THE LITERARY PIANO:Scrapbook Edition

"2009 was a good year for Tumblr. Synecdochally speaking, that means it was also a good year for..."

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:30:24 +1000

“

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.)

”

- Rex Sorgatz, Best New Blogs of 2009 — The Bygone Bureau

"… [O]ur thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural tangle of near infinite..."

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:18:00 +1000

“… [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.”

Moleskine 2010 Pocket Weekly Notebook - Red Hard Cover

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:36:55 +1000

Moleskine 2010 Pocket Weekly Notebook - Red Hard Cover

The Top 10 'Everything' of 2009 - TIME

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:29:54 +1000

The Top 10 'Everything' of 2009 - TIME

"Exposing politically controversial topics for public debate is vital for democracy. Homosexuality..."

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:26:21 +1000

“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...

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:24:28 +1000

turnofthecentury:liquidnight:

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

[via All Things Amazing]

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

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:06:49 +1000

"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

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:31:48 +1000

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)

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:53:46 +1000

Badlands (via)

"I’ve been looking for a girl like you - not you, but a girl like you."

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:23:25 +1000

“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...

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:00:00 +1000

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

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:22:44 +1000

“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?

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:40:49 +1000

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)

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:15:32 +1000

(via sabino)

"First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star missionary. A movie..."

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 09:14:18 +1000

“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)

"This country has been a sea of voices for so long, a melting pot. Think of that image; it’s..."

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:21:57 +1000

“This country has been a sea of voices for so long, a melting pot. Think of that image; it’s hot, bubbling over. That’s where things happen; that’s the primordial soul for comedy.”

- Conan O’Brien, Make ‘Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America

Death poems

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:34:36 +1000

buyhercandy: riazm:

A death poem (辞世の句 jisei no ku) is a poem written near the time of one’s own death. It is a tradition for literate people to write one in a number of different cultures, especially in Japan.

According to Wikipedia. And here are some death poems.

This one is from a poet named Hankai, taken from here.

The year is ending:
I have not left my heart
behind.

And here’s one from Ōta Dōkan, founder of Edo Castle:

Had I not known
that I was dead
already
I would have mourned
the loss of my life.

And finally, this is considered the poet Bashō’s death poem:

falling sick on a journey
my dream goes wandering
over a field of dried grass

Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz in The Brothers Bloom (2009)

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:21:37 +1000

Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz in The Brothers Bloom (2009)

"For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand..."

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:11:27 +1000

“For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents who you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else —); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, — and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves — only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

- Ranier Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (via ontheborderland) (via whilebird)

"Deep reading — the kind that you engage in when you get lost in the syntax and imagery and the long,..."

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:55:27 +1000

“

Deep reading — the kind that you engage in when you get lost in the syntax and imagery and the long, convoluted sentences of a really meaty book — is a special sort of exercise that creates a new part of the brain that did not exist at birth.

“It’s semi-miraculous, really,” said Dr. Wolf, the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University. “We don’t have genes for reading. It’s an activity we invented, and by doing it, we show that our brain has the capacity to go beyond itself, to take all these circuits that were created for oral language or vision, and do something entirely different with them — deduction, critical analysis, imagination, contemplation.”

”

- Wife/Mother/Worker/Spy - The Endless First Chapter - NYTimes.com (via karigee) (via whilebird)