Saturday, December 02, 2017

...Gate to the other side: Hold Back The River


“Love makes you do,
the best of things.
Love makes you do,
the worst of things,
It's a feeling extreme,
that doesn't exist in between.”
Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Almanac: David Mamet on the best Hollywood he-men

“These men, and their performances, are characterized by the absence of the desire to please. On screen, they don’t have anything to prove, and so we are extraordinarily drawn to them.” David Mamet, Bambi... read more

If we didn’t write poetry after the Holocaust it would be as if Hitler had won, or that the Nazis were right.” Neustadt laureate Adam Zagajewski discussed the art and trauma of the Holocaust and the idea of blurred homelands during a conversation on European culture held at the BBVA Foundation

5 Five Movies About Writers Worth Seeing - Peschel Press.

Longevity is less about diet, more about social circumstances Treehugger

Disgraced Chinese general commits suicide SCMP

...Gate to the other side:


Once all villagers decided to pray for rain. On the day of prayer all the people gathered, but only one boy came with an umbrella.
That is faith. ...

I could stare for hours, something
always new in each watery wedge—
a bottle top, a man’s black boot, a toad.


 J. M. Coetzee: 

“It sends him into ecstasies of rage, this whiff of fear coming off the being on the other side of the gate.” 
That is faith ...




Former Met Museum Director Ignites Leonardo Controversy With Instagram Post


Below the image of the Leonardo da Vinci, Campbell, who left the Met at the end of June, wrote the caption “450 million dollars?! Hope the buyer understands conservation issues…” followed by “#readthesmallprint”. … [Read More]

Machines Are Learning In New Ways. But What If We Can’t Understand Them?


"In many arenas, A.I. methods have advanced with startling speed; deep neural networks can now detect certain kinds of cancer as accurately as a human. But human doctors still have to make the decisions — and they won’t trust an A.I. unless it can explain itself. This isn’t merely a theoretical concern." … [Read More]



For the past couple of months, I’ve found myself teetering dangerously on the edge of a new and almost certainly expensive obsession with rare books. Blame Instagram.

As social-media platforms go, Instagram is the flashiest, the least reliant on text, and by far the most brazenly commercial, where it’s an open secret that every account past a certain audience threshold has long since been infiltrated by product placements and corporate-engineered hashtags. None of which is an obvious match for the literary world. But that all changed for me when I came across a group of rare-book dealers who use the platform not just to show off their wares, but also to sell them directly to their followers. In the process, these young turks are bringing one of the most inaccessible corners of the book world into the digital public square—and tempting me with $100 siren calls every time I open the damn app.


  • “The networking I’ve achieved through Instagram has been incredible. Way more than half of my sales are through there now,” says Jordan Brodeur, a mail carrier by day and book dealer by night (where he goes by the handle@sunlitcaverarebooks). Brodeur signed up for Instagram in late 2016, after selling for several years through eBay. He was also the first such dealer I fell for—his photos well composed, his titles well curated, and each post complemented by a dash of personality in the caption. So when I found out that we both live in the same northern Canadian city, I hopped in the car immediately to go see his collection in person.