I know a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectability of his life, and who one evening recognized that he had never loved her. He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people."
-The Fall (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, Borzoi Books, 1960.) Tr. Justin O'Brien. p. 37
Perfection, which is the passion of so many people, does not interest me. What is important in art is to vibrate oneself and make others vibrate.
-George Enescu
On a whim the other day, I bought a paperback called Improbable. Of course, if you read this blog at all and happen to be aware that I enjoy reading quite a bit, you would understand that it wasn't very improbable that I would buy it, even though I wasn't looking for a new book Shit happens: Improbable by Adam Fawer
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Lust for Life: Give it up for Moravian Mendel
With all the hoopla over Darwin Day (justified in my opinion) I thought I'd point you to this article, Gregor Mendel: The father of genetics.
Mendelian genetics was an inevitable discovery, as the nearly simultaneous rediscovery of "Mendel's Laws" around 1900 show us
• Czech Boy Gregor Mendel [Hip-hop has gone to sleep. It needs more active dreamers if it is to prove that it is now more than merely another Internet menu item. The Color of Money ; Rembrandt’s late self-portraits: that intimate, unflinching scrutiny of his own sagging, bloated visage. Life may have bashed him, says Robert Hughes, but it had not beaten him Connoisseur of the ordinary ; Literature can have a powerful influence on political culture - just look at how often the term “Orwellian” gets an airing whenever issues like state surveillance, the mangling of language or the power of propaganda are being discussed. Nineteen Eighty-Four has done a lot to define the terms of these debates Kafkaesque nightmares ]
• · Can society demand what it's owed, the happiness of the scientists be damned? My students are so smart ; When I was having lots of cybersex, I kept a notebook by my computer so I could jot down details about my cyber partners More Sex With Girlfriend X Publishers want authors to be young and photogenic, but booksellers are democratic pragmatists; they are interested not in you but in your book, particularly the price and the cover. Then they ask who the distributor is and whether the wholesalers have it in stock. Young and photogenic
• · · Quail Hunting with Dick Cheney Contagious Film Festival ; Scientists are split on the different ways men and women think Getting lynched ; You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby Words of Today
• · · · Type "Czech brides" into Google, and you get more than 27,000 Web sites promising romantic life partners, subservient women "unspoiled by feminism," and everything in between Former model brings real life to romance biz ; Jordan - A Whole New World by Katie Price
• · · · · Why Jim Born balances life as a cop and life as a writer Lawman fights crime on the page and off ; Everything the Shakers made is breathtaking in its beauty and simplicity. Why these lovely things so bewitch us is a mystery Shining Tree Of Life
• · · · · · Book reviewers impressed by a new work’s “honesty” can only rely on the aroma test. Alas, a pile of literary manure can smell like a bed of roses. Bluff ran like a river through his schemes ; “I’m not a grammar freak,” writes Jeremy Clarkson. “But when someone says myself instead of me I find it more offensive than if they’d said spastic wog”The worst word in the language ; OH Baby! Where were YOU when I was single? Dating has been around forever. But with the emergence of a new set of rules for Generation Y, dating has never been so confusing Luv for Generation Y: Just a game?; Little Mother's Milk in the shops ? ; With few exceptions, of which the Pickwick Papers is the finest example, happy writing rarely makes good and enduring literature 'The Bohemian Bourgeois