Castles and communism in the Slovak capital

It looks like something out of a science fiction movie, perhaps the War of the Worlds or a long-forgotten1980s television series called The Tripods.Bratislava's UFO Tower, which sits on a bridge that spans the Danube, is nothing if not attention grabbing.

With a circular restaurant at the top that is like a metal head, its windows acting as the beady eyes, the whole structure resembles a giant metal insect. The 95-meter tower, which opened in 1972, must rank as the most off-beat of the many communist-era buildings that survive in the Slovak capital.

The views from the restaurant are no less breathtaking than the exterior, and on one side at least, are considerably more pleasing aesthetically. Looking across the river toward the Old Town, the blindingly white castle takes center stage, sitting above St Martin's Cathedral, where more than 10 Hungarian monarchs were crowned Panelaky

Think like Job

SHOUTmkt has created an infographic called, “Simple Ideas to Stimulate Creativity,” which is full of ideas for exercises that will help you get your brain flowing.

Check it out: “Do something different. Humans are creatures of habit and we tend to have routines we do every day, and this also applies to business. We read the same magazines; have the same routine at work etc. Do something completely different to get your mind out of the same mindset you use every day. Do something physical. Web designers and computer users in general spend long hours staring at the screen and barely moving. Getting up and moving around, or taking a break to do a physical activity like sport or taking a walk can wake up your creative side.”

Ideas to stimulate creativity.   ~~~~Dare to be different a to be talk about

Lane Cooper brooked no nonsense. He lived his life – and ran his Cornell classroom – by a favorite maxim: Read aloud, read slowly, read suspiciously... Different stories

Drive Škoda  cerveny blesk, aka red flash, and world will be different ...

Image: And We Are Trying by Nicholas Roerich

Image: And We Are Trying by Nicholas Roerich-- Isaac Beshevis Singer, in an interview with Parabola Magazine

"I would say that behind all of my ideas... is the freedom of choice. I feel that the freedom of choice is the very essence of life. We have one great gift from God and this is to choose. And we always indulge in choosing. If we pay attention to one thing, we have chosen to pay attention to it. If we love somebody, we have chosen this person for love. This is in every act of humanity. To me, God is freedom. And nature, to me, is necessity... When people leave free choice, the demons appear. The demons are in a way the dark side of nature which we choose. If we stop completely believing in our power, then other powers can come upon us. In other words, the demon to me is a negative side of free choice. Demons come when people resign themselves, when people say to themselves, "I'm not going to make any choices anymore. I will just let the powers work for themselves." It is then that the demon is bound to appear. The danger is always there -- like a medical doctor who will tell you that the microbes are always there in your mouth and in your stomach, and if you become weak, they begin to multiply and become very strong... Just as we are medically surrounded by dangerous microbes, so our spirit has always to fight melancholy and disbelief and viciousness and cruelty and all kinds of things."Interviewer: "Why melancholy?"
"Oh, but the very essence of demons is melancholy. Because it's the very opposite of hope. I have sympathy for everyone who suffers and lives. Because we are all living in a great, great struggle, whether we realize it or not. Sometimes we realize it. This is a very difficult thing -- we very often say how difficult life is... We have to go through this kind of struggle. In a way, the hope is that life does not last forever, the crisis does not last forever, and behind all this crisis, behind all this darkness, there is a great light. We have to struggle, but we are not lost."

Crazy Promises ...

For better, for worse, forever. Marriage is a crazy promise, triply so the third time around. But Clancy Martin is fully aware of the power of self-deception...Crazy Promises

Yes, you might have your heart broken; yes, the whole thing might be an impossible joke, a game with outrageous odds; yes, you might have failed at it twice before, and there’s no guarantee—just the opposite, really—that the third time’s the charm. Life is risky; love, riskier still; marriage might be riskiest of all. But to choose to be married is, contra Montaigne, a paradoxical expression of one’s freedom. It’s not the only game in town, but it’s one helluva good game.

