Saturday, October 27, 2018

Jennifer Ackermann on the Genius of Birds

Almanac: Tolstoy on women

INK BOTTLE“Once Suler, Sergei Lvovich, Tchekhov, and some one else, were sitting in the park and talking about women: he listened in silence for a long time and then suddenly said: ‘And I will tell the truth about women, when I have one foot in the grave. I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me, and say, “Do what you like now.”’ The look he gave us was so wild, so terrifying that we all fell silent for a while.”
~ Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (trans. S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf)
We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.”
Dejan Stojanovic, The Shape 


  Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce – review | Books | The Guardian

Van Wyck Brooks, in his autobiography, provides an affecting portrait of John Butler Yeats 



 The idler's dilemma. It’s one thing to slack off in pursuit of self-interest. It’s another to be idle amid urgent human suffering  


 A new model for the art show?


An Urban Ink Forager Explains How To Paint With All The Colors Of The Alley











Can Catholic literature build on its rich heritage? | America Magazine



We’re All About Feelings Now – How Literature Evolved Beyond Narratives


Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?





Robin Hanson on Signalling and Self-Deception


Conversations with Tyler |  1h 05m | Listen Later 
Wide-ranging discussion with Robin Hanson, co-author of “The Elephant in the Room”, which makes the case that as much as 90% of human behaviour is motivated by sub-conscious signalling, not the selfless motives typically professed




Jennifer Ackermann on the Genius of Birds

Being Human with Robert Sapolsky

Origin Stories |  | 0h 38m | Listen Later 
Robert Sapolsky, author of “Behave”, with a fascinating and funny talk about human behaviour and the ways we are the same as, and different from, other animals.

On The Differences Between Being An Actor In The US And Europe

"Certainly American culture is different from European culture. So I had expected the life of a theatre artist in Paris or London to be more refined, somehow easier, and at the same time more gratifying on a creative level than mine here in the States. But it turns out that their struggles, passions, fiscal concerns, their training, their identity issues, and the sexism they face—in other words, much of their life experience, seems very similar to my own." … Read More