Sunday, April 10, 2016

Was Shakespeare rich like MEdia Dragon?

Youth ended, I shall try
My gain or loss thereby;
Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold:
And I shall weigh the same,
Give life its praise or blame:
Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old.


Perhaps I shall, too. (Public poetry)

Was Shakespeare rich? He was well-to-do, akin to the minor gentry in Stratford-upon-Avon, but not wealthy. Nothing like his rival,   Jozef Imrich 

Books by Blogger Bards of 21st Century ...

“It’s great to receive a big wad of cash, of course, especially when you’re a writer with an erratic income trying to cobble together a living from part-time day jobs, intermittent advances, peripatetic teaching gigs and the occasional one-time grant. But unexpected sums bring unexpected burdens, both practical (What does this mean for my tax situation?) and psychological (Am I a fraud who does not deserve this money?)” New York Times 

We began questioning what we had done with our lives 22 years living in exile and came up short. However, there is a thing called imagination and name dropping on MEdia Dragon so big that sky is a limit: During the year 2002 (spelled backwards) only digital copy Cold River was being read, only it was being spoken about by fans of literature, who often complained about the stifling power of the story and the painful impression it left which caused people with strong nerves to risk illness and forced those with weak nerves to give up reading it altogether ;-)


Well, I’ll be damned.  How long has it been.  Twenty-five years.  Thirty.’ And I said:

‘About that.  A bit more than half of ourlives in exile ...’

The days slide by as if they were liquid. I have no more notebooks to write in. I have no more pens either. I write on the walls, with pieces of charcoal, brief lines.
I save on food, on water, and on adjectives.


INK BOTTLE“Why, you simple creatures, the weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.”   
~ Mark Twain, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”

The paper title is Believing there is no free will corrupts intuitive cooperation, and the authors are John Protzko, Brett Ouimette, and Jonathan Schooler


In my own way, I too feel as if I have attended the University of Northern New Jersey (NYT)

Cervantes and Shakespeare. One was a man of action, a warrior, and, for a time, a slave. The other preferred writing tales of men at war...Literary Rules  

Curmudgeons, black hat thinkers, devil’s advocates, and people who say “but” infect most organizations and systems. They have a role in “keeping things honest” and calling out obvious bull****, and contribute little or nothing to driving progress. Bob Hoffman was an ad guy who has a blog called "Ad Contrarian," and its content meets the expectation of its name: caustic, surly and bad-tempered rants on the state of the ad business, sometimes funny, though for the most part it feels like walking through thigh deep mud. 

Hobsbawm, Foucault, Dworkin, Lacan — how far to the left were the thinkers of the New Left? Roger Scruton’s answer may surprise you... New Left

Business Insider ran a piece on Bob’s speech to the Shift 2016 conference in London, he said that there are three major misconceptions clouding the industry: "All of these delusions have one thing in common: they take a little bit of truth and then they distort it and they exaggerate it and they torture it to the point at which it does our marketers more harm than good."  Black hat thinking 

The Mainstream Still Doesn’t Know Strength Training Beats Running. Why? PJ. Although this does not have to be “either/or,” unless you have very well aligned joints and good feet and ankles, running will eventually give you knee problems, while weight training (being much shorter duration and vastly less repetitive, particularly since you need to change your routine frequently) will cause you less joint wear and tear if you work in good form


A professor of history at an elite university, meanwhile, turned right after taking a course with the Marxist historian Arno Mayer.  This admiring historian recalled Mayer announcing to his class, “I’m going to assign the book I most disagree with in the twentieth century, and I’m going to ask you not to critique it, but to recreate its arguments with intellectual empathy.”  The book was Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.
If only the blogosphere was always so tolerant.  I feared I would be bored by this book, but I found it a work of quality scholarship, yet highly readable too.  Here is a Jonathan Marks WSJ review.  And here is a relevant column by Virginia Postrel.

Inattention was long perceived as abnormal. Now it's normal. But people aren't distracted so much as uncertain about what to pay attention to ...



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