Saturday, March 17, 2018

Myth is the nought that means all

Who uses keys these days to unlock a car door, eh?

 The notion that history consists of a single grand narrative is almost universally regarded as a comforting myth. But not to Marcel Gauchet  Narrative 
 How New York Breaks Your Heart with Hayes’s splendid prose counterpart, Insomniac City, then revisit Walt Whitman’s sensual ode to New York

THAT’S TERRIBLE NEWS SINCE I’M NEVER HUNG OVER: Hangovers Are Good.

For all my friends, colleagues and fellow cyclists – wherever you may be cycling: “There are more bicycles than residents in The Netherlands and in cities like Amsterdam and The Hague up to 70% of all journeys are made by bike. The BBC’s Hague correspondent, Anna Holligan, who rides an omafiets – or “granny style” – bike complete with wicker basket and pedal-back brakes, examines what made everyone get back in the saddle

 busting blogging myths

 Had I not actually been through everything which makes up my present existence, I should probably have invented it all for myself and ended up with the same result.
For reasons sufficient to the writer, many places, people, observations and impressions have been left out of this book. Some were secrets and some were known by everyone and everyone has written about them and will doubtless write more.

There is no mention of the Stade Anastasie where the boxers served as waiters at the tables set out under the trees and the ring was in the garden. Nor of training with Larry Gains, nor the great twenty-round fights at the Cirque d’Hiver. Nor of such good friends as Charlie Sweeney, Bill Bird and Mike Strater, nor of André Masson and Miro. There is no mention of our voyages to the Black Forest or of our one-day explorations of the forests that we loved around Paris. It would be fine if all these were in this book but we will have to do without them for now.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact

Jorge Luis Borges in "A Profession of Literary Faith" postulated that all literature, in the end, is autobiographical. Everything literary is non-fiction, including fiction. This is probably because the reverse is also true. In Bernhard, the reenactment of his younger self's troubled life was truthful only in the sense that it was only ever an approximation: "Truth is always wrong, even if it is one hundred percent truth. Every error is pure truth." This pure dose of contradiction was his literary framework, in novels and autobiography both.

 Language is inadequate when it comes to communicating the truth, and the best the writer can offer is an approximation to the truth, a desperate and hence unreliable approximation. Language can only falsify and distort whatever is authentic.



 Years after the Cold War, after marriages, children, divorces, blogs, books, he came to Prague with his wife. He phoned her. It's me. She recognized him at once from the voice. She said, It's me, hello. He was nervous, afraid, as before. His voice suddenly trembled. And with the trembling, suddenly, she heard again the voice of The High Tatra Mountains. He knew she'd begun writing books, he's heard about it through her mother whom he'd met again in Sydney. Surreal memories behind and even more Kafkaesque moments ahead ...

 Daughters are like flowers – they fill the world with beauty and sometimes attract pests.
    The Bears vs. Vikings game. It’s not based on a book, but a multitude of tie-ins are being published. In keeping with recent tradition, to avoid spoilers, novelizations won’t be released until March, well after the movie’s December debut. Until then, publishers have to content themselves with publishing bridge Journey to Star Wars titles. Entertainment Weekly describes the titles in the publishing program. See the list of titles in our catalog of Upcoming — Tie-ins

    Protein Myths Blog Pics

    A flurry of other new trailers have been released since our last update:

    1922 (Stephen King)
    Shadowhunters, Season 3

    In other news since our last update, what’s old is new again. Back in 2010, there was much excitement about an adaptation of Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra, to be directed by James Cameron with Angela Jolie potentially in the lead. Both went on to other things, but theproject may be getting new life, with Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve in talks to take it on. No word on potential stars.

    The many Tana French fans will be delighted that her Dublin Murders series is being adapted by BBC One as an eight-part series.

    For a full rundown of upcoming adaptations, link to our Movies & TV Based on Books collection. To browse just the recent updates, download EarlyWord, Books-to-Movies UPDATES-—-Sept-22 thru Oct 9, 2017
    George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo(PRH/RH; RH Audio/BOT), a number one best seller in the US, has won the Man Booker Prize. Saunders is the second American to win the British prize, following Paul Beatty’s The Sellout(Macmillan/FSG) last year. Americans only became eligible for the Prize  four years ago.

    Back in March, Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman bought the film rights to the book. It has also had a virtual reality adaptation
    Librarians have been celebrating the end of a remarkable publishing year with their own year-end roundup of favorites, tweeting a title a day using the hashtag #libfaves17.



    An astounding 750 titles were tweeted, with a total vote count of 1,625, 14.1% higher than #libfaves16. Link the full list here.

    Thanks to GalleyChatters Robin Beerbower, Stephanie Chase and Linda Johns who began this project six years ago.

    Thanks also to the those who helped with the vote counting,
    P.J. Gardiner, Marlise Schiltz, Jane Jorgenson, Joe Jones. Vicki Nesting, Lucy Lockley, Jenna Friebel, Gregg Winsor, Susan Balla and Andrienne Cruz.

    And thanks to all the librarians who joined in.

    Special thanks to Janet Lockhart for her late night work in compiling the final list. We can now announce the top ten vote-getters, but before we do, we’d like to encourage you to take a look at the Storify transcripts of each day’s tweets. As many have attested over the years, the true fun of libfaves is the sheer range of titles and reading how librarians write about them.

    Inside Higher Ed, Email Crime and Punishment:
    Sheldon Pollack ..., professor of law and political science at the University of Delaware, has been formally reprimanded by Matthew Kinservik, vice provost for faculty affairs, for sending the wrong colleague a link to an Inside Higher Ed article with the word “penis” in it.
    Pollack, a longtime Delaware professor and former president of the Faculty Senate, says he also narrowly escaped mandated counseling recommended by the university’s human resources office.
    “This is an outrageous violation of academic freedom and free speech,” Pollack wrote in a draft appeal of the reprimand he prepared for the Faculty Senate’s Faculty Welfare & Privileges Committee and shared with Inside Higher Ed. “This administrative action is arbitrary and capricious. The ‘unprofessional’ action that Dr. Kinservik deems to be a violation of university policy and professional ethics is protected speech.”

    “Joe Gould was an old and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for thirty-five years.”
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