The local rag, Wentworth Courier, has a strangest ad of all on page 142 of the 14 December 2005 edition: Please note I Wainam Kaack and my daughter Sally Kaack are no longer Anglicans. Thankyou.
When Muriel Rukeyser famously asserted, “The universe is made up of stories, not atoms,” it was likely she was thinking about the kind of stories that never die ... the way we make sense of our lives is by telling stories about them stories which may or may not be true but making sense and telling the truth isn’t exactly the same thing ... Prizes and top 10 lists are cheap forms of mass therapy, reducing the stress of having to choose, says Peder Zane. Consider them cultural Prozac... I never knew what prize or time it was
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Picture Imperfect: There was a time when words were like magic
You must be out of your mind—you can’t change that! Anxiety is a first principle of our social life. Capital foments an insecurity that impels people to submit to its demands...
Jacoby argues, in the Kabbala and in Jewish tradition generally, the Torah achieves full meaning only through the oral law: “The ear trumps the eye. Alone, the written word may mislead: it is too graphic.” Similarly, the future of the iconoclasts is “heard and longed for” rather than seen. Here, Jacoby’s analysis intersects with a fear he has long shared with his Frankfurt School mentors—that a mass culture obsessed with images flattens the imagination and perhaps destroys it altogether. From this perspective, the iconoclasts’ elision of the image is itself radically countercultural.
• Ghosts, Fantasies, and Hope [Readers of the world unite ; P. L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the making of a myth. Becoming Mary Poppin]
• · An American expat finds the dark notes in a creepy Kafka opera Veteran voice: In the Penal Colony ; Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? Gore Vidal once observed that there are more prizes than writers in the United States. Shit sells. Put something scatological in the title of your book and the bestseller lists beckon. The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less What every budding author should know: crap books make lots of money
• · · My Tato, father, Jozef who had beehives everywhere of course knew all that without the PHD ;-) He was never, ever, bitten by his bees living in our huge mortuary garden Bees recognize human faces ; Books of The Times | 'The Edifice Complex': The pyramids, Versailles, the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin, the World Trade Center: it's hardly news that the rich and powerful have used architecture to try to achieve immortality, impress their contemporaries, stroke their own egos and make political and religious statements Leaders Who Build to Stroke Their Egos: My Sexual Organ
• · · · The Poisonwood Bible; Susan Sontag called for an erotics of art. Forty years on, all we’ve got in the English department is a neurotics of art: endless politics, victimology, meaning mongerin Literary Aesthetics: the Very Idea
• · · · · Psychiatry Ponders Whether Extreme Bias Can Be an Illness ; The Shift Away From Print
• · · · · · A study finds students who attend Catholic universities are More likely to lose their faith than retain or enrich it ; We teach schoolchildren about sex and supply free condoms. So why don't we take the same approach to smoking?