Critics scoff, as do scholars, feminists, and multiculturalists, but the dream of the. Great Bohemian Novel refuses to die....Bohemian Morava

The Voynich Manuscript has seduced linguists, physicists, chemists, computer scientists, historians, even botanists. What explains the allure?... Iron curtains and it's scripts

HERE IS WHAT is known about the Voynich manuscript, a mysterious document that has bedeviled scholars and top cryptographers for more than a century: It consists of 246 pages of handwritten script and illustrations. It was discovered in an Italian monastery by a Slavic Lithuanian bookseller named Wilfrid Voynich in 1912...

Mc

Lieutenant Colonel Cate McGregor is describing her first encounters with Tony Abbott in the early 1980s – on the rugby field and at a bar at Sydney University where the young leftie and the ‘‘coming man’’ of the right locked horns in a testosterone-fuelled game of one-upmanship What is it about the scots wanting to be women?

Sources of Ordinary Lives

KG: In the text's "A Note On Sources," you mention that the book "owes a literary debt to the novels of John Dos Passos's great U.S.A. trilogy," and I wonder if you could speak more to its influence and more about why you decided to structure The Unwinding in the way that you did, as a sort of collage.  To take the question further, do you think or did you want the shape of the narrative in turn to reflect or speak to its content?

GP: When I got started in late 2008, I didn't set out to write a book like that at all. I imagined a more conventional account of America from Reagan to Obama, with a focus on particular institutions in crisis or decline, and certain well-known individuals who represented them. But the task of recapitulating all that familiar history soon bored and defeated me. I was much more inclined to spend my time with someone like Dean Price in Rockingham County, North Carolina, and see what the turmoil following the financial crisis was doing to him and his area. Those conversations were what energized me. I began to wonder if I could cover the same period—late seventies to the present—and the same theme of institutional change and decline, but through ordinary Americans' lives.

For a long time it seemed impossible—such a specific set of requirements!—but gradually I realized that the people I was talking with had lived the history I wanted to illuminate. So it became a book about people the reader hadn't heard of, people shaped by a common history over several decades but in separate places and ways. I looked for a model of this kind of book, and the only example I knew of was fiction—Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, which I read and loved years ago. I took U.S.A. as my inspiration, which gave me the idea of including short sketches of the lives of some American celebrities who shaped our culture during the same decades (though in a very different form from Dos Passos'), and collages of found texts from certain years along the way .Ordinary Amerikans

Sydney under Seige

Read globally, write locally

~Jozef Imrich



A 16-storey building proposed by a developer for Station St in Marrickville has been rejected, with an alternative structure of up to nine storeys now in the frame 16 not so sweet storey development in Marrickville (sic)

Haberfield's Graeme Mckay is organising a meeting with lawyers in February to discuss potential class action for those who properties may end up next to a motorway ramp or exhaust tower due to the WestConnex plan. westconnex

Self Delete

Snowden Files author Luke Harding says he watched his manuscript “self-delete” -  The bear pit story was deleted at Bondi circa 2005

There will be drinking, eating of deviled eggs, conversation, and Jozef Imrich readings... by the auger Ernie walls.

All of the whiskey* will go to the person who can answer which two books from our nonfiction longlist begin with someone waking up after a failed suicide attempt.


* All of the whiskey being an inch and a half at the bottom of the bottle.

Retaining Wall and Existentialism

What’s news? In the medieval world, it consisted of a little truth and a lot of rumor and misunderstanding. It is to that world that we’re returning...Jay Rosen

Rudeness has always been on the rise, it seems. True or not, our interest in the unacceptable behavior of others is as old as society itself... Disclosure information unit of Kafkaesque proportions #failed escapee

Loathe the selfie? Don’t blame the Kardashians. Its roots originate in the 19th century, with silk-waistcoated Parisian dandies... I'm rich ... Of selfies

A sunset, a painting, a person: What do we mean when we call something beautiful? That we’ve been struck by an odd combination of anguish and delight ... High Tatra Mountains

Lane Cooper brooked no nonsense. He lived his life – and ran his Cornell classroom – by a favorite maxim: Read aloud, read slowly, read suspiciously... What do human creatures want? Fame? Wealth? Happiness?

Ava Gardner and Barbara Stanwyck were tough, talented, and certain that fame is fleeting. “Movie stars write their books,” said Gardner, “then they are forgotten, and then they die”... Fame

10 Wisdom of Grieving

Catherine Woodiwiss, a web editor based in Washington DC, who has experienced the death of a sister from an accident in Afghanistan, and the slow recovery of another sister who was hit by a car, wrote a moving article in January about trauma, grieving and healing. We can all benefit from her wisdom… Memories of Aga

Self-publishing: is it killing the mainstream?

