Saturday, October 06, 2018

Voices of the land: Living Life Slow

A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off of you.
— Françoise Sagan, who died in 2004

How to turn misinformation into wisdom

'ABC - The barbarians are not at the gate; they’re in the building'


 “I do not write for the reader, for people, for society. I write for myself, for my own self-regarding pleasure, trying to excel and always failing of the excellence I desire. If no one ever read me, would I write? Perhaps not; but I would not be able to stop writing in my head.”

Mike Davis: trucker, scholar, Marxist, expert on Turkish cinema. Now he's turned to the environment. His question: Who will build the arkMEdia Dragons Will 


Banned Book Week is upon us. Does this annual orgy of inaccuracy, overstatement, and self-righteousness serve any purpose?  Ano Si Yes  Oui 

A new culture war. The moralizers are young, and their quest is for representation and social justice. The result? Dull art...   Dull Yammer 



All-Female Termite Colonies Reproduce Without Male Input Smithsonian


Where Does Language Come From? The Mind Or The Land?

The English philosopher Owen Barfield, a member of the Oxford Inklings in the 1930s and ’40s, whose work as a philologist convinced him that the Romantic tradition was broadly right, put it succinctly. Words have soul, he said. They possess a vitality that mirrors the inner life of the world, and this connection is the source of their power. All forms of language implicitly deploy it. Poets are arguably more alert to it because they consciously seek it out.



How Penguin Has Strengthened Its Publishing Empire



Prominent Writers Protest Removal Of NY Review Of Books Editor


Leading Irish writers John Banville, Colm Tóibín and Roy Foster, along with some of the biggest names in English letters, including Joyce Carol Oates, Ian McEwan and Lorrie Moore, have released a joint letter in which they express dismay at what they call the “forced resignation” of the editor of the New York Review of Books under a #MeToo stormcloud.



Is Firing NY Review Of Books Editor A Chilling Of Intellectual Courage?


Laura Kipness: “Allocution is a tough genre. But even when the account is disingenuous and self-pitying, I’m interested in what the accused have to say for themselves, including those I think are guilty and despicable and who haven’t learned the proper lessons from their crimes. One of the reasons we read prison literature is because we’re all guilty and despicable. One of the reasons we read literature as such is to know what it’s like to be a criminal, a coward, a refugee, a pariah. In other words, human. Something significant was lost last week




Leonard Cohen’s Notebooks In The Freezer (And His Final Poems)


Leonard Cohen’s son says that even talking about his father’s process of writing feels like an invasion. “My father was very interested in preserving the magic of his process. And moreover, not demystifying it. Speaking of any of this … is a transgression,” Adam Cohen says. But a final book of poems “is what he was staying alive for.”

Margo Jefferson On Being A Critic And The Many Forms Of Codeswitching In Her Memoir


Jefferson’s memoir Negroland won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, partly because of its ability to be personal and critical at the same time. Jefferson says, “I’d spent my writing life as a critic. My initial feeling was that those kinds of tones and voices had to go; this was memoir. But then, I realized, no, that was as much a fixed part of my identity as other things. I realized I had to include the critic who is diagnosing, who is assessing, who is judging against a kind of backdrop that is aesthetic, cultural, political.” 




The ABC is experimenting with ways of deepening its coverage of regional Australia.








A parliamentary inquiry seems to be carefully avoiding the real challenge for Australia’s national museums, archives and libraries, writes David Stephens.





A groundbreaking new study shows that access to “greened” vacant lots reduced feelings of worthlessness and depression, especially in low-resource neighborhoods.

25 JUL 2018



What’s in a fence? More than you’d think. In neighborhoods where as little as about $1,000 was spent transforming a vacant lot with some grass, a few trees, and a short wooden fence, people felt less depressed and less worthless.


“Mr. Lamb has succeeded not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it. He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction. He prefers bye-ways tohighways. When the full tide of human life pours along to some festive shew, to some pageant of a day, Elia would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a tottering door-way, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative of embryo art and ancient manners.”








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