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Tuesday, January 31, 2006



The talk show queen apologises for end Oprah tells author: I feel duped

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Happiness is . . . two books about the pursuit of bliss
Maybe you have a New Year’s resolution that’s still unbroken.

I’m guessing that whatever it is - to lose weight, to give to charity, to reconcile with that family member, to change careers - the motive is the same. You want to be happier.
I mean, duh. Why do anything unless it’s going to make you happier? But here’s a question: What is happiness, anyway? Duh? OK, but two new books offer provocative answers to what might seem too obvious to ask.


• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, detach from material possessions, realize that happiness is a construct of your mind What is happiness, anyway? [Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency Slavoj Zizek ; What are the social effects of fast, cheap & stigma-free viewing? Audio and video of the Smith Foundation debate. Porn in the Age of Instant Access ]
• · When I read Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Hours," I admired it as a thoughtful, delicately considered engagement with the literary past and a sensitive articulation of various kinds of loss. We feel no alienation from a body like this, no division into me and it. It is the body as transformed into another type of material, an immaterial material. There is something wondrous and magical about it. . . . It is a body without the ignominy of flesh Alone in the Dark ; Movies offer us a transformed reality in which the body is stripped of its material bonds and becomes united with our essential nature as centers of consciousness Television Cul-de-Sac Mystery: Why Was Reality Show Killed?
• · · Two Seattle residents filed suit in federal court against Frey and Random House, charging "breach of contract, unjust enrichment, negligent misrepresentation, intentional misrepresentation and violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act," according to the Seattle Times. The plaintiffs, whose main request is to be compensated for the "lost time" in reading the book, are seeking class action for the suit. The newspapers says the suit is "apparently the third of its kind to be filed across the nation, seeks class-action status against Frey and the publisher Lost time; Frey Acknowledges Mistakes on Today's Oprah - Appearing on the show with Frey are publisher Nan Talese and some journalists. Do you think you lied or do you think you made a mistake?
• · · · Generally speaking, feminists get together with other feminists because it is less expensive than seeing a therapist Why I don’t take feminists seriously ; Ten years after identifying his brother as the Unabomber, David Kaczynski talks about what the experience cost him Matters of Life and Death
• · · · · The LA Weekly conducted a lengthy investigation of the work of another memoirist, Nadijj, following up in part on long-term assertions by Native American writer Sherman Alexie that Nadijj invented his Navajo identity and plagiarised the work of others. Alexie had told Nadijj's original editor at Houghton Mifflin, You're going to pay for this later - this is not real. Did a struggling white writer of gay erotica become one of multicultural literature’s most celebrated memoirists — by passing himself off as Native American? Navahoax; A true-to-life novel about learning anew what it means to be a mother and what it takes to be a son Kevin E. Cropp, author of The Time Keeper and son of cancer victim
• · · · · · To really "make" it as a Sopranos watcher, come with your full breadth of cultural references or don't come at all: At this point in our cultural history, mob movies are classic American cinema, like westerns Coming Heavy ; 7 myths about the Challenger shuttle disaster ; Fredric Jameson famously described globalisation as a version of "the proverbial elephant, described by its blind observers in so many diverse ways" In place of the apex