Sunday, August 09, 2020

MEdia Dragons: Meme Me – How Memes Work


“Music is essentially useless, as life is.” George Santayana, The Life of Reason Continue reading Almanac: George Santayana on music at About Last Night.... Read more

On a wet day Guylian goes well with macchiato Guylian (/ˈɡliən/French: [ɡiljɑ̃]) is a Belgian chocolate brand and manufacturer best known for its seashell shaped pralines. The company was founded in 1958 in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium by Guy Foubert and was later purchased by the South Korean parent company Lotte Confectionary.





One thing a good writer can do is to map the world of her imagination in such a way that a reader feels as if they could walk around that world and not get lost. This is too often an overlooked element of quality craft. When it is pulled off well, it can be amazing. How many of our readers had a map of Middtleurope on their walls when they were growing up? That is an example of excellent Literary Mapping.


The most trenchant part of the film comes near the end, when Bukowski ruminates about the “utter grimness” of his childhood. He says he was beaten with a razor strop three times a week “from the age of six to the age of eleven.” Bukowski call the violence “good literary training” because it taught him about pain (and also how to type). He explains that when you encountered “pain without reason” it revealed where “certain sections of life were” and that as a result you can go two ways—traumatized and ineffectual or tough and brave: “When you get the shit kicked out of you long enough and long enough and long enough, you tend to say what you mean.”

Bukowski lived in Philadelphia for a while — on Spring Garden Street, I believe — and spent a couple of weeks in Moyamensing Prison, which was just a few blocks from where I live. The prison was demolished years ago. The site is now an Acme supermarket.

An Opportunity To Diversify Your Theatre

“The reluctance to produce shows with casts that are all or largely non-white disproportionately affects shows written by Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) playwrights and composers. And the problem ripples outward beyond writers and actors. Predominantly white institutions (PWIs) all too often seemingly forget about directors, designers, stage managers, and dramaturgs of color entirely.” – Howlround



Kristy Edmunds: Why We Need Artists To Help Fix Things

“With the calamities facing the world, rebuilding what has been is no longer our most pressing goal — reimagining the future moving forward is. The ever-changing present requires the arts to accelerate our well-practiced ethos of compassionate vision, intellectual honesty and moral ingenuity. These are urgently required for shaping the road ahead.” – KCET


Meme Me – How Memes Work

The chaotic creativity of remixed internet memes and the new linguistic structures that rapidly evolve from them allow us to express certain states of mind and have others immediately get it and respond in kind. This has been called an “asynchronous, massively multi-person conversation.” – JSTOR


Is The British Theatre Critic Tradition Coming To An End?

It is hard to think of a leading critic under fifty. There is no new generation in sight. This is unprecedented. Billington was barely thirty when he began at The Guardian, older than Nightingale when he started at The Statesman. Much is made of the fact that Tynan took over at The Observer when he was 27, but Hobson was only 31 when he began as a theatre critic and James Agate was 30 when he began at The Guardian. The great critics, in short, always began before they were forty. Who are their equivalents today? Where are the new, young voices in theatre criticism? – The Critic


How The First Bestseller List Was Invented

It was called Bookman, started in 1895, and was the only place you could see which books were selling. “Once invented, the best seller could be discussed in literary journals, trade publications, social circles, and book clubs, solidifying a popular conception of what it meant to be a best seller and what it meant to read one.” – Lapham’s Quarterly


Redemption story should serve to inspire