Saturday, June 02, 2018

Gabbie's Plays: To Finding Diverse Cold River Plays and Books Before They’re Published

(Secret Numbers Pat stosestnastka ...)

Her father gave her the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in her ...



Richard III, Macbeth, Misha, Lear, Mark Antony: Shakespeare's tyrants can tell us much about the puzzling psychology and spectacle of  villainy  - behind that strict woman in charge of the by The Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne - risk averse parents need an insurance if they want to help to clean up the  theatre ;-) 

How Useful Is Fear?

Evolution has installed phobias in humans that are proving hard to shake.



What is magic? – Mark Vernon

TIMER: Four decades, forty years:  six of one, half a dozen of the other.  Time is what it is.  But the mere fact of that much distance is enough to give one pause.  Yet there are no grounds for regret or lamentation. After all, I am here to see that distance:  something that ought not to be taken for granted.  Gratitude is the appropriate response

"There is something strange as well as sad in seeing actors—your pleasant fellows particularly—subjected to and suffering the common lot—their fortunes, their casualties, their deaths, seem to belong to the scene, their actions to be amenable to poetic justice only. We can hardly connect them with more awful responsibilities.”

caves beach
Global Trotter that rare and giving Antipodeans Godfather  ... Circa wild teenage eras










The Science In Shakespeare



Until relatively recently, Shakespeare’s contact with the scientific world has gone largely unnoticed both among scholars and general audiences. Perhaps Shakespeare scholars and audiences don’t notice the way he takes up science because they are unfamiliar with much of the science he was exposed to, while most scientists don’t see Shakespeare as valuable for reflecting on science because they assume he was unfamiliar with it.



      “Like a bird on the wire,
         Like a drunk in a midnight choir,
         I have tried, in my way, to be free.”


“Not Shakespeare had more feeling of the mystery of the world and of life. There are mountain peaks and chasms and – the whole is as thick with life at first hand now as the day it was written – as Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter seemed to me thin, 20 years ago. (W. James replied to me when I said so, Because it is an original book.)” 



'I Think This Is a Bigger Man'


John Wareham worked with Kenny Johnson – career criminal, career inmate.  Until he met John at Rikers Island where he joined John’s Taking Wings programme.  Five years of classes and Kenny turned into a teacher and guide.  He was tragically felled by a heart attack at age 49.
Crazy for Conspiracies
Excerpt from a poem by Kenny Johnson, which he delivered at protest rally on the steps of the New York State Capitol building, shortly before he died.
You might not agree with me,
say I’m crazy for conspiracies,
but if education’s the key
to what a person needs to be,
why aren’t we building schools
instead of penitentiaries?
Yeah—those concrete cookers breeding villains;
kids come home with stigmatisms,
short on skills and stoicism,
left to cope, with little hope,
and in their palms a wad of rope
to hang themselves,
as tucked into society’s unforgiving shelves
shamed and lost and left to delve
into what they know best
—and you or I could guess, more or less—
what that might be;
drugs and crime and the old paradigm,
of doing time to end up doing more time.
via Kevin Roberts


Fearless’ French Filmmaker Claire Denis Has Inspired Young American Directors


Barry Jenkins, director of the Best Picture Oscar-winning Moonlight, is a fan. And her actors appreciate that she deeply understands her medium. "Alex Descas, one of the actors with whom Denis has worked longest, and who credits her with writing complicated, realistic roles for black actors at a time when few others did, described her artistic mode succinctly: 'Film is not theatre,' he told me." … [Read More]
"I am haunted by waters. It may be that I’m too dry in myself, too English, or it may be simply that I’m susceptible to beauty, but I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby. “When it hurts,” wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Miłosz, “we return to the banks of certain rivers,” and I take comfort in his words, for there’s a river I’ve returned to over and again, in sickness and in health, in grief, in desolation and in joy." 
 
Rivers may be among our richest existential metaphors — “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges proclaimed in histimeless meditation on time“I do not think that the banks of a river suffer because they let the river flow,” Frida Kahlo wrote in celebrating her unconventional relationship with Diego Rivera — but they are also the raw material of our existence, the seedbed of civilization. Laing writes:


Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers


“It’s a mercy that time runs in one direction only, that we see the past but darkly and the future not at all.”



Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers
“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river,” Virginia Woolfwrote some years before she filled her coat-pockets with stones, waded into the River Ouse near her house, and, unwilling to endure what she had barely survived in the past, slid beneath the smooth surface of life.
Arthurton: How to spend the perfect Saturday in Northcote 


Northcote area guide 



Librarian’s Guide To Finding Diverse Books Before They’re Published BookRiot – Here’s how to find diverse books before they’re published so you can read and nominate them with plenty of time for them to show up on the monthly LibraryReads list. “When you can find these books and read them, you can become a better advocate for these titles and ultimately, a better advocate for the whole of the readers in the communities you serve.)”

Motherboard: This story is part of When Spies Come Home, a Motherboard series about powerful surveillance software ordinary people use to spy on their loved ones. “The Internet Archive’s goal, according to its website, is “universal access to all knowledge.” As part of that mission, the non-profit runs the Wayback Machine, an online tool that anyone can use to digitally preserve a snapshot of a website. It provides an important public service, in that if a company tries to quietly change its policy, or perhaps a government tries to scrub a position from its website, the Wayback Machine can provide robust proof of the switch. But the Internet Archive has been purging its banks of content related to a company which marketed powerful malware for abusive partners to spy on their spouses. The news highlights the broader issue of the fragility of online archives, including those preserving information in the public interest. “Journalists and human rights defenders often rely on archiving services such as the Wayback Machine as tools to preserve evidence that might be key to demand accountability,” Claudio Guarnieri, a technologist at human rights charity Amnesty International, told Motherboard in an online chat. The company in question is FlexiSpy, a Thailand-based firm which offers desktop and mobile malware. The spyware can intercept phone calls, remotely turn on a device’s microphone and camera, steal emails and social media messages, as well as track a target’s GPS location. Previously, pages from FlexiSpy’s website saved to the Wayback Machine showed a customer survey, with over 50 percent of respondents saying they were interested in a spy phone product because they believe their partner may be cheating. That particular graphic was mentioned in a recent New York Times piece on the consumer spyware market…”

Via Reddit – This gas station in Finland has a tiny library

GOOD: “Iceland’s natural beauty is one of the several reasons why the tiny island nation publishes the highest number of books per capita in the world. According to a 2016 report from the International Publishers Association, the U.K., with 2,710 books published in 2015, came in at first place. Iceland was a close second, with 2,628 books that year. This is impressive, however, as the U.K.’s population in 2015 stood at 65 million, while Iceland’s was only 330,000…”

Czech - sic - out Seven Sharp’s guide to business brilliance