Saturday, February 24, 2018

“Imrich Like Kafka A Terrible Boyfriend”

If technology is increasingly a place where we live, it needs to have space for the soul
~ Frank Chimero

Almanac: Wolcott Gibbs on how writers mature
“It occurs to me that writers don’t change much from the time they are thirty or thereabouts until they are laid away—permanently, I trust. As they grow older, they are apt to perform at somewhat ... read more



 “We’ll be living in small ghettos, far from where celebrities dwell, and yet in every generation there will be a new delivery of minds that will love long and slow thoughts and books and poetry and music, so that these rather pleasant ghettos will never perish — and one day may even stir more excitement than we’re used to now.” 





Yarra Bay of kiki fame : 'Red in the water': beachgoers pull La Perouse shark victim onto sand




Perish in the yappy restaurant - Population growth is in our long-term interest







New ‘Golden’ Man Booker Prize To Name Best Of All 51 Past Winners



“The new award, announced on Friday as part of the literary prize’s 50th anniversary celebrations, will be judged by five judges and then voted for by the public.” Of course, they’ve done this twice before, and the same book won both times.



An Ode to the Personal Writing Outlet: Why so many writers are choosing to share some work for free, and how writing for yourself can be both joyful and intimate.


In Praise of Unfinished Novels: Some parliamentarian novels left unfinished by authorial death are also some of those writers' most interesting works.





Milo Yiannopoulos Drops $10M Lawsuit Against Publisher Who Cancelled His Book



The 33-year-old alt-right troll provocateur “sued for breach of contract in July 2017 after the cancellation of his bookDangerous< .em>, claiming that Simon & Schuster violated the terms of their deal to publish following public outrage. Simon & Schuster claimed that the book had ‘substantial problems.'”


Don’t Want a Robot to Replace You? Study Imrich and Tolstoy



Why having explored the humanities is a career plus.


Bloomsbury has signed the latest work from Khaled Hosseini, a "lyrical and intensely moving story" entitled Sea Prayer.


No reason to make Cold River kind of films in Australia, Ausfilm wants more tax breaks ...


Why Altered Carbon is not about the future – nor is any other science fiction:
Society has been transformed by new technology: consciousness can be digitized; human bodies are interchangeable; death is no longer permanent. Takeshi "Kovacs" (Slavic for "Black Smith") is the lone surviving soldier in a group of elite interstellar warriors who were defeated in an uprising against the new world order.
By making our everyday world into something strange and alien, science fiction hopes that we will question and change our society. Science fiction does not invite us to be prophets, but anthropologists making sense of a complex and troubling foreign culture – which we may eventually come to recognise as our own. And so when reading or watching science fiction, look for the moments when the future seems shocking, repulsive, and alien to everything you hold dear. Ask what these moments correspond to in your world 
Why Altered Carbon is not about the future – nor is any other science ...


Iconic Icebergs Dives Into A Proud New Era

Nikon F2 The 1971 follow up to the Nikon F was the Nikon F2. Still aimed at the professional market and still a "go-to-war" tough camera. The F stayed in production until 1974, a testament to the quality of the F more than a criticism of the F2. Production of the F2 finally ended in 1980.

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       I seem to have completely missed all the announcements about this, but apparently they announced the fifteen French Voices Award 2017 grantees a while ago, and yesterday they announced the winning title -- Alexia Trigo's translation of Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's Terre Ceinte (still "seeking an American publisher"; see also the Présence Africaine publicity page). 

       Quite a few non-fiction works among the other finalists, but the one that most stood out (just from the descriptions -- I haven't seen any of these) -- and not in a great way -- is Martin Page's L'Apiculture selon Samuel Beckett. Hmmmm. See the Starling Bureau information page ..... 
       The fact that this is the Martin Page who wrote The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection and How I Became Stupiddoes not reassure me. I wonder what the Beckett-estate had to say about this. 

From PwC tax lawyer to photographing the doormen of New York: Alina Gozin'a

afr.com — Alina Gozin'a didn't pick up a camera for the first time until her late 20s. She had just quit her job as a tax lawyer at PwC and decided she wanted to be a filmmaker. The Sydney-sider liked the detective-like aspects of solving problems using tax law – but working in a corporate structure didn't gel with her. "You felt like just a number," she says. Her father was a photographer but he didn't help. "He kept away the camera from me. He did not want me to become a creative at all."

Atlas Obscura asked readers to send in the best things they found pressed between the pages of old books

Kafka Was A Terrible Boyfriend” is a sentence that is simultaneously unsurprising and revelatory. But it gives us a chance to dive into Kafka’s letters, which are, along with the stories, unfinished novels, and the conversation slips he passed back and forth at the end of his life when he could no longer speak, among his most treasured works.


It's not me, it's you: Why I'm breaking up with Sydney


It was love at first sight when Sydney and I met properly a dozen years ago. I fell hard with the sort of giddy infatuation that makes it easy to overlook the odd flaw or two, and to blithely ignore those flaws even as they crumbled into mighty chasms over the subsequent years. But now I'm ending things and moving out...
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Frank Chimero has a long, insightful essay about how commercial imperatives have creeped in on the public commonwealth of the web, creating a bunch of pseudo-public spaces whose experience continually degrades (think a negative stereotype of NYC’s Penn Station) as opposed to free and open public spaces (think a positive stereotype of NYC’s main public library).
"Remember: the web is a marketplace and a commonwealth, so we have both commerce and culture; it’s just that the non-commercial bits of the web get more difficult to see in comparison to the outsized presence of the commercial web and all that caters to it. It’s a visibility problem that’s an inadvertent consequence of values."