Forecasting the big books of the coming year is a bit like forecasting the weather: You know there'll be rain and wind, but you don't know when or how much. There will be hot books and good books, and maybe even a few that are both, but there are bound to be surprises, too.
-Dave Mehegan

Year on year, there are no great waves of change, just odd ripples. The recent explosion of literary weblogs has to be the most encouraging development in recent memory. Hail the "litblogs," which offer critique, comment, passion and show how to learn to stop worrying about the past and love the future

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Endings are a catharsis: We Are All in the Business of Buying Time
They give meaning to what comes before, and change us from the way we were. They also inform us whether something was empty or full Steve Winn ponders endings:

Endings define and disappoint, gratify and frustrate. They confer meaning and confirm the structure of what's come before -- in a movie, a sonata, a work of fiction. But they also kill off pleasure, snap us out of the dream and clamp down order on experience that we, as citizens of the modern world, believe to be open-ended, ambiguous and unresolved. It's a delicious paradox. Fairy tales, adventure films, mystery stories and Mozart symphonies all gain velocity by pointing us at one ending, toying with our biology of anticipation and racing off toward some new false conclusion and then another and another before finishing themselves off ...


A Meditation On Endings [No exile should be denied the chance to buy extra creative time. Like sea breezes, bushfires, and new year resolutions films about exiles are part of Sydney festival summer ]
• · Since it is the buying time of year czech out this two links: The death of Simon Raven, at the age of 73 after suffering a stroke, is proof that the devil looks after his own. He ought, by rights, to have died of shame at 30 or of drink at 50. Written on my birthday in 2001 Once a plain death notice, the obituary has become an entertaining art form Death, the ineluctable final bow, is the subject of harrowing series entitled Who Will Look After Media Dragon How you love people, how you talk to them and your friendship with them - that is all that remains in the end
• · · No literary(-related) event is too small! If someone tickles me, I turn into a lone commando unit with a mission to assassinate As a behavioral and physiological phenomenon, tickling is a bag of riddles. The Mystery of Ticklish Laughter: Pleasure or pain? Social response or reflex [The secret lies in the cerebellum, a region at the back of the brain which predicts the sensory consequences of movements and sends signals to the rest of the brain instructing it to ignore the resulting sensation - This is why we unknowingly love our lives to be unpredictable!!!]
• · · · Millionaire musicians to lose Irish tax free status
• · · · · The anti-Fictionalist: I’m sick of faking it. (P.K.) Philosophy in Questionable Taste Alfred Hitchcock aspired to lift a curtain on the mystery of the living clock: It is rare man whose past does not come to haunt him. Not much left in the existential tank so far as the I am my dream - I am my hell reality is concerned. You gotta have some kind of faith
• · · · · · Amy Campbell Trends inside 2004; The top 100 Word Spy words Last year, I earned a cute looking Red Cross clock (three dabbing strikes of a needle and anyone can get one - smile) Even teenagers like the retro look. Next idea for the marketing section to consider is to czech out this savvy T-shirt. I will not only give blood, but also $50 if it goes towards a good cause - This Red Cross t-shirt tickles many of my dispositions. The classic army green works beautifully alongside the red and white of the logo.; Welsh surfer rode tsunami to safety