Saturday, December 10, 2005



Cold River, a kind of story for readers who thirst after exciting foreign non-fiction - a fluid memoir You are different. So is Cold River



I blog to remember who I am ... The sky’s the limit when it comes to what bloggers can do to make a difference in someone else’s life. Books and blogs - They’re the New Black!
Television can make you famous, but it can’t keep you famous. It’s more like an opiate—as soon as you stop taking your daily fix, you get all pale and clammy, and before long you vanish in a puff of near-transparent mist over a Cold River ...

This was the story of a twelve-year-old girl who had nowhere to go. Humbert had tried to turn her into his fantasy, into his dead love, and he had destroyed her. The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another. We don't know what Lolita would have become if Humbert had not engulfed her. Yet the novel, the finished work, is hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of beauty but of life ... Warming up and suddenly inspired, I added that in fact Nabokov had taken revenge on our own solipsizers; he had taken revenge on the Ayatollah Khomeini ... As Christopher Hitchens reminds us, Lolita Haze would be 70 this year

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Gods and Generals
Death may be immortality’s opposite, but it confers a similar invulnerability. Death dealing and bent on dying, Achilles has achieved absolute freedom

It makes me very aware of my wasted life as an artist; I should have chucked security and settled for Bohemianism in which my talents might have flowered more originally. Perhaps wife and child and the desire for roots have been a mistake. I should have given an adventurous Lear by now and invented a clown. Ah well. What I have is a dear good wife, a dear good son and a house with views of rolling downs, trees, grass, and open skies. And a pretty good collection of books. -Alec Guinness (diary entry, Jan. 1, 1981)


Heroes are not necessarily amiable [They're supposed to be hellish wastelands: Chill out in the outer reaches, admiring the view and reciting poetry with Homer and Virgil. As night falls, drop down a few circles to where the real party is: among all those gamblers and fornicators. The 10 Best Dystopias ; The typical American female TV criminal is nasty, cutthroat, cunning, duplicitous and sexy to boot Bad Girls ]
• · Jim Collins's best seller is that rare business book that finds an audience beyond corporations. Now he's got a sequel for organizations not ruled by the bottom line ...There will be no glitzy media tour to sell it--if people want it, he figures, they'll know where to find it. Good to Self-Publish: A 'Good to Great' Second Act ; Walden Plans Book Line In 'Narnia,' Tycoon Seeks Blockbuster With a Message
• · · Cookies at Christmas ; Now, I know why some animals eat their young. Christmas Letters: Gag Me With A Spoon
• · · · Knowing your heart is the best treat life has to offer magic follows Publish or Perish: It’s Not Only for Academia ; Men are often accused by women of, to put it bluntly, having their brains in their balls. A joke, of course. But perhaps not as much of one as people might like to think Bigger testes mean smaller brains
• · · · · For starters, being polyamorous doesn't mean you're shagging a bunch of people. It may mean that you only have one other partner Social animals - Intimacy adds to the quality of your life ; Your how-to guide in loving more than one Polyamory? ; Testosterone and Trust
• · · · · · For an Englishman in New York, happiness is never having to say you're sorry Against Politeness ; Premarital sex is now just a part of the process of getting acquainted Who’s a virgin these days? ; A generation after Mao suits, China is coping with an epidemic of free love Sex, Please--We're Young and Chinese