Tuesday, April 03, 2018

Fashion Climbing and All-day Booktopia cafés

Light it up ah, light it up 
Another hit erases all the pain 
Bulletproof ah, kill the truth 
You’re falling, but you think you’re flying high

~ We all will live forever and ever in the digital world ...

* A 55-hour Spotify playlist of Bob Dylan songs in chronological order



What Our Accents Signify, And Why People Try To Change Them



“After all, you can wear professional-looking clothes and behave in a way appropriate to your job, but as soon as you open your mouth, your accent betrays your upbringing. As the linguist Chi Luu explained …, research shows that we are quickly judged based on how we speak.” (Especially in Britain.)

There are several lovely poems in Northern Light.  But there is one that stands out for me, and to which I return, either in my mind or by revisiting the book

                           
Garramor Bay inside Cold River

Now the long wave unfolded falls from the West,
The sandbirds run upon twittering, twinkling feet:
Life is perilous, poised on the lip of a wave,
And the weed that lay yesterday here is clean gone.

O visitor, fugitive creature, thing of a tide,
Make music, my heart, before the long silence.

L. A. G. Strong, Northern Light (Victor Gollancz 1930).

Yesterday evening, I was in a wistful, vaguely unsettled mood, for no particular reason, internal or external.  Was it the vernal equinox, perhaps?  No.  Just a mood.  But I suddenly felt the need to read "Garramor Bay."  There you have it.

Poetry fits when nothing else does.

Moths are drawn to any source of light, which could include those innocuous and harmless (flashlight, porch light, light bulb) as well as dangerous (bug zapper and St Jan's bonfires)

Despair is the only genuine atheism.
— Jean Paul, born in 1763

Booktopia continues to set trends in e-commerce success by putting customers first

Booktopia - Cold River, The Cold Truth of Freedom by Jozef Imrich, 9781554043118. Buy this book online


Knausgaard's 'Winter': Dark but brilliant surprises - and a daughter is born


Problems & Mysteries | Issue 125 | Philosophy Now

The difference between problems and mysteries has been well expressed by the French Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel:

“A problem is something which I meet which I find completely before me, but which I can lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and initial validity.” (Being and Having, 1949).

Problems are localized and ‘out there’, whereas mysteries enclose us.



JSTOR – [See the article referenced, available to read free online: The Portrayal of Librarians in Obituaries at the End of the Twentieth Century]: “Historically, the New York Times’s pages have been male-dominated, and its obituary section is no different. On International Women’s Day, the paper set out to supplement the record by running obituaries for overlooked women like Charlotte Brontë and Ida B. Wells—and the project will continue in an attempt to amend the record. Back in 2004, Information Studies scholars Juris Dilevko and Lisa Gottlieb wanted to know if those oversights included librarians. They analyzed the New York Times obit section between 1977 and 2002 in an attempt to understand how the obituary section portrayed American librarians. Calling the Times’ obituaries “a genre into themselves,” they wondered how editors decided whom to memorialize and whom to leave behind. Given the paper’s  commitment to repute as opposed to celebrity, what might the coverage reveal about librarianship? The team studied 123 obituaries about people who were librarians by training and who had spent the majority of their professional lives working in a library or archive…”

“…Nearly sixty-four percent of the obituaries were about men. Librarianship is a heavily woman-dominated field, with women holding over eighty-five percent of all librarian positions in the U.S. and sixty-four percent of all academic librarian positions…” [h/t Barclay Walsh]



How WAPO distorts reality: Although some of the article is correct, the young journalist was not investigating Fico’s finances, but mis-use of Euro funds in eastern Slovakia. But WAPO’s writers state that he was investigating PM’s finances – implying the cause of the subsequent murder.
“Case of the mystery judge is solved”: Travis Andersen of The Boston Globe has this report.
Bob McGovern of The Boston Herald reports that “Court officer studies art to ID mystery judge.”
And Alanna Durkin Richer of The Associated Press has an article headlined “Solved: Portrait of mystery high court justice identi

 France paralysed as unions revive the spirit of 1968 The Times














Gray rabbit bunny baby and yellow chick links


Maserati Levante Trofeo rises to the upper echelons of the performance SUV pack



Robert Plant rocks out old school Led Zeppelin at Bluesfest




The idea is to encourage patrons to drop in whenever, and linger for hours if they feel like it. The spaces are carefully designed to be both beautiful and comfortable. Their owners speak of engendering a sense of community and “a diverse range of experiences,” as Camille Becerra, the former chef at De Maria, said last year in an interview with Eater. The roots of this type of establishment are often traced to California, or Australia, where leisurely schedules (and avocado toast) are the norm, though some, like La Mercerie and, one imagines, the forthcoming Pisellino, from the proprietors of Buvette and Via Carota (both open all day), feel distinctly European, the sort of effortlessly romantic place you’d find on the perimeter of your neighborhood piazza.
All-day cafés

5 Weird Realities Of Composing Music For Movies And AdsCracked. Robert H: “There are (usually bad) reasons for everything.”



Obama ponders creating ‘a million young Barack Obamas’The Hill (UserFriendly). And the MSM criticize Trump’s narcissism.  I guess it’s a more or less necessary quality for anyone who runs seriously for President.


  • Old friends

    I go back a long way with Laura Demanski, my best friend, who blogged with me as “Our Girl in Chicago” for many years. We met some three decades ago. Back then she was the ... read more

    It’s only right, then, that we mark Johann Sebastian’s 333rd birthday not with the usual seriousness and solemnity, but with the exuberance of the season: this composer and his musical wife knew not just how to make babies, but also how to sing about sex. Bach and sex

    When artists had jobs. Philip Glass was a plumber; James Dickey, a sloganeer for Coca-Cola. Day jobs provided artists with space for stray thoughts. Can they still?  Crown Employee

This is kind of amazing. Legendary street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham died two years ago, leaving behind a massive body of work documenting the last 40 years of the fashion world. Somewhat surprisingly, he also wrote a memoir that seemingly no one knew about. He called it This is kind of amazing. Legendary street fashion photographer Bill Cunninghamdied two years ago, leaving behind a massive body of work documenting the last 40 years of the fashion world. Somewhat surprisingly, he also wrote a memoir that seemingly no one knew about. He called it Fashion Climbing (pre-order on Amazon).
Fashion Climbing is the story of a young man striving to be the person he was born to be: a true original. But although he was one of the city’s most recognized and treasured figures, Bill was also one of its most guarded. Written with his infectious joy and one-of-a-kind voice, this memoir was polished, neatly typewritten, and safely stored away in his lifetime. He held off on sharing it — and himself — until his passing. Between these covers, is an education in style, an effervescent tale of a bohemian world as it once was, and a final gift to the readers of one of New York’s great characters.
The NY Times, where Cunningham worked for decades, has more information on the book.
“There I was, 4 years old, decked out in my sister’s prettiest dress,” reads the memoir’s second sentence. “Women’s clothes were always much more stimulating to my imagination. That summer day, in 1933, as my back was pinned to the dining room wall, my eyes spattering tears all over the pink organdy full-skirted dress, my mother beat the hell out of me, and threatened every bone in my uninhibited body if I wore girls’ clothes again.”