Thursday, March 26, 2020

How To Make Your Home A Hard Target

In public life it is sometimes necessary to appear really natural to be actually artificial.” Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge  Continue reading Almanac: Calvin Coolidge on... [read more]

The Australian Taxation Office is building a network analytics solution called ‘ANGIE’ to help its tax avoidance taskforce discern complex, multi-layered relationships between clients.

Polish The Smarter Data Strategies: The ATO is building a big data platform to tackle tax evasion

















As crowds at Bondi were being scolded, something more sinister was spreading through Sydney



‘It is no wonder that you are there, half-naked, leaning over what I write. You make a triangle with your legs, you stand on your foot, but not as a ballerina. (. . .) But if you lay down a foot on my breast and raise your arms, letting your hair fall down, I think it is a writing foot split into fingers, searching for my emotion. Provoking me. In the end, I bit it. This is my retribution as a living writer.’

~ Maria Gabriela Llansol, from Onde Vais, Drama-Poesia, (2000)


‘(Surely a person is able to sample the experience of eternity without having to read fiction? I found just now a passage that I copied more than thirty years ago from the translated writings of Alfred Jarry: “It is fine to live two different moments of time as one: that alone allows one authentically to live a single moment of eternity, indeed all eternity since it has no moments.”)


‘The wayward few, as I call them, take for their subject-matter scenes and events never reported in any fictional text but likely to have taken place in the vast zone of possibility surrounding not just every page but the merest sentence on that page. And the mental space that I mentioned just now extends so far in every direction from every fictional text that the wayward ones, as I call them, are able to write as though the content of many a seemingly separate fictional text adjoins, or is entangled with, the content of many another such.’

From Gerald Murnane’s A Million Windows, p. 23

It might be that no one writes about the virtuality of fiction better than Gerald Murnane. I don’t know his work sufficiently well yet. The absence of wide acclaim is unsurprising, these quirky fictions are not the stuff of the mainstream. This is writing for the wayward few. His distinctive, idiosyncratic style, beyond its stylistic signature, seems utterly sui generis. I understand better what fiction does to me (for me?) for reading Murnane.





Bigger Brother New York Review of Books






COVID Transmission Graphic The Spinoff (chigal)

Space Shuttle thermal tiles conduct heat so poorly that after being in a 2200 °F oven for hours, you can pick them up with your bare hands only seconds after they come out, still glowing hot.