Last week has been aimed at settling me and my angel Gabriella at Bondi and preparing me for the Cold River Bondi Bronte ocean swim tomorrow. [I am back to my 95 kg from 103 kg more palatable for my 6.2 frame] If there are no posts on Monday it means my 40 something body just could not take the surf and the rocks ;-)
A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possession - Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy Be happy not rich
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: For Love of Freedom: Tales of Desperate Science Fictional Acts
Because of the Cold War emphasis on dystopias, Cold War writers like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Samuel R. Delany had to find radical new ways to express their inexpressible hopes about the future, claims Jameson. In Dick's uncanny novels, the author demands of us that we decide for ourselves what's real and what isn't ...
Josh Glenn writes a terrific column for the Boston Globe's Ideas section. It is called "The Examined Life." This week, he wrote "a long-form essay I've written for today's Ideas: It's about Fredric Jameson's new book on the utopian possibilities of dystopian science fiction by the likes of Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Samuel R. Delany."
Fans of Dick, Delany, and their ilk warn neophytes not to read too many of their books too quickly: Doing so, as this reader can attest, tends to result in pronounced feelings of irreality, paranoia, and angst.
• Josh Glenn on utopian ideas hidden inside dystopian sf. [ There is no alternative to free-market capitalism ...; Science Fiction Cold River runs so deep ]
• · Communal TV viewing by families and groups of friends is on the rise again after years of decline, thanks to shows such as Strictly Come Dancing, The X Factor and Doctor Who. TV has a unique ability which other media simply don't possess - it brings people together Family viewing on the rise
• · · Tolstoy understood human consciousness better than anyone who ever lived ... Her single-minded faith in love, which befits a romance character but is pure hell on one who resides in a realist work, plunges her into isolation and paranoia . Anna’s fate illustrates the dangers of such kinds of all-or-nothing thinking. And all at once she thought of the man crushed by the train the day she had first met Vronsky, and she knew what she had to do. The character, not the author, fulfills the omen. Anna provides her own foreshadowing, and fate has nothing to do with it I knew that she knew what she had to do: All about Jozef and Anna Semankova ;-); One must write, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure. Work like war is not just a scrapbook of atrocities and bad luck. It is not a series of alarming photographs. War is hell because it happens to people Cold (War) River: we didn't plan it this way