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
At NSW Parliamentary Library every issue of Playboy and Penthouse were indexed some of the best investigatory writing took place in those naughty magazines. No-one ever really believed any man who used the old excuse for buying Playboy magazine - "for the articles", as opposed to for the photos of nude women.
The nude women were the main attraction.
Yet the magazine does have a long and proud literary tradition, publishing stories by authors like John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Arthur C Clarke, Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami.
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who has died at the age of 91, once joked with a group of centrefolds at a magazine anniversary party: "Ladies, it's been a wonderful 25 years, and I owe it all to you. Without you, I would have had nothing but a literary magazine."
Former Playboy literary editor Amy Grace Loyd summed up the magazine's formula in 2009: "You've got things drawing a man's eye, then you've got things that are enriching his intellectual and spiritual life."
… Playboy also gave authors an outlet for stories with uncensored, adult and controversial themes, and paid its writers well.
John Clarke's pictures from nature live on in 2018 calendar Times Literary Supplement: “…Both Evans [The Emoji Code, Vyvyan Evans] and Danesi [Marcel Danesi, The Semiotics of Emoji] set
out to explain why emoji are an important development, why it is
interesting to study them, and why we can ignore naysayers who cite them
as another example of the erosion of standards
The Village Voice – Keepers of the Secrets:
“I was told that the most interesting man in the world works in the
archives division of the New York Public Library, and so I went there,
one morning this summer, to meet him…Our destination was Room 328.
archives division of the New York Public Library, archives division of
the New York Public Library, A sign above the door called it the “Brooke
Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts.” Inside,
there were a handful of quiet researchers stooped at large wooden desks,
and in the corner, presiding over a cart of acid-free Hollinger
document boxes, was the archivist Thomas Lannon. Lannon is younger than
you’d expect, just thirty-nine years old…The New York Public Library’s
Schwarzman building is most famous for the ornate and cavernous Rose
Reading Room, now reopened after two years of restoration.
The stacks under the library can hold 4 million books (the actual
number in storage is lower, though no one is quite sure), which are
delivered to the reading room by 950 feet of miniature rail running at
75 feet per minute. But the real gem of the library, in Lannon’s view,
is the stuff that you can find only in boxes like the ones now strewn
across the table. “You can get a book anywhere,” he said. “An archive
exists in one location.” The room we’re standing in is the only place
that you can read, say, the week’s worth of journal entries in which New York Times
editor Abe Rosenthal contemplates publishing the Pentagon Papers. It’s
the only place where you can read the collected papers of Robert Moses,
or a letter T.S. Eliot wrote about Ulysses to James Joyce’s
Paris publisher, Sylvia Beach. These collections aren’t digitized. The
only way to find out what’s inside them is to ask for a particular box —
often with just a vague notion of what will be in it — and to hold the
old papers in your hands. “I don’t know how one could be interested in
libraries and not archives,” Lannon told me. They tell you “the stories behind things,”
he said, “the unpublished, the hard to find, the true story.” This, I
began to see, is why someone might have been inclined to call Lannon the
most interesting man in the world: it’s because he knows so many of
these stories himself, including stories that no one else knows, because
they are only told here. That is the paradox of being an archivist. The
reason an archivist should know something, Lannon said, is to help
others to know it. But it’s not really the archivist’s place to impose his
knowledge on anyone else. Indeed, if the field could be said to have a
creed, it’s that archivists aren’t there to tell you what’s important.
Historically momentous documents are to be left in folders next to the
trivial and the mundane — because who’s to say what’s actually mundane
or not?…”
