How to make a revolution . Start with an 85-year-old pacifist, an Oxford-trained academic who works out of his home in Boston Gene Sharp: The Machiavelli of non-violence
Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.
VLVT The color revolution How to make a revolution
Out went neutral tints, in came indigo, crimson, lime green. The transformation was total, and all to sell things. Velvet Consumerism
。。。 no technology in human history has ever spread so far, so fast, so deep. • those without is so last century ; Forget what you’ve heard: Print is not dead, e-books are not the future, or at least not the only future. CLD RVR： Old-fashioned books are back [What is a poet’s biography for? A New Life, declares the subtitle of a book on John Keats. But the arguments are old, even if some details are not... Irritable Reachings: On John Keats ; For love of women and art. Was Raphael a chaste saint who sublimated his passion into his work? Or was he a womanizer who died in the arms of his mistress? Raphael: worn out by love, or work ]John Brockman’s Edge question for 2013 asks more than 150 intellectuals, “What should we be worried about? A new kind of misplaced worries is likely to become more and more common. The ever-accelerating current scientific and technological revolution results in a flow of problems and opportunities that presents unprecedented cognitive and decisional challenges. Our capacity to anticipate these problems and opportunities is swamped by their number, novelty, speed of arrival, and complexity.
Every day, for instance, we have reasons to rejoice in the new opportunities afforded by the Internet. The worry of fifteen years ago that it would create yet another major social divide between those with access to the internet and those without is so last century!
• · The Internet has prompted an age of self-examination, or at least self-exposure. Navel-gazing is our passion. Psychoanalysis is not. Why? Psychoanalysis and the human talent for unhappiness. Beyond the couch ; Big Crit and its discontents. An algorithm can tell you what Animal Farm says about animals, but it can't tell you what it says about Stalinism... Big Data is the new big thin。。
• · · Disgust and delight. What excites our desire – a naked body, a boiled lobster, a cigarette – is simultaneously what threatens to trigger our revulsion Nausea ; Reading Chekhov again. His stories, like Kipling’s, never lose flavor and never disappoint. New Age to neuroscience, Daniel Goleman to Malcolm Gladwell, advice books have a new name: “nonfiction with a strong takeaway”. The Power of Positive Publishing
• · · · “Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can • off.” - Philip Larkin 50 years after her suicide, Sylvia Plath is hardly forgotten = Wedding celebrants, most of them Poles and Germans, drank rivers of vodka by the shot. ; “I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.” Business in literature: are there practical, applicable lessons there?
• · · · · “This is the Eve of St. Agnes, on which young virgins obedient to various bedtime rituals — having eaten only a salt-filled egg, or having put sprigs of thyme and rosemary in their shoes-are granted a vision of their future lovers. Agnes is the patron saint of virgins, martyred at the age of twelve (ca. 305) for choosing to die rather than become the wife of a Roman prefect. In Keats’s famous ‘The Eve of St. Agnes,’ Madeline retires dressed in white, pledged to look only heavenward for her vision of the forbidden Porphyro; this allows Porphyro, who has hidden himself in her bedroom closet, to have full view of her…” ; “Many of the novel’s epiphanies take place over food, while characters are making chowder, braising endive, or biting into a tortilla chip.” The Lost Art of Mixing:
• · · · · · The phenomenon of dead authors posting on Twitter and Facebook. …safe to say that amazing things will most likely be happening in MY literary career right now Status Updates; Wendy Smith on Jim Harrison’s The River Swimmer: “…has the dreamlike quality of a fairy tale, complete with magical beings and a poor, questing hero. “Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.” Jim Harrison’s new novellas explore the nature of self and self-discovery； Near-death experiences seem to be a goldmine for would-be bestselling authors Publishing world cashes in on heavenly journeys ； Can it be true? Do people really see a light at the end of a tunnel when they have a near-death experience?