THE LITERARY PIANO:Scrapbook Edition

Dec 17

“

2009 was a good year for Tumblr. Synecdochally speaking, that means it was also a good year for Tumblrers, or whatever you call them.

Whether your metric-of-choice is book deals or raw numbers, The Kids Who Tumble graduated to big boys on the playground, not so much by stomping the other kids as by inventing their own game in the corner. Tumblr’s make-or-break premise was always that the semi-closed platform (insular, secular, participatory) would eventually make a deeper connection than the open online systems (cosmopolitan, egalitarian, populist) powered by Feedburner and retweets. Whereas anyone can read blogs or tweets, tumbling nearly demands participation.

And reblogging. Lots and lots of reblogging.

…. Tumblr never was for the suits. What it lacks in individual size, Tumblr makes up for in aggregate. Take the “Fuck Yeah ____” meme. These Tumblrs (including but certainly not limited to Fuck Yeah Sharks, Fuck Yeah Neal Patrick Harris, Fuck Yeah Skinny Bitch, Fuck Yeah Philosophy) have nothing to do with each other, but they served their essential purpose of being 4chan-lite. (Oh look, Fuck Yeah 4chan.)

“… [O]ur thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. A bit of distance, however, helps loosen the chains of cognition, making it easier to see some-thing new in the old; the mundane is grasped from a slightly more abstract perspective. As T. S. Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” — Jonah Lehrer on the creative benefits of travel via The Frontal Cortex (via somethingchanged). Lehrer concludes: “We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.”

Dec 16

Moleskine 2010 Pocket Weekly Notebook - Red Hard Cover

The Top 10 'Everything' of 2009 - TIME

“Exposing politically controversial topics for public debate is vital for democracy. Homosexuality was a crime in Australia until 1976 in ACT, NSW in 1984 and 1997 in Tasmania. Political and social norms change over time and benefit from intense public scrutiny and debate. The openness of the Internet makes this all the more possible and should be protected.” — Google Australia comes out against mandatory ISP filtering (via monkeytypist)

turnofthecentury:liquidnight:

Gustave Doré - Illustration from Little Red Riding Hood by Charles Perrault, 1870

[via All Things Amazing]

Dec 15

"Dov Charney is not only a fascist, he's the worst kind of fascist. An eyebrow fascist!" -

“Pervy” American Apparel CEO Dov Charney sent out an e-mail to all employees informing them of how they must groom their eyebrows, suggesting Brooke Shields’s brows as a template to follow, a female AA employee and tipster tells Jezebel…

Morning, Questions

Your fingertip ponders my shoulder and my own name tickles my ear when you breathe, asking me again why I’m here

with you.

Badlands (via)

“I’ve been looking for a girl like you - not you, but a girl like you.” — Groucho Marx (via simko)

Miranda - The Tempest by John William Waterhouse (1916) (via suicideblonde)

Dec 14

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” — Final line of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

CAL/Meanjin essay: Is the Carnival Over? -

In more concrete terms, the modern history of Australian festivals begins with the Perth and Adelaide festivals, which were established in the 1950s on the template of the Edinburgh Festival. Edinburgh was a postwar creation, established by Rudolf Bing and Henry Harvey Wood with the goal of providing ‘a platform for the flowering of the human spirit’—a remarkably optimistic undertaking in a country still recovering from a scarifying war. At a time when ration cards were still a feature of everyday life, the ‘flowering of the human spirit’ may not have represented an achievable goal in Scotland, but it was certainly a desirable one.

As former Adelaide Festival director Anthony Steel points out, all the Australian capital city arts festivals are based on the Edinburgh pattern. ‘Certainly Adelaide was a direct copy of Edinburgh, and most of the festivals that have started in capital cities in Australia since have been direct copies of Adelaide. The politicians want to keep up with the Joneses and “if Adelaide has one, then we should certainly have one” has been the attitude.’

While Perth is older, it was Adelaide that established itself as the premier event in the antipodes for serious arts lovers. Beginning in 1960, the Adelaide Festival was for some decades the only event where local audiences could see the kind of famous, high-brow artists and companies that are these days slightly jarringly referred to as ‘world class’.

…

A glance at Steel’s 1974 program gives us a glimpse of how refreshing and truly risky those earlier Adelaide Festivals must have seemed. Featuring recitals by Andre Tchaikowski (whose skull is still acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company) and concerts by the Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra, it culminated in a reading of Ogden Nash’s poetry by Premier Don Dunstan, set to Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals and held at the Adelaide Zoo. History records that the performance sold out.

Ben Eltham on the history, trends, policies and passions of Australia’s cultural festivals.

(via sabino)

“First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age — say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire.” — Lorrie Moore, “How To Become A Writer” (via bibliotheque) (via jeanhannah)