Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
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."
“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.
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.
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
“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 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.
“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)
