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Tuesday, April 05, 2016

MEdia Dragons: Millennials’ Media Habits Are Different and Distinct

“No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue . . .”
~Bathroom Quote  (Art of dedication) Sadly, from east to  west libraries of hard copy newspapers and magazines are disappearing ... One step forward two steps backwards ...

Remember to give thanks for the forgotten writers. `Scarcely Known But By the Catalogue'

Also thanks go to regional ABC stations that are not peppered with yuppies who create news and talk shows about nothing ... Just overheard on  Illawarra radio that the steel pipes and rails coming in from Spain has holes in filled with car body materials and painted over. Steel from China is even worse.... issues steel even from Australia has false paperwork
A caller said that in some steel pipes from India holes have been filled in with plaster of paris...

What we see as the clear-cut dichotomy between “the writing of imagination and the writing of fact” doesn’t exist in many languages, and in others the equivalent distinction is drawn along somewhat different lines The Guardian

Imaginative writing will improve as the cyborg heart aims to replace the diseased heart altogether ... MEdia Dragons are Acquiring New Hearts

Nielsen – “The difference between an 18-year-old and a 34-year-old is often like night and day. From where they live to what they wear to how much discretionary income they take home, a vast array of differences exist within what is often portrayed as a monolithic group of consumers. Likewise, according to Nielsen’s Q4 2015 Total Audience Report, Millennials’ don’t have a uniform media palate.

“‘It is a peculiarity of capitalists and the bourgeoisie to think that we workers have no culture,’ says the novelist, whose many tattoos include one of Karl Marx on his left arm.” Yahoo (Agence France Presse)

Overheard on a bus ;-) 'If I have to choose between you and me - I like ME better ..'
Nathan Glazer is an intellectual loner by temperament and design. Also because he possesses that rare thing: a willingness to change his mind...  Glazing Chandlers 

In the race of human life, always back self-interest ..

Ancient stories and traditions that have been passed down over centuries by word-of-mouth might not appear to be the obvious subject matter for a medium that thrives on novelty and speed Folkloric Touches via Gurals
…Dante’s fame as a necromancer is also in a certain sense documented.
Such notoriety shouldn’t be surprising. For one thing, he had a reputation as an expert in astrology, and we know that this discipline could easily spill over into magical and necromantic practices.  And then, above all, he was famous after the publication of Inferno for having descended live into the realms of the afterlife and for having encountered devils there, the souls of the damned, and having spoken to them.  It must have been a rumor widely spread and also disturbing.  It seems, according to Boccaccio, that the women who used to pass him in the street would say to each other: Look, “he who goes into Hell, and returns whenever he likes, and brings back news of those who are down there…” 
How to read The Divine Comedy. Few of us any longer try to tackle what the poet called his versi strani strange verses. But patience pays off 

“After all, no matter how long you live, there aren’t too many delicious moments along the way, since most of life is spent eating and sleeping and waiting for something to happen that never does. You can figure it up for yourself, using your own life as the scoreboard. Most of living is waiting to live. And you spend a great deal of time worrying about things that don’t matter and about people that don’t matter and all this you know the very day you’re going to die.”
That is from the new Dante biography by Marco Santagata, Belknap Press at Harvard, definitely recommended, it will make my best non-fiction of the year list for sure 

“Everything is a choice that seems like it could make the whole house of cards fall down — unless you don’t live in a web of doubt. But I write in a dark room of doubt.”  LitHub 

Digital memory is ubiquitous and inexpensive yet unimaginably fragile. Result: The history of the 21st century will be riddled with silences ... 

What happened to the demons that beset me?
I'm breathing easily, not like before.
I'll go and let them have some blood for testing,
and give a bit more blood to sign this poem.

~Dedicated to Jan Palach

Zack Beauchamp reports:
On Friday morning, a US air strike killed Abu Alaa al-Afri, a senior leader in ISIS, whom the US says it considers the organization’s second-ranked leader.
As some Twitter wags noted, this all hearkens back to a 2006 Onion article, “Eighty Percent Of Al-Qaeda No. 2s Now Dead.”

Above the Law, Professor Resigns After Accusations Of Sleeping With Students

“‘Her poetry achieves that joyful and rare thing,’ one literary commentator said last week. ‘It is of high literary merit and also accessible.'” The Observer (UK)

 “One of the best conversations [Bill] Walton and I had during our two days together consisted entirely of listing the rivers in Oregon.” (NYT)

"...attempts at difference had the opposite effect to the one intended. For they emphasized that, in the midst of this randomness, you saw only the one identical expression: eyes staring into the distance, and lips held firmly shut as though against some pervasive infection Our people had collectively solved their shared problem, which was how to keep the mask in place, while showing that it is only a mask. People collaborated in the great deception, so as not to be deceived."
  Notes from (czech) underground by Roger Scruton


Matt Hackett & Casey Neistat’s social platform strips away self-editing.  


An app is reshaping how we interact with the content we want to pay attention to