Language Arts
Just added to Language Arts Guide:
Magazineer - Blog about magazines written by people who work in and on and love magazines.
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” and so MagCloud asks for a pdf, and they’ll print, take care of the mailing and manage subscriptions.
Contemporary Turkish literature translated into English; A Mid-Summer Night’s Story, Turkish Poetry (side by side translations) and selected stories of childhood and youth.Last Call Bohemia (Vanity Fair). Christopher Hitchens writes: It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships.
The Name of the Rose. Historical fiction. Historical Fact.
The Cunning Linguist: Remembering George Carlin (Reason Magazine).
ReadAtWork - Classic novels in Powerpoint form.
Summer books to feed your fiction addiction (NPR).
Here’s one to read: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (WashingtonPost) Sit. Stay. Read. The dog days of summer are nigh, and here is a big-hearted novel you can fall into, get lost in and finally emerge from reluctantly, a little surprised that the real world went on spinning while you were absorbed. You haven’t heard of the author. David Wroblewski is a 48-year-old software developer in Colorado, and this is his first novel. It’s being released with the kind of hoopla once reserved for the publishing world’s most established authors. No wonder: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is an enormous but effortless read, trimmed down to the elements of a captivating story about a mute boy and his dogs. That sets off alarm bells, I know.
Not covered above, The Book of Love (The story of the Kamasutra) Years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around drinking when I heard a friend murmur two sentences I have never forgotten. “You know, guys, sex is the greatest thing in the world.” He paused and we were all about to nod in agreement. He was, after all, a noted and knowledgeable ladies’ man. Unexpectedly, though, he then added, with infinite wistfulness: “But it’s just not that great.” There, in that gulf between the reality and the dream, lies the domain of pornography, the sex industry and the masturbatory fantasy — of Viagra and the midlife crisis. Our Western myths of love are seldom about fulfillment; they are all about yearning. In Plato’s Symposium we are told that the gods divided the original ball-like human beings in two, and that we consequently spend our lives searching for the other half who will complete us. So-called romantic love, which first blossomed in 12th-century France, revels in passion delayed, forbidden or otherwise thwarted. Its real theme is desire.
God’s Debris. Scott Adams (Dilbert) free online book. So, is Scott a member of the secret society Ordo Templi Orientis?
Take The Funny And Run (Radar) Anyone who has ever performed stand-up is familiar with the red light, the universal signal that warns dawdlers it’s time to wrap things up. In the ’80s, comics at the Hollywood Improv came up with a novel use for the light. When shining steadily, it had the conventional meaning. But if the bulb began sputtering, it was the comedic equivalent of an air-raid siren, warning performers to lock up their original material immediately unless they wanted to lose it to a master thief. Robin Williams, comedy’s most notorious joke rustler, was in the house.
How to win the New Yorker cartoon caption contest (Slate)
This Ecstatic Nation: Learning from Emily Dickinson after 9/11. (BostonReview). Howe’s book is simultaneously a dazzling exploration of Dickinson’s power and an anatomy of the American cultural imaginary. “The vivid rhetoric of terror,” Howe writes, “was a first step in the slow process of American Democracy.” This rhetoric of terror—fueled by a double legacy of Calvinist predestinarianism and violent frontier experience—animates some of Dickinson’s best work. Maybe alongside Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” much circulated in the weeks after September 11th, we might do equally well to return to a homegrown poet of terror, abjection, and difficulty.
What would Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot write to each other?
How the Web Was Won (Vanity Fair). Oral history contains some gems, like this one from Bezos: When we started out, we were packing on our hands and knees on these cement floors. One of the software engineers that I was packing next to was saying, You know, this is really killing my knees and my back. And I said to this person, I just had a great idea. We should get kneepads. And he looked at me like I was from Mars. And he said, Jeff, we should get packing tables.
We got packing tables the next day, and it doubled our productivity.
Trailer for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. David Fincher, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett. Pitt’s character starts off as an old man and ages backwards. The full text of the Fitzgerald short story on which the film is based is available online.
Anne Carson. Tango II. Tango XII. So The Hall Door Shuts Again And All Noise Is Gone. Ode To The Sublime. Men In The Off Hours. Autobiography of Red.