books
Could have given that address too. And past the sailors’ home. He turned from the morning noises of the quayside and walked through Lime street.
Modern men in the throes of a midlife crisis have been known to overhaul their careers, their relationships—even their bodies. Few, though, intentionally induce hallucinations in order to commune with demons and deities and end up creating a text transforming—at least indirectly—the entire field of psychology.
Carl Gustav Jung was 37 when by most accounts he lost his soul. As psychological historian Sonu Shamdasani explained, “Jung had reached a point in 1912 when he’d achieved all of his youthful ambitions but felt that he’d lost meaning in his life, an existential crisis in which he simply neglected the areas of ultimate spiritual concern that were his main motivations in his youth.”
In fact, the dilemma was so profound it eventually caused the father of analytical psychology to undergo a series of waking fantasies. Traveling from Zurich to Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in October 1913, Jung was roused by a troubling vision of “European-wide destruction.” In place of the normally serene fields and trees, one of the era’s pre-eminent thinkers saw the landscape submerged by a river of blood carrying forth not only detritus but also dead bodies. When that vision resurfaced a few weeks later—on the same journey—added to the mix was a voice telling him to “look clearly; all this would become real.” World War I broke out the following summer.
These experiences prompted Jung to question his own sanity. But they also motivated him to embark on what turned out to be a 16-year self-seeking journey documented in a red leather journal titled “Liber Novus” (Latin for “New Book”). It features ethereal, often unsavory passages and shocking yet vibrant images expressing what Jung himself termed a “confrontation with the unconscious.”
Mr. Shamdasani, who got hold of a copy in 1996, took five years to understand it and three years to convince the Jung family to allow the journal’s publication. (…)
The result was W.W. Norton’s “The Red Book: Liber Novus.”
‘Everything is how you look at it.’ –Warhol
What does it mean to be white?
A controversial new book, The History of White People, claims that Barack Obama is, to all intents and purposes, white. Not because he had a white mother but because of his educational background, his income, his power, his status. The book’s author, the eminent black American historian Nell Irvin Painter, has written a fascinating, sprawling history of the concept of race, looking specifically at the idea of a white race and at why and how whites have dominated other, darker-skinned races throughout recent centuries. The conclusion of Painter’s book – which has taken more than a decade to research and write – is explosive. Race, she argues, is a fluid social construct, entirely unsupported by scientific fact. Like beauty, it is merely skin-deep.
‘Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.’ –Georges Simenon
In his 1959 memoir “A House on the Heights,” Truman Capote wrote, “I live in Brooklyn. By choice. Those ignorant of its allures are entitled to wonder why.” The main reason, it turns out, was his love of Brooklyn Heights, which he described as standing “atop a cliff that secures a sea-gull’s view of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges.” Capote lived in the garden apartment of a mansion on Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights from 1955 to 1965.
‘The proper study of mankind is books.’ –Aldous Huxley
Marginalia are notes, scribbles, and comments made by readers in the margin of a book, as well as marginal decoration, drolleries, and drawings in medieval illuminated manuscripts, although many of these were planned parts of the book. True marginalia is not to be confused with reader’s signs, marks (e.g. stars, crosses, fists) or doodles in books. The formal way of adding descriptive notes to a document is called annotation. The scholia on classical manuscripts are the earliest known form of marginalia.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Auto-Urine Therapy | Enlarge | Read more: Urine therapy }
Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence
The phenomenon of multiple personality presents a puzzle for our understanding and thinking about what it is to be a person, for in such cases we are left in doubt about where one person ends and another perhaps begins. In cases of multiple personality, our sense of personal identity and the continuity of the self seem to be shattered. The problem of personal identity consists in identifying those circumstances that comprise necessary and sufficient conditions for the continuity of the same self over time, such as spatio‑temporal continuity, continuity of long‑term memory traces, etc. As Apter (1991) puts it, the special problem attached to personal identity and multiple personality is the “Question of Who… Is a multiple personality the same person over time?”
{ Review of Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality by Logi Gunnarsson, 2009 | Wikipedia | Continue reading }
photo { Abby Wilcox }
Nicky’s methods of betting weren’t scientific, but they worked. When he won, he collected. When he lost, he told the bookies to go fuck themselves.
