– John Ruskin
“The only thing we have is one another. The only competitive advantage we have is the culture and values of the company. Anyone can open up a coffee store. We have no technology, we have no patent. All we have is the relationship around the values of the company and what we bring to the customer every day. And we all have to own it.”Howard Schultz, CEO, Starbucks
“This is the lesson I give to MBA students. In any M&A or spin-off, don’t wipe everything out. Find one thing in the organisation that was good and use it as a cornerstone for a new culture. People don’t want to work for an organisation for years and then be told its rubbish.”Bob Every, Chairman Boral and Wesfarmers
Twelve Russians charged with US 2016 election hack
A Handmaid’s Tale-themed line of wines utterly misses the point of the show. And of wine, for that matter
↩︎ The Guardian
NEWS YOU CAN NOSE: ‘Phantom Smells’ May Be A Sign Of Trouble
↩︎ New studies suggest humans evolved with a characteristic lifespan, with individuals staying healthy into their 60s. ViaAeon
NEWS YOU CAN NOSE: ‘Phantom Smells’ May Be A Sign Of Trouble
↩︎ New studies suggest humans evolved with a characteristic lifespan, with individuals staying healthy into their 60s. ViaAeon
Never, ever use soap in a lake Treehugger
Let’s make private data into a public good Mariana Mazzucato MIT Technology Review
We dive into the work of some writers like skinny-dipping teenagers in June. Others we approach cautiously, toe first, testing the waters...
“Far be it from me to advocate that every leisure hour should be spent in reading ( Imrich or ) Shakespeare. There is a lot to be said for sheer idleness; it may be, even, that the power to muse in hot weather, extending over many generations, has been responsible for the work of Shakespeare himself. Certainly of no hereditary tendency to read the classics will great poetry ever be born, for the perfect use of leisure is to prefer your own thoughts when surrounded by every possible amusement. And so the great mass of people who sit at this moment with books or papers before them, refusing to read, have right on their side.”
“Once at Combe Florey in Somerset, he hung oranges in the trees, for the beauty of it, and fitted his donkeys with felt antlers, for the joke of it, and herded them under his orange-bearing cedars, and invited the neighborhood in for cider and fruitcake, for the fun of it.”
“How should we approach old texts? How can we avoid reading them with an indulgent, superior smile that they may not deserve? Especially when the author is not noted for his wit and only manages to crack a joke now and then. . . . Generally speaking the passage of time creates especially bad acoustical conditions for humor. I suspect there are untold victims among individual words, sentences, passages, and even entire works.”
The Women Of Rare Books
Although it’s true that old white men have always run the large, moneyed, century-old rare-book trade—buying and selling books for a living—women have made enormous inroads as private and institutional collectors. Things started shifting in the seventies. Second-wave feminism gave women a voice, and female collectors started patching the historical holes by seeing value and relevance in objects that men had ignored. When you put your gaze on a manuscript and call attention to it, you create value in the eyes of others. Curiosity creates a market. … [Read More]
We dive into the work of some writers like skinny-dipping teenagers in June. Others we approach cautiously, toe first, testing the waters...
“Far be it from me to advocate that every leisure hour should be spent in reading ( Imrich or ) Shakespeare. There is a lot to be said for sheer idleness; it may be, even, that the power to muse in hot weather, extending over many generations, has been responsible for the work of Shakespeare himself. Certainly of no hereditary tendency to read the classics will great poetry ever be born, for the perfect use of leisure is to prefer your own thoughts when surrounded by every possible amusement. And so the great mass of people who sit at this moment with books or papers before them, refusing to read, have right on their side.”
“Once at Combe Florey in Somerset, he hung oranges in the trees, for the beauty of it, and fitted his donkeys with felt antlers, for the joke of it, and herded them under his orange-bearing cedars, and invited the neighborhood in for cider and fruitcake, for the fun of it.”
'For the Fun of It'
Very Near Fuddled
What’s The Best Way To Try To Understand Ourselves
As the philosopher Noam Chomsky has said, “we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology” – something the critic and author David Lodge has explored. In his 2004 book Consciousness and the Novel, Lodge argues that “literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have… The novel is arguably man’s most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time.”
'Those Written without Permission'
Thanks go to John Wilson for remembering Andrei Sinyavsky/Abram Tertz and celebrating his work in“Thinking Under the Influence.” The non-Jewish Sinyavsky (1925-1997) used a pseudonym borrowed from the renowned Russian-Jewish gangster Abram Tertz. In 1966 he was sentenced to seven years of forced labor for trying to “subvert or weaken the Soviet regime.” That is, he sent a pamphlet and stories to Paris for publication. Totalitarian regimes pay writers the compliment of taking their work seriously. Modern democracies don’t care, and let's hope it stays that way.
Sinyavsky was released from the camps in 1971 and two years later immigrated to France. Wilson cites an essay written after his imprisonment, “The Literary Process in Russia,” which carries a well-known epigraph from Mandelstam’s Fourth Prose (trans. Clarence Brown, The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, 1986):
“I divide all works of literature throughout the world into those permitted and those written without permission. The first are so much garbage; the second sort are stolen air. I want to spit in the face of those writers who write with prior approval; I want to beat them about the head with a stick and sit them all down at table in Herzen House, having placed in front of each one a glass of police tea and given each of them an analysis of Gornfeld’s urine.”
For a quick gloss on the Gornfeld affair, go here, though Mandelstam’s essential point is clear. Wilson then quotes Sinyavsky’s essay: “. . . all true writing—even when no clash with authority is involved—is something forbidden, something reprehensible, and in this illicit element lies the whole excitement, the whole dilemma of being a writer.” Today, most claimants to writerly illicitness are fooling themselves. They’re playing dress-up. They risk nothing. Their work comes pre-censored.