Self-publishing: is it killing the mainstream?

Is DIY publishing building the industry's future? Carrying timber at a home improvement story. Photograph: Roger Bamber

Brenna Aubrey nself-published her debut romance novel At Any Price on the Amazon Kindle on 9 December 2013. One month later At Any Price had netted a total profit of £16,588. Aubrey's success is far from unique – 2013 was a breakout year for "indie authors" led by the phenomenal success of Hugh Howey. But Aubrey is among the first in a wave of authors to do what, until very recently, would have been unthinkable; turn down a $120,000 (£72,000) deal from one of the big five publishing houses and decide to do their job herself.Media Dragons

Short Story

Neil Gaiman: Short Story as an Illustrated Book

By Maryann Yin on February 20, 2014 9:30 AM

HarperCollins will release Neil Gaiman’s short story, “The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains,” as a full-fledged book in June 2014. According to Gaiman’s blog post, artist Eddie Campbell created illustrations for this project.

In the past, this story appeared in an anthology (co-edited by Gaiman) called Stories. Shortly after Stories was published, the Sydney Opera House commissioned Gaiman to transform his story into a 90-minute multimedia show.

“The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains” show was part of their 2010 Graphic Festival. Now, Gaiman has lined up four dates to perform it; he will be at the Warfield in San Francisco on June 25th and two days later, Gaiman will take his show to Carnegie Hall in New York City. Following those U.S. performances, Gaiman will fly to London for two shows at the Barbican.

Sydneyrella

Can’t stop dreaming about what might have been? Makes sense: we regret more than we used to. In fact, the culture is awash in self-absorbed self-criticism... Level 13 peppered with lonely characters

The Book of Many Lives

C.D. Hermelin, on behalf of the School of Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Aleksandar Hemon, via email, about his book The Book of My Lives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which is among the final five selections, in the category of Autobiography, for the 2013 NBCC awards.

CDH: At the end of the section titled "Life During Wartime," you write: "The war had arrived and now we were all waiting to see who would live, who would kill, and who would die." This sentence struck me, as living and dying are separated from those "who would kill." Why separate those who kill from those who go about living and dying?

AH: Well, I would think that living/dying is what every human being does, while killing is a little more exclusive, even in a war. But there is also a Bosnian expression, roughly translatable as: "Let’s see who lives and who dies," used when someone is overly optimistic or confident in predicting the future. The sentence you quoted engages the idea that the distribution of the future depends on the distribution of life and death, as well as on the distributors of death.

CDH: In The Book of My Lives you make special mention that your professor's essay-writing course was the only writing course you've ever taken. Did the rest of your development as a writer take place through your own experiments with writing—and are there any blank spots that you feel like an education could fill? Can a writer be over-educated in writing itself?

Stories from broken eastern europe

Tunnel to the other Side ...

A tunnel to Yugoslavia would have simplified the trip from landlocked Czechoslovakia to the sea… …if Cold War politics hadn’t interfered tunnel-to-the-other-side

Snippets from Fiona 

Every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (Lao-Tzu).

One of the best tips I ever received about getting stuff done comes from Japanese psychologist, Shoma Morita: “people…think that they should always like what they do, and that their lives should be trouble free. Consequently, their mental energy is wasted by their impossible attempts to avoid feelings of displeasure or boredom, and they fail to advance their self-development…” Morita advises us to “Begin taking action now, while being neurotic or imperfect or a procrastinator or unhealthy or lazy or any other label by which you inaccurately describe yourself. Go ahead and be the best imperfect person you can be and get started on those things you want to accomplish…” In other words, we don’t have to be perfect to get stuff done. We just have to make a start.

Timelines & Zines

“They’re beautiful objects, whose arrangement of content, photography and paper stocks convey a different view of the world. The design and textures are an invitation to be touched, flicked, handled. Most of all, in keeping with our age of Instagram, Pinterest and social network photo sharing, the content is visually driven.”  Works That Work, a design magazine for non-designers, created a social distribution model where readers got paid for delivering magazines to bookstores New Mags


The best ideas are often the simplest, they make you say: “I wish I’d thought of that!” We often don’t think if it, because ‘simple’ is not the same as easy. There is genius in simplicity  Simple & So Good Things in Life

Power, Money, Gospel ... According to Mark

"Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution--these can lift at a colossal humbug,--push it a little--crowd it a little--weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand."

