Ink Flowed Like Blood

“God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.”
~ Rebecca West, “The Tosh Horse”

“No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.

Or you don't.”
― Stephen King, The Stand 


The world is such a poorer place without her... Canadian poet and critic Judith Fitzgerald has died. An obituary ...

"As a poet, critic and person in the world, she was passionate, brilliant, forceful and sometimes difficult. I shall miss her."
Ink Flowed Like Blood WSJ. Karl Kraus

“We could do it, you know."
"What?"
"Leave the district. Run off. Live in the woods. You and I, we could make it.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games 

Patrick Kavanagh ( not related to Patricia Brereton) was a contrary soul, and not always immune to the lures of sentimentality, self-dramatization and self-pity. His sometime friend Flann O’Brien ribbed him about these romantic tendencies. Kavanagh writes in Self Portrait: “I fear that the mood I have been evoking may give the impression that what happened to me is important and that I am important. Nobody is important. Nobody is major. We get to our destiny in the end. I am not in the least bitter over all this. In fact I am always in danger of bursting out laughing.”

“I suppose the wise man lives as if he is on day-release from death, seeing `all sorts of beautiful things’ wherever he might be. But man is made for wisdom as dormice are for coal-mining. Kavanagh was an alcoholic who quarrelled with almost everyone, and my best resolutions are those that are soonest broken.”

Lifeline for elephants: Ivory price halves in China after Xi pledges ban Washington Post 

Survival Strategy: The “Click-Bait” Novel? 

“You have to get the reader on the first page of a short story, you have to convince them of a world inside page one. As writers try to capture the scattered attention of readers, I think the novel is moving towards that degree of compression.”

Diving into Cold River via Atlantic 

Joan Didion's writing remains fresh because it captures both the ambition of hopeful beginnings and the dignity of  grief and survival ...

New Study: Illicit Financial Flows Hit US$1.1 Trillion in 2013 Global Financial Integrity 

Bank Crimes Pay: Under the Thumb of the Global Financial Mafiocracy Link Truth out 

Hedge Funds Leave U.S. Pensions With Little to Show for the Fees Bloomberg

 Oh CEOs Earn $60k a week ...The "inside job" is alive and well with a new survey showing bosses looking to fund their flashy lifestyles are the biggest fraudsters next to professional criminals and rank and file staff. Inside Job: Bosses funding flash lifestyles the biggest fraudsters

Temper us in fire, and we grow stronger. When we suffer, we survive. Sometimes even to live is an act of courage ... “But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.” ― Albert Camus Cold Thoughts

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ABC News Sydney 

✔@abcnewsSydney

Wallaby rescued by students after being found swimming one kilometre from NSW coast http://ab.co/1ltv2Q5 

6:50 PM - 9 Dec 2015

*Exclusive scoop :-) Uber-Sponsored Survey Finds Working for Uber Is Awesome Re/code

And so, no good at marriage, he lives alone.  And the affairs he’s had since then have come and gone like memorable dinners, fun while they lasted.  But lately, and it’s a feeling that’s gradually crept up on him, he’s beginning to think of himself as past all that, past the kind of love and desire that makes people do silly and desperate things – past all that, like watching a sport you once played but don’t any more.  All the same, a young woman, a Norwegian, a painter too, staying in the area, came to visit recently.  And at some point in their talk, for she had come to see his work and for the conversation,  because these hills and valleys can be lonely, he realised he was talking quickly.  Even a little theatrically. Almost a sort of performance.  And he realised he was trying to impress her.  And, at the same time, realised that the young woman was oblivious to this.  Soon after, she left.  All she saw, no doubt, was not so much an old man as an oldish one.  Thinning hair, grey goatee.  Someone who might once have looked like a young Toulouse-Lautrec, but didn’t any more.  We forget, he muses, for our bodies grow old while our minds stay young. Or, at least, we continue to think of ourselves as young.  And from time to time a young mind forgets itself and speaks from an old body.  
~ Forever Young by Steven Carroll

An artist's impression of the Australian new dinosaur ankylosaur, Kunbarrasaurus ieversi.

SUPPLIED: AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHIC those bones were found at Malchkin favourite spot at Richmond the famous Dinosaur Trail to Winton etc

Corruption, Again? CalPERS Keeping Lobbying Records SECRET From its Board Members California Political Review

Contention Attention – This Year’s Best Books Sparked Backlash 

“The most important consequence of a wave of adoring reviews, followed by a backlash of negative opinion is that it suddenly matters whether you’re the kind of person who loved A Little Life or just didn’t.”

The New Republic