Friday, October 13, 2017

Orwell, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald ...


Medicinal cannabis research funding long overdue for sufferers like Ben


In its belief that what matters is information rather than insight, society has become what Wittgenstein feared. That could explain his unpopularity .... those hunger games ... Isolated MEdia Dragon 

Orwell has become less flesh and blood than a set of moral positions. But deep in his letters and diaries and remembrances, one can glimpse the man Oh Well 



Sylvia Plath at Smith. “I’m so happy here I could cry!” she wrote to her mother. In her journals, she struck a different note: “God, who am I? ... I’m lost.”... Contradictions of life 




E O Wilson suggests that evolution can “make sense” of art. But the relationship between biology and creativity is more complicated — and less determinative — than that Creativity of MEdia Dragons  
Did F. Scott Fitzgerald fancy himself a social critic, a foe of market capitalism? Well, he wouldn't be the first such critic to relish capitalism's fruits Social Dilemmas

How to interpret experiences that resist interpretation? What's the point of sowing terror if the terrorized can't understand you?  Translating in concentration camps  Translation as in  Lost 


“What are these pines & these birds about?” wondered Thoreau. “I must know a little more.” So he embarked on his masterpiece — not Walden, but his journal... Masterpiece



Dinged as a sex-obsessed, money-hungry charlatan, Anthony Burgess earned a reputation that merits a different distinction: His work was a late triumph of modernism... Burgess




John Banville: Novels were never the same after Henry James ...
Henry James transformed the novel form into something new. Turn to chapter 27 of The Portrait of a Lady to see the birth of the psychological novel... John BanVille aka Benjamin BLACK ... not of MatraVille Fame

Oxford's Very Short Introductions series taps into a very old human desire to know everything. Eight million copies have been sold to readers who yearn for mastery Oxford