There is only one trait that makes the writer. He is always watching.
— Morley Callaghan, born in 1903
There is still an iron curtain between Europe’s two major mouse species, the so-called “Squeaky Curtain.” Today, they interbreed only in a narrow zone 10 to 20 km wide near the border between Germany and the Czech Republic. (“‘Squeaky Curtain’ divides Europe’s Eastern and Western mice”)
The Brideshead Generation’s “lost girls” were known for their dry repartee and sexual dalliances. Their stories deserve telling Lost Girls
“I try to tell young writers, ‘Do not fetishize your world-building.’ I’ve seen writers think they have to be Tolkien, they have to invent Elvish, before they can start the first page of their book.”
Warhol’s pranks, like dressing up as a box of Brillo, sound dumb. But we still live in his world
Because few bankers are men of letters, and few men of letters are bankers, Walter Bagehotremains unique. As does his supercilious literary style
Michael Hollingshead, LSD provider to the intellectually minded, is known as a benign cosmic courier. But his story has a dark side Divine Rascal
"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."
- Oscar Wilde
There is still an iron curtain between Europe’s two major mouse species, the so-called “Squeaky Curtain.” Today, they interbreed only in a narrow zone 10 to 20 km wide near the border between Germany and the Czech Republic. (“‘Squeaky Curtain’ divides Europe’s Eastern and Western mice”)
The Brideshead Generation’s “lost girls” were known for their dry repartee and sexual dalliances. Their stories deserve telling Lost Girls
The show, which began with hilarious writing by Larry Gelbart, was running on fumes by its last couple of seasons. I found its finale to be remarkably anemic when I tried rewatching it a couple of years ago. Evenveteran M*A*S*H scriptwriter turned blogger Ken Levine wrote of the finale, “I’ll be honest. I liked it but I didn’t love it. I know and greatly respect all the writers. And there are parts of it that are moving and brilliant. I also loved that everyone was affected in some way by the war. But I felt the show was too long and too serious. Just personal taste. I know many fans adored it.”
“I try to tell young writers, ‘Do not fetishize your world-building.’ I’ve seen writers think they have to be Tolkien, they have to invent Elvish, before they can start the first page of their book.”
Warhol’s pranks, like dressing up as a box of Brillo, sound dumb. But we still live in his world
Blake Gopnik’s New Bio Of Warhol: A Case For His Enduring Influence
It is hard now to recapture the shock of 1962 when the iterations of Campbell’s soup went on display at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles (New York wasn’t interested). But the cumulative effect of their pristine forms, their tromp l’oeil construction, their obsessive reiteration (there were 32 prints, one for each flavour), luminous banality and, above all, their thereness, was to blast apart everything that we thought – and think – we know about art. – The Guardian
Michael Hollingshead, LSD provider to the intellectually minded, is known as a benign cosmic courier. But his story has a dark side Divine Rascal
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is sex the answer to your relationship woes?
The answer is generally “yes,” of course: “When the so-called ‘low-desire’ partner – who is, she is at pains to emphasise, just as likely to be a man or a woman – was encouraged to have sex they didn’t particularly want, not only did they end up enjoying themselves but the high-desire partner became a much nicer person to be around.”
Hey, “maintenance sex” has saved many a marriage.Including, as you can see, some InstaPundit readers’.
Gopnik biography is much needed — and it’s not long enough. The text is quite a roller-coaster, as the author attempts to resolve what he sees as the artist’s contradictions, something which Warhol himself never bothered about. At his revolutionary height in the 1960s, when he ruptured art and society through the astonishing liberties taken by his paintings, films and superstars at the Silver Factory, Warhol went home at night to be looked after by his mother. Gopnik sees this as an example of Warhol’s irony, but that is wrong. It’s not his irony, it’s ours.
Tsundoku - is acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them
“Alive Together”
Speaking of marvels, I am alive
together with you, when I might have been
alive with anyone under the sun,
when I might have been Abelard’s woman
or the whore of a Renaissance pope
or a peasant wife with not enough food
and not enough love, with my children
dead of the plague. I might have slept
in an alcove next to the man
with the golden nose, who poked it
into the business of stars,
or sewn a starry flag
for a general with wooden teeth.
I might have been the exemplary Pocahontas
or a woman without a name
weeping in Master’s bed
for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
my daughter, lost in a drunken bet.
