"The greatest trick that the banks ever pulled, was to convince the population that it was the politicians who were in control..." courtesy of BC - The Fearless Fishhead On 29 October 2016 AD XXIX - X - MMXVI
The Three Marina Abramovićs
“As she likes to say herself, there are three Marina Abramovićs: Warrior Marina (who can endure any pain and scream louder than anybody else), Spiritual Marina (who can endure any amount of stillness and remain silent longer than anybody else) and Bullshit Marina (who adores celebrity and likes to talk about fickle men and why she sometimes feels fat and ugly).”
Judging fiction is easier said than done. Cyril Connolly, formerly of the Observer,
once wrote that “the great difficulty in reviewing new novels is to
maintain a double standard – one to judge novels as fiction and the
other as literature. Luckily, very few novels pretend to be literature,
but when they do it is necessary to slate them by one rule and praise
them by another.” In recent memory, several Booker panels have given
masterclasses in the fine art of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. Man Booker prize 2016: the fine line between fiction and literature The Guardian (UK)
10 ways to engage readers with alternative story forms
FINDING a reliable way of timing the market is something that has eluded the greatest investment minds in history. Aremagazine covers a contrarian indicator?
CHAMPAGNE corks must have been popping ... Animal Farm in America. How an unknown democratic socialist rode the acclaim for his "little squib" of a fable to become the leading literary Cold Warrior
Of all of the wonderful and even magical things reading can do for us, the most important has seldom been suspected. According to a study that covered a large control group over many years, the reading of books can lengthen your life. From the New York Times:
Compared with those who did not read books, those who read for up to three and a half hours a week were 17 percent less likely to die over 12 years of follow-up, and those who read more than that were 23 percent less likely to die. Book readers lived an average of almost two years longer than those who did not read at all.
The New York Times piece is here. You can see the highlights of the study on Science Direct here
Geoffrey Bowcock had no experience as a spy. But he knew how to drink, which qualified him to seduce Andrey Duchkov, a 30-year-old Soviet diplomat who arrived in Canberra in the winter of 1977 and straight into the sights of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
Even in quiet Canberra, the Cold War was heating up. In January 1976, there were well over 100 Soviet bloc officials in Australia, and ASIO suspected 40 of them were intelligence agents.
The domestic spy agency was under pressure to move beyond its speciality of tracking Australian communists. "Yet ASIO's surveillance capability remained negligible and its radio communications were almost certainly monitored by the Soviets," according to The Secret Cold War, the third volume of the agency's official history, written by Australian National University historians John Blaxland and Rhys Crawley.
The ASIO plan to use beer, boats and vodka to turn Soviet diplomat into a spy
Celebrating local literature via my loving spies in Perth
How to find that break-your-heart detail for your story
Geoffrey Bowcock had no experience as a spy. But he knew how to drink, which qualified him to seduce Andrey Duchkov, a 30-year-old Soviet diplomat who arrived in Canberra in the winter of 1977 and straight into the sights of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
Even in quiet Canberra, the Cold War was heating up. In January 1976, there were well over 100 Soviet bloc officials in Australia, and ASIO suspected 40 of them were intelligence agents.
The domestic spy agency was under pressure to move beyond its speciality of tracking Australian communists. "Yet ASIO's surveillance capability remained negligible and its radio communications were almost certainly monitored by the Soviets," according to The Secret Cold War, the third volume of the agency's official history, written by Australian National University historians John Blaxland and Rhys Crawley.
The ASIO plan to use beer, boats and vodka to turn Soviet diplomat into a spy
Celebrating local literature via my loving spies in Perth
How to find that break-your-heart detail for your story
You could not write a joke as good as (X)...
Infographic, The Big Five US Trade Book Publishers and Their Imprints, “Rectangles are either divisions, groups, imprints or publishing lines.” This is the work of Ali Almossawi [who “works on the data science team at Mozilla and is an alumnus of MIT’s Engineering Systems Division (M.S.) and Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science (M.S.) “] The author provided the source code.
“The 54-year-old Los Angeles-born writer won for The Sellout, a laugh-out-loud novel whose main character wants to assert his African American identity by, outrageously and transgressively, bringing back slavery and segregation.” Paul Beatty Is First American To Win Man Booker Prize
Learning to cope with chronic pain
“Like the soil we walk on, most of the words we speak and write hide secret kinds of life.” Ingenious misspellings
Slang in digital age
NATO seeks troops to deter Russia on eastern flank Reuters
AARP sues U.S. agency over employee wellness programs Reuters Recycled teenagers are comsidered stupid and according to AC DC thry just don’t work and ... ;-)
Revisiting - At Five Hours, Wim Wenders’s Full ‘Until the End of the World’ Is a Dream Odyssey