the
oyster’s autobiography
~ “All
art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” Federico
Fellini
Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think The Atlantic
Decisions, decisions, decisions — so many to make. We tend to forget that the truly important ones are out of our hands...Growing Up
Edward Copleston was a shrewd observer of the literary scene. His essay "Advice to a Young Reviewer" was published in 1807. It holds up disturbingly well...The Pearl is the Oyster’s Review
Another veteran, Ford Madox Ford, writes of the Great War in his fictionalized memoir It Was the Nightingale (1915): “In the end, if one is a writer, and if one was in that hell, it was a major motive that one should be able to write of it.”
Failure is the key human experience, and her words were all the more powerful for being spoken in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, a place where success is both addiction and the drug itself. We trumpet our successes on Facebook, perpetually shine our C.V.’s, and forge ahead in our determined effort to “brand” ourselves and market ourselves. We risk replacing the face with the mask we have created. police
Meet Irv Teibel, the man who took his recording equipment to the seashore and came back New York's least likely Media Dragon Mogul
The government of Shanghai says that under new rules residents who fail to visit their elderly parents will get black marks on their credit records...
Poynter Institute: “The recipients of the 2016 Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday. We’ve collected the winners below, along with reactions from newsrooms across the country.”
Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think The Atlantic
Edward Copleston was a shrewd observer of the literary scene. His essay "Advice to a Young Reviewer" was published in 1807. It holds up disturbingly well...The Pearl is the Oyster’s Review
My whole life’s like learning a second language –
so many immigrant sacrifices but in the end
I can’t get rid of this accent, recognized
everywhere to my annoyance.
And I’d been feeling almost assimilated!
All that effort, and for what?
so many immigrant sacrifices but in the end
I can’t get rid of this accent, recognized
everywhere to my annoyance.
And I’d been feeling almost assimilated!
All that effort, and for what?
Creative professionals are inundated with information on an hourly basis. So how can journalists and their colleagues promote their work so it stands out from all the noise? Self-promotion is a skill, like writing, that takes time and conscious practice to improve. Here are a few ways to become a better advocate for yourself Journalists guide to shameless self promotion
The Coetzee archives. “All writing is autobiography,” he likes to say. But how much could he bear to reveal in his own papers?
Before we go any further, and to make sure that our story is properly understood, perhaps I should explain for foreign readers who’ve never heard of it before, and for future generations of Slavic readers who will, I fear, forget all about it within the next twenty to thirty years, that smažené pirôžky are filled dumplings of a traditional Mittleuropean origin. They are made by wrapping pockets of unleavened dough around savory potato filling and cooking them in boiling water ... Padlocking Memories of Food
I’m full of the feeling of emptiness,
full.
An abundant famine
boils me in my soul’s fevered fields,
and this strange waterless boiling
startles the image in my poem
to life.
I watch the new-living picture,
a peerless rose
blush across the page!
But barely has she first breathed
when streaks of smoke begin
to obscure her face and fumes
consume her perfumed skin ...
The Coetzee archives. “All writing is autobiography,” he likes to say. But how much could he bear to reveal in his own papers?
Before we go any further, and to make sure that our story is properly understood, perhaps I should explain for foreign readers who’ve never heard of it before, and for future generations of Slavic readers who will, I fear, forget all about it within the next twenty to thirty years, that smažené pirôžky are filled dumplings of a traditional Mittleuropean origin. They are made by wrapping pockets of unleavened dough around savory potato filling and cooking them in boiling water ... Padlocking Memories of Food
- The first sentence is not compelling.
- Neither are the second, third, or fourth sentences.
- Nor the fifth.
- (I’m sure the later sentences are sterling, stunning stuff, but I’m sorry, I’m sorry, those earlier efforts couldn’t propel me onward).
- Those blurbs: So thickly pasted in glowing praise is your novel that its spine I dare not crack.
- Swarming with spiders. Scores of mean spiders. A horde, exploding from your novel’s pages.
- Too long ...
- Reason Readers Do Not Care About Our Memoirs
Creativity Is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice Scientific American
full.
An abundant famine
boils me in my soul’s fevered fields,
and this strange waterless boiling
startles the image in my poem
to life.
I watch the new-living picture,
a peerless rose
blush across the page!
But barely has she first breathed
when streaks of smoke begin
to obscure her face and fumes
consume her perfumed skin ...
“Cervantes and Shakespeare almost certainly never met, but the closer you look at the pages they left behind the more echoes you hear. The first, and to my mind the most valuable shared idea is the belief that a work of literature doesn’t have to be simply comic, or tragic, or romantic, or political/historical: that, if properly conceived, it can be many things at the same time.” New Statesman Salman Rushdie
My colleagues like to say that what I didn’t know would fill a book. Well, here is it :-)
Dedicated to bad writing :-(
The tragedy of Dorothy Parker. Intelligent and clever, she won fame early in life. Death and suicide, however, were never far from her thoughts
“Failure is the key human experience,” said Izabela, who had been a visiting scholar at Berkeley from 2003-2005. It’s a universal one, because “none of us arrive at the destination,” the imagined empyrean we never reach. She remembered George Orwell, and said this realization is why “poverty became his topic.” I believe that is one reason why Orwell will last.
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life
~ Pablo Picasso
Twain's autobiography - uncut, unexpurgated, unchronological - clocks in at half a million words. An uproarious and unmitigated delight, right? Well ...
Oppressively earnest, quick to take offense, an aggressive drunk — Grace Hartigan didn’t make things easy for her friends, who included Frankenthaler, O’Hara, and Ashbery... Biography
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life
~ Pablo Picasso
Twain's autobiography - uncut, unexpurgated, unchronological - clocks in at half a million words. An uproarious and unmitigated delight, right? Well ...
Oppressively earnest, quick to take offense, an aggressive drunk — Grace Hartigan didn’t make things easy for her friends, who included Frankenthaler, O’Hara, and Ashbery... Biography
Failure is the key human experience, and her words were all the more powerful for being spoken in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, a place where success is both addiction and the drug itself. We trumpet our successes on Facebook, perpetually shine our C.V.’s, and forge ahead in our determined effort to “brand” ourselves and market ourselves. We risk replacing the face with the mask we have created. policeMeet Irv Teibel, the man who took his recording equipment to the seashore and came back New York's least likely Media Dragon Mogul
The government of Shanghai says that under new rules residents who fail to visit their elderly parents will get black marks on their credit records...
Books are sustenance, and some readers will risk everything to preserve their reliable supply of reading matter. Andrei Sinyavsky (1925-1997) wrote under a pseudonym he borrowed from the legendary Russian-Jewish gangster, Abram Tertz. The genesis of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union can be traced to the 1966 trial of Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who were found guilty of smuggling anti-Soviet manuscripts out of the country. Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in a forced labor camp; Daniel, five. One of the masterpieces of literature inadvertently produced by Soviet injustice is A Voice from the Chorus (trans. Kyril Fitzlyon and Max Hayward, 1976), a volume based on the two letters per month the Soviets permitted Sinyavsky to send to his wife. During his six years in the camp, he was not otherwise permitted to write ` People and Traditions Like That'
Poynter Institute: “The recipients of the 2016 Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday. We’ve collected the winners below, along with reactions from newsrooms across the country.”