This has been quite a week for literary coups. My book has been downloaded at different parts of my publisher’s world map in the last two weeks including Australia, China, the Czech Republic, Findland, France, Germany, Holand, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Slovakia, and UK. As Natsume Soseki noted: A storyteller is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world Ugly Escape: The Three-Cornered World
The complete unexpurgated scripts of the original TV series MontyPython.net
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: The Singing Neanderthal
Music moves the human body (our feet tap, our bodies sway) and the human heart (our emotions beat in time to a song’s pulse).
Every child in every society creates music, defined to include song and dance: it’s a fundamental activity of Homo sapiens.
And it’s a mystery too, full of questions in major and minor keys. Major: Why and when did music evolve? Why is music of all kinds capable of stirring our emotions, transporting us into our past after a few chords? Minor, but not unrelated: Why some days, rifling through my CDs, do I pass Vivaldi, Satie, even Springsteen, in a craving for (wait for it….) Hall and Oates?
• Emotional power [The paradox of the era since 1945 is that the greatest tragedy in Jewish history has had two utterly different consequences. Benefits of Diaspora ; Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam ]
• · Gerald Murnane's obsessive imagination ; Yoga study from American Council on Exercise, finds benefits. For My Soul Mate Gwynne ; Now, brace yourself for this. Don't panic. Don't freak out - Around 2,000 people died in 9/11. Around 10,000 have died from Hurricane Katrina. Around 100,000 died during the great Tsunami. Around 60,000,000 died in all of World War II. I cannot even fathom the impact of 150,000,000 deaths, can you? The media is selling us despair and death - How to stay calm: Bird Flu - The greatest human tragedy in history
• · · Digital technology will help alternative filmmakers ; Top 25 film scores of all time
• · · · Carry On Don't Lose Your Head, The Origins and Common Usage of British Swear-words ; Samuel Johnson: Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment A World Turned Upside Down
• · · · · Film: Enron — The smartest guys in the room ; Hungarian Literature Online
• · · · · · Angus Wilson: Sir Edgar smiled. 'For a man of your years you have a curious expectation that life runs smoothly,' he said New Humanities ; Martha Nell Smith on Democratizing Knowledge