Monday, February 01, 2016

Requiem-writing

“Misanthropes are, generally speaking, delightful people. At least I’ve never met one I didn’t like.” An absence of Vanity is rare in any writer ...

The great writer’s gift to a reader is to make him a better writer.

Man comes back to life after freezing for one night ZME Science A more extreme version of the case of a doctor, Beck Weathers, in the disastrous Everest climb documented in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. except Beck suffered much more long-term damage. IIRC, Krakauer was one of the ones who’d seen him outside the camp, apparently frozen to death, and was stunned when Beck managed to stagger in hours later

"We go to our deaths asymptotically, never getting there because ‘we’ and ‘there’ can’t exist at the same moment"


Our irrational overuse of numbered lists does nothing to improve critical thinking. And they are rife in the public service. Lists

“I’m still me: a person for whom reading has always been a defining feature. I deal with change by reading my way through it.”  LitHub

Writing political speeches by AI algorithm.
This is the era of the first sentence: supposedly a writer's only chance to entice a reader. Too often, however, a great first sentence is the only great sentence Requiem Sentences

Will inequality in Sydney fuel Antipodean Revolution and New Writers

How the Homeless Population Is Changing — and Becoming Much More Vulnerable The Conversation

Zygmunt Bauman: “Social media are a trap” El Pais (martha r). Important. This article is mainly about inequality, which Bauman was early to identify as a “metastasis”.
Google Beethoven Logo
Beethoven's Requiem on Media Dragon and Google ...

... What’s great about Goethe? 



First they came for the Revolution and I did not speak out
because I was not a Revolution.
Then they came for the Parliamentary Socialism
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Parliamentary Socialism.
Then they came for the Third Party
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Third Party.
Then they came for the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.
Then they came for the Green Lantern
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Green Lantern.

Then they came for me
but that was cool
because I’m a Democrat.
First They Came For… Corey Robin 

“Tolstoy’s huge novel about Russia during the Napoleonic Wars has been adapted many times, despite the difficulty of catching the essence of a work whose essence has a lot to do with sheer scale. When the book was published, in 1869, people wondered … Was this a history or a novel? And why was it so big? It’s big because it’s both.” The New Yorker: What Do We Love About ‘War and Peace’? 

UK's Tony Blair Privatizing Other Countries' Public Services 

"The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter," wrote Brecht. How then should we handle this devious tool?

“The best-selling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy said he had ‘had enough’ of writers being expected to work for nothing. He announced his decision on Twitter and revealed he had long tried to persuade the Oxford festival to change its policy ‘but they won’t. Time to go.'”
Read the story at The Independent (UK): Philip Pullman Quits Oxford Literary Festival Because Guest Authors Don’t Get Paid

Redundant phrases will clutter your writing and frustrate your readers. Review your writing for the obvious, and less obvious, culprits
Clarity is Key: Making Writing Clean and Concise
a9631-zeus-edge-fly-25jan16. links
1. What’s great about Goethe?
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.l7xvYP2W.dpuf
Writing for Vocabulary

Pew – Projects funded through Kickstarter cut across more than 60 countries – “Over the past several years, crowdfunding via the internet has become a popular way to engage public support – and financial backing – for all kinds of projects, from the Coolest Cooler to a virtual reality gaming headset to a prototype of a sailing spacecraft and a bailout fund for Greece. The area of journalism is no exception. From April 28, 2009 to September 15, 2015, 658 journalism-related projects proposed on Kickstarter, one of the largest single hubs for crowdfunding journalism, received full – or more than full – funding, to the tune of nearly $6.3 million.”