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Monthly Archives: June 2011

Two things you can learn about Stanley Kubrick by talking to Jan Harlan.

L.M. Kit Carson: As Harlan puts it: “Stanley got truly satisfied that this piece by Strauss was all he needed. To make the question remain…about whether there might be some deliberation effecting us somewhere in the Universe.”

· A part-stanza: from ‘Lives of the Obscure’.

1919. Then nothing for twenty years
Until her first profession of religious vows
When she changed her name to Sister Joan Frances
Of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

· Going to hell for writing poetry for fish.

“Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” possibly Cowper’s best-known poem, delivers tremendous force, rooted, for me, in the self-contradiction of its energetic hopelessness: If the narrator’s predicament is so absolute and unrelievable, how can he describe it with such explosive intellectual strength?

· Two vicars, three daughters, three miles up the Thames to Wonderland.

” When they returned, Alice asked Dodgson to write out the adventures for her. He said he would try, and sat up nearly the whole night putting down the tale on paper, and adding a number of pen-and-ink illustrations; afterwards, the little volume, entitled Alice’s Adventures Underground, was often seen on the drawing-room table at the Deanery.

· Event: ‘Abstraction’ at The Room in London N17, from 3 July 2011.

‘ABSTRACTION’, a group exhibit at The Room, 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, N17, opens 3 July and continues through 2 November 2011.

Historicism and the great beast.

Anthony O’Hear: We should consider whether the extreme unpredictability of the crowds we are seeing to-day in quite a number of places (including even London, as it happens) is not just an extreme illustration of what is actually always the case. Beneath its apparently smooth surface and underpinning the leaders who appear to shape it, human history is built on shifting sands, on countless inherently unstable actions and decisions of millions of individual people.

· Metafriending Aristotle on Facebook.

Aristotle engages in a philosophic version of “unfriending”: gently, he sets out to correct his readers—a correction necessary in every era, but especially ours.

· Event: WILCO’s Solid Sound in the Berkshires, 24-26 June 2011.

At the heart of Solid Sound is a sense of collaboration, where a band can join forces with a museum, a comedian can perform against a backdrop of boundary-pushing works of art, and festival attendees of all ages can be entertained and inspired by three days of exciting, eclectic artistic expression.

Elliott Coleman: the American poet from Augustland.

This portfolio of work by and about Elliott Coleman contains two of Coleman’s poems, an appreciative essay by poet and essayist Myra Sklarew, and comments from others who studied in the Writing Seminars before the days of the MFA.

· If it weren’t for the euro, the euro-zone would be in good shape.

Those in responsible positions are getting bogged down in crisis management, as they seek to placate the public and sugarcoat the problems. They say that there is only a government debt crisis in a few euro countries but no euro crisis, citing as evidence the fact that the value of the European common currency has remained relatively stable against other currencies like the dollar.

· Need an agent who can negotiate a sweet deal with a vanity publisher?

Big publishing is simply not set up to publish anything but books. Mid-length materials, worksheets, and other writing that might be downloaded from Amazon or directly from the author’s site are not in their repertoire. Neither do they help the author develop unpublished chapters into articles for placement in magazines.

· The perfect Father’s Day gift? A flowchart! With Phish!

Do dads really have an influence on the musical tastes of their offspring? This amusing flowchart, created for Father’s Day in honor of dads who rock, predicts the kind of music you prefer by the tunes your father listened to when you were growing up.

· A memo from John Malkovich to the staff of the Guardian.

John Malkovich on the minds of Guardian journalists.

· Very not-close encounters with 18 million books. Plus: What does the Lit Lab have to do with lit?

You pretty much have two choices. You can read a small number of books very carefully. Or you can read lots of books “very, very not-carefully”.

· To an old dog, every day’s a brand new trick.

I saw how the dog does it; how, without the human’s painful ability to project ahead and fear the inevitable, the dog simply wakes to each day as a new step in the journey.