Wednesday, May 18, 2016

The Mouldy Smell of Cold River: Vinegar - that's what fear smells like

Vinegar: that's what fear smells like

When Kate Tempest walked onto the stage, a hush of anticipation fell over the room. Clad in green socks, black pants and a button-up shirt, she opened with an almost meek "Hello, I'm going to tell you some poems" before beginning a booming monologue that went on for 15 minutes. It was an impassioned and powerful opening to the Sydney Writers Festival:
"Every pain, every grievance, every stab of shame, every day spent with a demon in your brain giving chase, hold it. Know the wolves (dragons) that hunt you. In time, they will be the dogs that bring your slippers. Love them right, and you will feel them kiss you when they come to bite."
Kate Tempest delivers powerful opening address at Sydney Writers Festival

The mark of a great mind, La Rochefoucauld said, was to “say many things with few words.” Thus the remarkable lifespan of the Aphorism ...

Almost like a day in creative East Latitude that lucky 13 level seven below Commish ;-) Fun behind aphorism millions of post it note art war takes over NY chris and lydia


 “Book smell” is now a thing in the perfume world, like vanilla or sandalwood. In the last few years, dozens of products have appeared on the market to give your home or person the earthy scent of a rare book collection.
Sweet Tea Apothecaries sells Dead Writers Perfume, which promises to evoke the aroma of books old enough for their authors to have passed to the great writers’ retreat in the sky. Perfumer Christopher Brosius’s “In the Library” product line makes your home and body smell just like that. The high-end fragrance Paper Passion claims to capture the “unique olfactory pleasures of the freshly printed book,” though for roughly $200 per bottle it’s a lot cheaper to just buy a freshly printed book.
The appeal of old books’ smell has been studied in depth. Wood-based paper contains lignin, a chemical closely related to vanillin, the compound that gives vanilla its fragrance. As the pages age and the compounds break down, they release that signature scent. An experienced rare book handler can date a volume by scent alone, according to the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers.
The sweet, sexy smell of old books is a perfume fad 

We hope that while so many  people are out smelling the flowers someone is taking the time to plant some


It seems we search more for jokes in better, cheerier times:
…Monday is actually the day we are least likely to search for jokes. Searches for jokes climb through the week and are highest on Friday through Sunday. This isn’t because people are too busy with work or school on Mondays. Searches for “depression,” “anxiety” and “doctor” are all highest on Mondays.
Second, I compared searches for jokes to the weather. I did this for all searches in the New York City area over the past five years. Rain was a wash, but there were 6 percent fewer searches for jokes when it was below freezing. There were also 3 percent fewer searches for jokes on foggy days.
Finally, I looked at searches for jokes during traumatic events. Consider, for example, the Boston Marathon bombing. Shortly after the bombing, searches for “jokes” dropped nearly 20 percent. They remained almost as low in the days after the attack, including the Friday when Boston was in lockdown while the authorities searched for the bomber who was still on the loose. They didn’t return to normal until two weeks later.
Sure, some other entertainment searches, like “music” and “shopping,” also dropped after the bombing. Declines in these searches, however, were smaller than declines in searches for jokes, and some entertainment searches, like “games,” actually rose during the manhunt.
That is from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (NYT)



Finding water is important to an elephant's survival on the savanna.
An elephant's trunk is good for more than bringing food to his mouth and squirting water over his back -- it's well designed to work as a nose.

How plot works. Flashbacks, prefigurations, parallel subplots all rest on the subtle relationship between chronology and artistic effect... Plots Thickens

The Big Fear is a solid first outing for lawyer-novelist Andrew Case.
Standard Of Review: ‘The Big Fear’ Is A Gritty Look At A City Administrative Agency

More Fear in Literature ...

“I was shaking my pom-poms for books. However, I wasn’t doing so because I was an industry shill, shallow, or self-interested. I failed to provide meaningful criticism, information, or recommendations because I was, like so many of my colleagues, frightened about the future of books and publishing. In desperate times, the desperate tilt at windmills.” LitHub 
A Reason to Live

Allegory first appeared in the waning years of the Roman Empire. It is a rich and wonderful literary tradition. And it's being minded

“His self-serious moralizing and the ostentatiousness of his characters’ rectitude make Richardson difficult to embrace. Yet, unlike the more urbane and congenial Fielding, Richardson has a knack for psychological realism and an ability to craft characters whose clamorous inner lives continue, almost three centuries later, to feel real to us.”   The New Yorker

And what became clear to me in that infinite moment is that, ironically, a man with cancer has more options than one that doesn’t. Having already stared my own mortality in the face, I couldn’t really be threatened with death.
What a pleasure to find a new author to follow, and a new series to pick up! And the Kindle prices are reduced right now!
A Reason to Live by Matthew Iden is the story of Marty Singer (also the narrator), a detective for the Washington D.C. police department, retired. He didn’t retire willingly. He felt obligated leave the job to when he learned that he had colon cancer and was in for a course of chemotherapy. He’s middle-aged, divorced, and has no very close friends. Life seems bleak, hardly worth the trouble of fighting his disease.
WSJ profile of Russ Roberts

“Publishing, like other industries before (and since), suffered a bad attack of technodazzle: It failed to distinguish between newness and value. It could read digital’s hysterical cheerleaders, but not predict how a market of human beings would respond to a product once the novelty had passed. It ignored human nature. Reading the meaning of words is not consuming a manufacture: it is experience.”  The Guardian (UK) 

Singlish is starting to win appreciation again (NYT).  And Singlish Bible