It was followed in late 1936 by Life, the picture magazine, which was an astonishing newsstand success: “By the end of 1937 . . . circulation had reached 1.5 million — more than triple the first-year circulation of any magazine in American (and likely world) history.” But then, as throughout much of its existence, Life was troubled by high production costs and insufficient advertising revenues.
Luce’s empire grew to include “The March of Time,” first a radio broadcast and then a newsreel for theatrical distribution, and finally, in 1954, the slow-growing but eventually phenomenally successful Sports Illustrated.
The empire was called Time, Incorporated, a name that no longer exists. In 1990 — 23 years after Luce’s death — it merged with Warner Brothers and has since been known as Time Warner, a partnership that has seen its rough times but is now “one of the three largest media companies in the United States.” It is “a powerful and successful company, although the magazine division that had launched the company [is] weakening fast in the digital world of the twenty-first century.” Time, which was required reading in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, even for those who detested it, seems now to be waiting-room reading; Fortune retains relatively strong circulation but seems primarily known for its “Fortune 500″ rankings; and Sports Illustrated, though still widely read, is no longer noteworthy, as it once was, for superb journalism that at times reached the lower rungs of literature.
If you can dream, and not make dreams your master
…and it may be that the immobility, the inertia, the absence of all active passion or incident or peril which such a retired existence imposed upon man led him to create, in the midst of the world of nature, another and an impossible world, in which he found comfort and relief for his idle intellect, explanations of the more ordinary sequences of events, and extraneous solutions of extraordinary phenomena. (…)
…for him the legend confounded itself with life, and, unconsciously, he found himself regretting that the legend differed from life, and that life differed from the legend.
Contract killa, murder for the scrilla
{ Encyclopedia Britanica broome | Thanks AJJ!}
Anyway, her name is CeCe, she said she go to BMCC
What to do if cracks appear in a marriage—from seeking counseling to calling it quits. (…)
Many couples work out what to do on their own.
But what should clashing couples do? Marriage counseling became a popular answer to that question after marital referees first appeared in the U.S. in the 1930s. (…) Counseling for couples gradually grew to be an entrenched social phenomenon. (…)
It is all going reasonably well— until Chris decides that he wants to leave. She never quite figures out what went wrong, numbering each possibility as it occurs to her. (There are more then 300 by book’s end.) Even a decent marriage, Ms. Morrison learns, can turn heartbreaking.
Gun pop, heart stop, homie this is heavy
Let’s define the term “value” as “a fair equivalent in money for something sold.”
Let’s define “devalue” as “to lessen the worth off something sold.”
So does a $1.99 price point for ebooks constitute their value? Or does that price devalue the work?
In a capitalist economy, under the rules of supply and demand, things cost money to produce, and their price is dictated by how many things are produced and how many people want to buy them.
An item usually costs a determined amount to create (which tends to go down as more items are produced), and then wholesalers and retailers sell this item for what the market will bear, trying to make a profit.
A few years ago, when the Nintendo Wii was a hot item and hard to find, people who were able to get Wiis sold them on eBay for more than double the $199 list price. The Wii’s value was higher, because demand was higher.
Now you can buy used Wii’s for less than $100. There is a big enough supply for everyone, so the price comes down.
So how do ebooks fit into this?
For the moment, let’s ignore the hard work the author has put into writing the book.
To bring an ebook to market, a book needs to be edited, proofread, put into a proper layout and format, and given cover art and a product description.
These costs can fluctuate. But they are one-time costs.
Once an ebook is created, it can be reproduced indefinitely for free. There are no printing costs or shipping costs. Distributing ebooks to readers costs about 5 cents per download.
The trouble with precision
A little vagueness helps us to live with differences of opinion and debate each other without too much savagery.
‘If I seem unduly clear to you,” former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once remarked, “you must have misunderstood what I said.”
As Kees van Deemter tells it in “Not Exactly,” Mr. Greenspan’s famous imprecision is simply the most advanced form of a syndrome that besets all of us. Our language is befogged with vagueness, by which Mr. van Deemter means that almost all words have “fuzzy” boundaries. Think of “short” and “tall.” We cannot say definitively where one ends and the other begins. Even words that seem models of precision are vague: Mr. van Deemter notes that “meter” is an inexact measurement term—the platinum bar regarded as the definitive meter turns out to have been mismeasured by about 0.00005 millimeters.
