Bleak City may not be so bleak after all, according to one industry insider who suggest Melbourne is the cultural capital of Australia The Arts: How our cities compare
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Married to a Genius
D.H. Lawrence said you must have “something vicious in you” to be a writer – perhaps a splinter of ice in your heart. Imagine marrying one...
Geniuses are traditionally difficult to live with. It is part of their mystique. Disregard for other people is vital for their art, or so they claim. Jeffrey Meyers’s sharp-witted book tests these beliefs by examining the marital relationships of nine writers — Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. Each study is brilliant and arresting, and they reflect fascinatingly on one another. Meyers has an intricate grasp of modern literature, and has already written full-scale biographies of five of his subjects. Above all, he reveals how subtly writers’ lives infiltrate their fiction — the hardest trick in literary biography
• Dragging, literary style [Michel Houellebecq the only writer alive said to be a Stalinist, a Nazi, a sex maniac, and a drunk. This is the man who fell asleep during a TV interview You dine with Michel Houellebecq at your peril ; When Simone de Beauvoir died in April 1986, headlines announced, “Women, you owe her everything.” Now do you really?... ]
• · Teaching is an art form, one that needs a constant flow of new - and, yes, 'trendy' - ideas Be fascinating, or be toast ; Coffee is the drug that changed my life. Without its brain-perking effects, it's doubtful that I could have passed astronomy in college, read The Wealth of Nations cover to cover, or made a favorable first impression on my girlfriend's parents despite suffering from a colossal hangover Brain Brew
• · · Caffeine has long been a drug of choice for students, helping many of them through all-nighters, exam weeks, and just getting up every day Do You Really Need That Latte? ; Javanomics 101: Today's Coffee Is Tomorrow's Debt
• · · · The notion of American exceptionalism—that the United States alone has the right, whether by divine sanction or moral obligation, to bring civilization, or democracy, or liberty to the rest of the world, by violence if necessary—is not new The Power and the Glory; Seven deadly sins: A new look at society through an old lens
• · · · Three songs from the End of History ; Constants of the universe are a tantalizing mystery. Why do they exist at all? They pose physics’s grandest question Inconstant Constants
• · · · · There are two groups who seem to indulge in writing memoirs: people who are too young to have lived through very much, and those who have lived so long that they've forgotten much that happened. Jamie Reidy would seem to be from the first pack. He's only 35, and his story, "Hard Sell," chronicles his professional adventures from age 25 to 30 Slacker Viagra salesman tells all ; Flying snakes are a small group of species of tree snakes that live in South and Southeast Asia Flying Snakes
• · · · · · The Sydney writer talks about writing the screenplay for the film Peaches. Questions for Sue Smith ; A new study from the American Library Association which was conducted by researchers at Florida State University, found that 98.9 percent of libraries offer free public Internet access, up from 21 percent in 1994 and 95 percent in 2002. It also found that 18 percent of libraries have wireless Internet access and 21 percent plan to get it within the next year Almost All Libraries Offer Free Web Access