No binging tv series for moi tonight as Telstra is suffering another outage attack ... Goliath series is now in second series
The outsourced Telstra services Phillipines call center was not aware that there was a problem however the ABC news noted that Telstra went down ...
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief."
– Franz Kafka
Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.
— Boris Pasternak
Mothers and grandmothers, wolves and little girls …
… The Postmenopausal Fairy Tale.
My mother laughs at me in my grandmother’s living room for pretending to feed a baby doll my grandmother has just given me. I am five. It’s my first memory of anger and shame. “You ruin everything,” I say to my mother
The death of book blogging (nothing unhappy)
The Indie Book Blog Is Dead says The Vulture, a commerical culturesite I may or may not have seen before – they all look and sound the same – focusing on another commercial culturesite that looks and sounds pretty much the same but one I had definitely seen before though had never considered to be a book blog, which has been sold to another commercial culturesite, signalling, apparently, the end of indie book blogs, a distinguishing phrase that stood out – independent of what, I wondered; any feeling for literature?
The article prompted a bemused shrug from Anthony as he celebrated ten years of Time's Flow Stemmed, a brilliant and cutting response from Juliana of The Blank Garden and, most recently, Flowerville's reflections on why she continues to blog after all these years. I've written about the form a couple of times in The beginning of something and A blog comes to one in the dark, so I repeat myself now only to observe that such repetition indicates why book blogging maintains itself in a state of precarity: it offers an infinite and apparently meaningless freedom. It is like the novel in this sense and, like a novelist who embraces genre, the blogger can constrain themself by mimicking the culturesites with enthusiasm for new publications, offering consumer reports, prizechat and local agitations about diversity, but the longer one pursues such writing, the more nagging questions or feelings present themselves and demand to be explored.
The article prompted a bemused shrug from Anthony as he celebrated ten years of Time's Flow Stemmed, a brilliant and cutting response from Juliana of The Blank Garden and, most recently, Flowerville's reflections on why she continues to blog after all these years. I've written about the form a couple of times in The beginning of something and A blog comes to one in the dark, so I repeat myself now only to observe that such repetition indicates why book blogging maintains itself in a state of precarity: it offers an infinite and apparently meaningless freedom. It is like the novel in this sense and, like a novelist who embraces genre, the blogger can constrain themself by mimicking the culturesites with enthusiasm for new publications, offering consumer reports, prizechat and local agitations about diversity, but the longer one pursues such writing, the more nagging questions or feelings present themselves and demand to be explored.
Rod Dreher on Twitter: "From the new issue of Modern Age, edited by @ToryAnarchist. I needed to read this:… new age of cold ricer flowing to sea "
You can’t make this up …
… Welcome back Titania McGrath! | Spectator USA
But apparently you can. Dave sends along this:
The genius of Titania McGrath.
Cestrum parqui, commonly known as green cestrum or willow-leaved jessamine - and sometimes incorrectly referred to as "mortal nightshade" - is a species of flowering plant native to Chile. It is a fast, straggly, woody deciduous or semi-evergreen shrub with one or more fragile green stems. Wikipedia
But apparently you can. Dave sends along this:
The genius of Titania McGrath.
Private Eye recently featured a tweet by Titania McGrath in Pseuds’ Corner. She was advertising her new book Woke: a Guide to Social Justice: ‘I have written the most important book of 2019. Do not buy it for my sake, but for the sake of humanity.’ The magazine was fooled. Titania is a spoof, and her book, out next month, is categorised on Wikipedia as ‘Genre: Humour’. She tweets every day. On Monday: ‘Dear Hollywood, please reshoot every scene that Liam Neeson has ever acted in and replace him with Christopher Plummer. Do this NOW’ and, ‘If you don’t think exactly the same way as me, you have clearly got a lot to learn about diversity.’ Last week: ‘It’s a broken kind of democracy which allows a majority of voters to impose their wishes on the rest of us.’ She is a genius.Dangerous plant invading NSW that kills cattle
Cestrum parqui, commonly known as green cestrum or willow-leaved jessamine - and sometimes incorrectly referred to as "mortal nightshade" - is a species of flowering plant native to Chile. It is a fast, straggly, woody deciduous or semi-evergreen shrub with one or more fragile green stems. Wikipedia
Scientific name: Cestrum parqui
Higher classification: Jessamines