~ Mark Twain, "Chronicle of Young Satan" (courtesy of Tim Hulsey)

New: Self-Published Books Are Now Outselling Traditional Publisher

“Indie authors are outselling the big five. That’s the entire big five. Combined. Indie and small-press books account for half of the ebook sales in the most popular and bestselling genres on Amazon,” writes Howey in his report, which has been described as “the most penetrating, ground-breaking, explosive article about publishing in memory.” The revolution behind Cold Rivers

It doesn’t matter how you publish. It matters, though, that we’re all together in this, and not shitty toward each other, and not hunkering down into our little cults and camps, our factions and followings. It matters that we can all do better and that we strive for that, with every day, every word, every story, every iteration of publication that we choose to embrace Imrich Self publishing truisms

We Won’t Stop Until We Have A History Of Everything

“We’ve had histories of conversation, boredom, shit, death, breasts, penises, tasting, happiness, smiling, laughing, celibacy, masturbation, taking out the trash, obsession, collective joy, and sadness” – and now sleep...

Risk Takers

Folio Prize Announces Inaugural Shortlist of Eight Books

“Born from frustrations with the Man Booker, the Folio chose eight writers from the US, Canada and Britain, all of whom ‘take risks’.”

Courtesy of The Guardian

Americans “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” When the internationally celebrated author Herta Müller won the Nobel in 2009, Europeans poked fun at the bafflement of Americans with headlines like: “Amerikaanse Mewedia: ‘Müller, Who the f*** Is Müller?’”

Via Pacific Standard

“While the television industry has begun catering to impatient audiences by releasing entire series at once, the book business is upending its traditional timetable by encouraging a kind of binge reading, releasing new works by a single author at an accelerated pace.”

Read the story at The New York Times 

The Art of Pressing

“Oh, always press. Just understand the difference between useless whining and actual pressing. What corporations understand is money. They don’t give a toss about blog posts or combative questioners at conventions. Clearly.

You vote and make change by the strategic application or withdrawal of money. Buy the products you want andwithhold money from those companies that don’t produce said product. And say why you’ve done so in both cases.

But this isn’t politics. It’s business. At least, we’re all pretending it’s only business.”

– actor, screenwriter, novelist and comics writer Geoffrey Thorne, when asked whether consumers should give up hope that Marvel and DC will hire “a respectable amount” of writers of color

“More and more I find myself reading headlines and articles that suggest that the evils once confined to fairytales and folklore have burst their fictive boundaries and bled into the real world.”

Via Latitude of The Guardian 

Abba dressing for success

New book reveals band's style was influenced by Swedish laws that allowed cost of outfits to be deducted against tax Beatles complained about the taxman and now Abba wears garish flares and platform soles to claim tax deduction-bjorn-ulvaeus

Failing better

Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

By Paul Caron

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Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success (2014):

Most new products fail. So do most small businesses. And most of us, if we are honest, have experienced a major setback in our personal or professional lives. So what determines who will bounce back and follow up with a home run? If you want to succeed in business and in life, Megan McArdle argues in this hugely thought-provoking book, you have to learn how to harness the power of failure.

McArdle has been one of our most popular business bloggers for more than a decade, covering the rise and fall of some the world’s top companies and challenging us to think differently about how we live, learn, and work. Drawing on cutting-edge research in science, psychology, economics, and business, and taking insights from turnaround experts, emergency room doctors, venture capitalists, child psychologists, bankruptcy judges, and mountaineers, McArdle argues that America is unique in its willingness to let people and companies fail, but also in its determination to let them pick up after the fall. Failure is how people and businesses learn. So how do you reinvent yourself when you are down?

Dynamic and punchy, McArdle teaches us how to recognize mistakes early to channel setbacks into future success. The Up Side of Down marks the emergence of an author with her thumb on the pulse whose book just might change the way you lead your life. 

 | Ask anyone I am the biggest failure