“It turns out that ‘low-intensity’ negative moods are linked to better writing than happy moods. As shown in the research of University of New South Wales Psychology Professor Joe Forgas, when we’re not walking on clouds or doing a happy dance, we tend to be more careful and mindful of details. “Forgas has worked extensively [...]
Archive for November, 2009
Good News, Bad Muse: Do Bad Moods Make for Better Writing?
Posted in Human Behavior, Writers & Writing on November 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Assaying the Essay: Zadie Smith Asks “Why Do Novelists Write Essays?”
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Writers & Writing on November 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don’t know where to put them. It’s a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and Michael Chabon, among others, have published essays, and so this month will I. [...]
Bill Moyers On A Tale of Two Quagmires: Vietnam & Afghanistan
Posted in American History, Current Events, Obama, Politics, War & Peace on November 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Bill Moyers, a former advisor to President Lyndon Johnson, who in April, 2010, will retire from his weekly televison program, “Bill Moyers Journal,” on the parallels between Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam War and the decision facing Barack Obama in Afghanistan: “Now in a different world, at a different time, and with [...]
Flannery O’Connor’s “The Complete Stories” Voted Best National Book Award Winner
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Writers & Writing on November 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“In an online poll conducted by the National Book Foundation, [Flannery O'Connor's] collection ‘The Complete Stories’ was named the best work to have won the National Book Award for fiction in the contest’s 60-year history. The competition was steep: other finalists in the poll were ‘The Stories of John Cheever,’ William Faulkner’s ‘Collected Stories,’ ‘The [...]
R.I.P. – Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009)
Posted in Art & Artists, Museums & Exhibitions, New York City, Obituaries on November 19, 2009 | 1 Comment »
“Jeanne-Claude, who collaborated with her husband, Christo, on dozens of environmental arts projects, notably the wrapping of the Pont Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin, and the installation of 7,503 vinyl gates with saffron-colored nylon panels in Central Park, died Thursday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 74. “The cause was complications [...]
Literary Review’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” Shortlist Announced: Roth, Oz, Theroux Face Stiff Competition
Posted in Book Reviews, Books, Literature, Sex & Gender, Writers & Writing on November 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The story of the seduction of a lesbian by an ageing stage actor, which includes an eye-watering scene with a green dildo, has won Philip Roth the dubious honour of a place on the shortlist for the Literary Review’s bad sex in fiction award. “Roth can comfort himself with the fact that a roll call of literary [...]
Velvet Fog: Commemorating Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution (and the Lie that Launched It)
Posted in Europe, European History, Foreign Travel, International Affairs, Politics on November 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“It was a revolution that began with a lie. “Vaclav Havel, the dissident leader who spearheaded the Velvet Revolution that overthrew communism in Czechoslovakia and kicked off twenty years ago on November 17, 1989, once declared that ‘truth and love must triumph over lies and hatred.’ Yet the revolution — its name a reference to [...]
Judging A Book By Its Odor: A “Sniff Test” for Preserving Old Books
Posted in Antiques & Folk Art, Books, Europe, Science & Technology on November 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Old books smell like grass, with a tang of acidity and a hint of vanilla, according to scientists who have discovered a way to tell the condition of an [sic] works by their odour. “The system can measure the degradation of old books and historical documents on the basis of their aroma. “Now the scientists [...]
Recipes for Desire: Adam Gopnik on Our Hunger for Cookbooks
Posted in Books, Food & Wine on November 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. When I was in my early teens, the sick yearning for sweets that adolescents suffer [...]
Blue Notes: Is Jazz Dying? (And if it is, What’s Killing It?)
Posted in Blues & Jazz, Performing Arts, Popular Culture, Popular Music on November 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Long before we debated what real punk-rock was, what true hip-hop was, or what made indie-rock authentic, jazz heads grappled with what is and isn’t jazz music. Now, the debate is whether jazz is dying off or not. “Not long ago Jae Sinnett, a jazz drummer, composer, educator and radio personality, told NPR that jazz is dying because people [...]
Sweet Home Hazelhurst, Mississippi: Robert Johnson’s Birthplace Verified
Posted in Blues & Jazz, Museums & Exhibitions, Popular Culture, Popular Music, Rock 'n' Roll, U.S. Travel on November 14, 2009 | 1 Comment »
“The mystery surrounding bluesman Robert Johnson‘s life and death feeds the lingering fascination with his work. “There’s the myth he sold his soul to the devil to create his haunting guitar intonations. There’s the dispute over where he died after his alleged poisoning by a jealous man in 1938. Three different markers claim to be [...]
Supreme Court Sluggers: “Green Bag” Law Review Issuing Trading Cards of Supreme Court Justices
Posted in American History, Baseball, Collectors & Collecting, Politics, Sports, Supreme Court on November 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I’m not sure why I feel compelled to post this, but: “If you’re a fan of the U.S. Supreme Court bobbleheads that can be found on the desks of powerhouse lawyers and law professors nationwide, then you’ll like the next brainchild of the bobbleheads’ creator: Supreme Court baseball cards. “The first one, commemorating Chief Justice [...]
Forty-Four Years in the Making: The World’s First Historical Thesaurus
Posted in Books, Language on November 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Ever wonder how people really talked in the 1800s, or 1500s, or earlier? “You can stop building the time machine. Such questions are now easier to answer than ever before, with the publication—after 44 years of work—of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. At almost 4,000 pages and about 800,000 meanings, this mind-boggling reference work [...]
A Jew By Any Other Name? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question
Posted in Education, Europe, Jewish Life on November 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The questions before the judges in Courtroom No. 1 of Britain’s Supreme Court were as ancient and as complex as Judaism itself. “Who is a Jew? And who gets to decide? “On the surface, the court was considering a straightforward challenge to the admissions policy of a Jewish high school in London. But the case, in [...]
R.I.P. – Art D’Lugoff (1924-2009)
Posted in Blues & Jazz, Business, Counter Culture, New York City, Performing Arts, Plays & Playwrights, Poets & Poetry, Popular Culture, Popular Music, Rock 'n' Roll, Theater, Writers & Writing on November 6, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Art D’Lugoff, who was widely regarded as the dean of New York nightclub impresarios and whose storied spot, the Village Gate, was for more than 30 years home to performers as celebrated, and diverse, as Duke Ellington, Allen Ginsberg and John Belushi, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 85 and lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. [...]
R.I.P. – Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)
Posted in Anthropology, Books, Human Behavior, Obituaries, Writers & Writing on November 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called ‘primitive man’ and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100. . . . “A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of ‘structuralism,’ a school of thought in which universal ‘structures’ were [...]
Das Book Cover Art: BLICKFANG & The Eye-Catching Cover Art of Weimar Germany
Posted in Books, Design, Europe on November 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Two examples from the extraordinary selection of twenty-five Weimer-era book covers and posters from the sadly out-of-print book Blickfang: Bucheinbände und Schutzumschläge Berliner Verlage 1919 – 1933 (Holstein, 2005), posted by Will on his blog, A Journey Round My Skull. (via thebookslut)
