Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer—and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest men are at siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for that is only to suffer one another.
-Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome
The Australian is concerned about "three certainties about Australian fiction today: fewer books are being published, sales are falling and shelf-lives are shorter." Lits out: Shrinking Support for Australian Novelists
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: The Dream Life
I have been in a bad mood for the last, well, to be perfectly honest, 25 years, since 7 July 1980, but for the sake of this blog post we'll say last few months.
Films have often been compared to dreams. Indeed, there is something dreamlike about those images moving before us as we sit still in the dark of a movie theater. Hollywood is called the "dream factory," and dreams have inspired avant-garde filmmakers, too. The great Surrealist Luis Buñuel, for example, made his first film, Un Chien andalou (1929), from a screenplay that he and another young Spaniard in Paris, Salvador Dalí, derived from their dreams. No one who has seen this startling dream-film can forget its opening. A man sharpens a razor, goes out onto a balcony and looks up at the full moon as a thin cloud slices across it, at which point the eye of a woman who has appeared out of nowhere is sliced with the razor. Even if this is, it is there on the screen with so vivid a quality of physical reality that we recoil in shock, as if our own eyes were under attack.
• Occurring in the man's imagination [Margo Hammond interviews poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. This song has been a secret anthem of my soul ; Vote for the Greatest Living Writer I’m Rich ; Janice 'Girlbomb' Erlbaum Dishes on Her Sex-Crazed and Drug-Addled Past and How Life Is Different Now GIRLBOMB: A Halfway Homeless Memoir ]
• · American culture has always warmed to what's cool cold river ; My search for smiles is taking me to some wonderful places. The merest touch of lippy
• · · Literature is good with words Whose side are you on? ; It’s difficult to feel that books matter when most Americans don’t read even one book a year, when writers struggle to get published and noticed under the avalanche of celebrity biographies and diet books, and when nearly all of the book gifts I’ve given to friends have yet to be read. Real Life and the Life of the Lit Major
• · · · Woe unto the manly. So scorned, so sublimated When was the last time you could throw a punch?; Double Dragon really, really thinks you should go to Amazon river and dive into Cold River ; People are remembered by their flowers and seeds, not their mulch. Fuck interviews. Papal attraction: Douglas Coupland tries to interview Morrissey
• · · · · What America learned from 9/11 -- what other nations already knew, from their own dread acquaintance with terrorism and the anguish left in its wake -- is that people can just disappear, can vaporize, can put on a hat and coat and leave in the morning and never come back, can turn a corner and fade from sight forever. What happens when people simply go away? ; Is there ever a time and place for censorship? I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it Tom Stoppard: Free speech is not a human right
• · · · · · Should parents have the right to prevent their daughters from having abortions? ; Go back a few millenniums, and we've all got the same ancestors.