I might have been stretched on a totem pole
to appease a vindictive god
or left, a useless girl-child,
to die on a cliff. I like to think
I might have been Mary Shelley
in love with a wrongheaded angel,
or Mary’s friend, I might have been you.
This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made it, alive in a time
when rationalists in square hats
and hatless Jehovah’s Witnesses
agree it is almost over,
alive with our lively children
who–but for endless ifs–
might have missed out on being alive
together with marvels and follies
and longings and lies and wishes
and error and humor and mercy
and journeys and voices and faces
and colors and summers and mornings
and knowledge and tears and chance.
— Lisel Mueller
Inside Australia's former embassy to East Germany
https://www.abc.net.au › blueprintforliving
Businessman Alfine Fuad shows how he smuggled his family out of East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie in 1976.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS HOFFMANN, PICTURE ALLIANCE/GETTY
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS HOFFMANN, PICTURE ALLIANCE/GETTY
Warhol by Blake Gopnik review – sex, religion and overtaking Picasso A splendid life of Andy Warhol claims him as the most influential artist of the 20th century, and isn’t shy of exposing his private life
In U.S., Library Visits Outpaced Trips to Movies in 2019
In U.S., Library Visits Outpaced Trips to Movies in 2019
When Grandma Moses Was Conscripted For The Cold War
“Between June and December of 1950, a government-backed exhibition of Moses’s picturesque American scenes toured six European cities. … One Foreign Service officer who was involved with the Moses show declared that the exhibition had been as valuable as ‘pure gold’ in promoting ‘the core of our national character which we are endeavoring to articulate in opposition to the efforts of the communists.'” –Smithsonian Magazine
I haven't seen this one yet, but see also the W.W.Nortonpublicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com orAmazon.co.uk.
The Good Soldier Švejk Q & A
Radio Prague International has started a series on The Czech Books You Must Read and they now have a Q & A by Ian Willoughby with Abigail Weil ("who is currently working on a book about Hašek") about the most-translated and one of the best-known Czech novels, Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk.
The Penguin Classics edition is the Cecil Parrott translation -- get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk -- but, as they note, a new one, by Gerald Turner, is in the works, apparently scheduled for the centenary of Hašek's 1923 death.
(The Good Soldier Švejk isn't under review at the complete review -- I guess I'll wait until the new translation is out ... -- but Hašek's The Secret History of my Sojourn in Russia is.)
Howard Jacobson: 'Russia, My Homeland' – Tablet Magazine
My own contribution to the task of shaking the Urals from our shoes was preferring Tolstoy to Dostoevsky and once in a while putting in a word for Turgenev above them both. But weren’t there twinges of recognition whichever of them I read? Yes. No. Yes.
The Atlantic – “An unprecedented data set shows where the encyclopedia’s editors are, where they aren’t, and why. A map of the United States shows the percentage of households editing Wikipedia by county. Analysis of Wikipedia IP editor activity. Wikipedia matters. In a time of extreme political polarization, algorithmically enforced filter bubbles, and fact patterns dismissed as fake news, Wikipedia has become one of the few places where we can meet to write a shared reality. We treat it like a utility, and the U.S. and U.K. trust it about as much as the news. But we know very little about who is writing the world’s encyclopedia. We do know that just because anyone can edit, doesn’t mean that everyone does: The site’s editors are disproportionately cis white men from the global North. We also know that, as with most of the internet, a small number of the editors do a large amount of the editing.
But that’s basically it: In the interest of improving retention, the Wikimedia Foundation’s own research focuses on the motivations of people who do edit, not on those who don’t. The media, meanwhile, frequently focus on Wikipedia’s personality stories, even when covering the bigger questions. And Wikipedia’s own culture pushes back against granular data harvesting: The Wikimedia Foundation’s strong data-privacy rules guarantee users’ anonymity and limit the modes and duration of their own use of editor data. But as part of my research in producing Print Wikipedia, I discovered a data set that can offer an entry point into the geography of Wikipedia’s contributors. Every time anyone edits Wikipedia, the software records the text added or removed, the time of the edit, and the username of the editor. (This edit history is part of Wikipedia’s ethos of radical transparency: Everyone is anonymous, and you can see what everyone is doing.) When an editor isn’t logged in with a username, the software records that user’s IP address. I parsed all of the 884 million edits to English Wikipedia to collect and geolocate the 43 million IP addresses that have edited English Wikipedia. I also counted 8.6 million username editors who have made at least one edit to an article…”
