Artists don’t talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it’s stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

PADDY CHAYEFSKY

Shadows of things that Will be, or shadows of things that May be?

(via The Smart Set: Marley and Me - December 8, 2009)

Then Scrooge has some bad gravy, a nightmare about three ghosts, and he spends Christmas Day in a hysterical fit sending turkeys all about the city and giving everyone raises. He’s so happy not to be dead (as the third ghost suggested he soon would be) that he has a chuckling fit and bursts into tears, perhaps having gone insane. An unbelievable asshole but a day ago, Scrooge is now the picture of human kindness.

I, for one, don’t buy it. Despite Dickens’ assurance to the contrary, I think Scrooge came to his senses a few days later and started busting balls again. Tiny Tim died. No way he could have survived.

Later in life [Anthony Burgess] asked an American conductor to explain what makes English music English. The American answered, “Too much organ voluntary in Lincoln Cathedral, too much coronation in Westminster Abbey, too much lark ascending, too much clodhopping on the fucking village green.”

(via Brian Dettmer: Book Autopsies)

Source: http://sharpsuits.net/Home

(via John Craig -)

One of the great strengths of the English language is the number of ways it provides to describe people who annoy us. True, German has the word “Backpfeifengesicht” – “a face in need of a punch” – but English overwhelms us with options, thanks partly to its abundance of vulgarisms. If I call you a “wanker” I mean something subtly different from a “dickhead”. (It can be hard to pinpoint these nuances without resort to further swearing, as demonstrated by users of urbandictionary.com, as they struggle to define a “prick”: “An all around fucktard, dickweed, assrat bastard.”) These differences aren’t just a matter of intensity. We can presumably all agree that Simon Cowell is a bit of a tosser. But his success makes it hard to dismiss him as a fuckwit, while it’s not clear he’s guilty of the malice that would condemn him as a shit.

I think an awful lot of what passes for political discourse in this country these days works off that principle: There’s money in making stupid people mad.

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The search for meaning is not man’s search. The real question is how to do any good, or as Etty Hillesum put it just days after learning for a certainty that the Germans “are after our total destruction,” the problem is one of “offering what little assistance I can wherever it has pleased God to place me.”

Or, as some wag once said, “in the most carefully constructed experiment under the most carefully controlled conditions, the organism will do whatever it damn well pleases.”

Yoga is not about doing…it is about being. The most important thing to remember is that you have everything you need right in you. Enter every practice without expectation or judgement. Enter every pose as if it were the very first time. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Don’t worry if you are stronger on the right than on the left. Don’t worry if you could do a pose yesterday that you can’t do today. You are exactly where you are meant to be…right here in this moment. Take the first step, and let yoga do the rest.

Everything you need to know about the connections between humans and demi-gods is down there in the subconscious – this is my cut-price Jungian theory. And writing is the sort of process that brings out those connections. With the conscious application of craft, things just pop up. It is like solving a cryptic-crossword clue.

In a recent email newsletter, David Byrne summed it up well:

I also have a funny feeling that, like much of our world that is disappearing onto servers and clouds, eBooks will become ephemeral. I have a sneaking feeling that like lost languages and manuscripts, most digital information will be lost to random glitches and changing formats. Much of our world will become unretrievable—like the wooden houses, music, and knowledge of our ancient predecessors. I have a few physical books that are 100 years old. Will we be able to read our eBooks in 100 years? Really?

We know the past from literature only the way astronomers know distant galaxies: not directly, but by correcting for what we know to be distortions.

(via How does the human mind handle conflicts of interest? | Barking Up The Wrong Tree)

Forty years after Alvin Toffler popularised the term “information overload”, we might as well admit this: our efforts to fight it have failed. Unless you’re willing to be radical – to give up the internet completely, say – the recommended cures don’t work.

Resolve to check your email twice daily, and you’ll find many more messages waiting when you do. Go on an “information diet”, and it’s likely to end like any other diet: you’ll succumb and consume the bad stuff, with extra guilt.

So maybe we need to reframe things. The real problem isn’t too much information: it’s the feeling of being out of control. Why not focus, then, on finding ways to feel more in control – even if that’s based, in part, on self-deception?

(via Video Game Review of Slender: The Eight Pages | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review)

classic-hollywood-glam:

vampira