Vagueness, then, may be unavoidable. But is it a problem? Not according to Mr. van Deemter.
photo { Nicholas Lorden }
‘The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.’ –Albert Einstein
Magic Show, a newly published catalogue to accompany a travelling exhibition of the same name, explores the relationship between art and magic. (…)
Many of the 24 contemporary artists featured (in both the show and the book) borrow directly from iconic magic tricks. Sinta Werner’s “Disjunction” plays on the idea of a disappearing act, but in this case it is the viewer who vanishes; the site-specific installation creates the effect of approaching a mirror without a reflection. Susan Hiller’s “Homage to Yves Klein” is a more upbeat take on his rather dark photo-montage, “Leap into the Void” (1960). The result is a charming play on the trick of levitation.
In other works, artists challenge the viewer’s ability to suspend disbelief—a crucial requirement of magic-show audiences.
related { In the Zig-Zag illusion, a magician divides his or her assistant into thirds }
‘Surrealism isn’t surreal anymore. It doesn’t shock or jolt. It isn’t confusing or upsetting.’ –Morgan Meis
In the emerging world of e-books, many consumers assume it is only logical that publishers are saving vast amounts by not having to print or distribute paper books, leaving room to pass along those savings to their customers.
Publishers largely agree, which is why in negotiations with Apple, five of the six largest publishers of trade books have said they would price most digital editions of new fiction and nonfiction books from $12.99 to $14.99 on the forthcoming iPad tablet — significantly lower than the average $26 price for a hardcover book.
But publishers also say consumers exaggerate the savings and have developed unrealistic expectations about how low the prices of e-books can go. Yes, they say, printing costs may vanish, but a raft of expenses that apply to all books, like overhead, marketing and royalties, are still in effect.
quote { Morgan Meis, Photography’s surprising impact on the Surrealists }
In my Benzo, 20 inch Lorenzos, smoking on indo
The principle of Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest hypothesis is usually the correct one — or as the character Gil Grissom in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” succinctly puts it, if you hear hoofbeats, “think horses, not zebras.”
In his lively new book, “Voodoo Histories,” the journalist David Aaronovitch uses Occam’s razor to eviscerate the many conspiracy theories that have percolated through politics and popular culture over the last century, from those that assert that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were actually a United States government plot to those that claim that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered at the direction of the royal family or British intelligence.
In most cases, Mr. Aaronovitch notes, conspiracy theorists would rather tie themselves into complicated knots and postulate all sorts of improbable secret connections than accept a simple, more obvious explanation. (…)
Does the Internet, with its increased democratization of information, help spread conspiracy theories or help expose them? Mr. Aaronovitch says that it was obvious that “sites endorsing 9/11 conspiracy theories and those subscribing to them in passing far outnumbered sites devoted to debunking or refuting such theories.”
He writes that the Internet has enabled the “release of a mass of undifferentiated information, some of it authoritative, some speculative, some absurd,” and that “cyberspace communities of semi-anonymous and occasionally self-invented individuals have grown up, some of them permitting contact between people who in previous times might have thought each other’s interests impossibly exotic and even mad.”
On an ever spinning wheel
Zachary Mason’s critically praised first novel comes with a largely self-explanatory title: “The Lost Books of the Odyssey” purports to be a compilation of 44 alternate versions of Homer’s epic. What that title cannot possibly convey, though, is the unusual journey of Mr. Mason’s manuscript on its way to publication by Farrar, Straus & Giroux last week.
Mr. Mason, 35, a computer scientist specializing in search recommendation systems and keywords, once worked at Amazon.com. He avoided writing workshops and M.F.A. programs as a matter of principle, and produced “The Lost Books” at night, during lunch breaks and on weekends and vacations. (…)
In person, Mr. Mason is extremely soft-spoken and tends to talk in a flat, unemotional tone, though he does note with regret that he “turned down Google two weeks before their I.P.O.” (He’s now employed at a Silicon Valley start-up.) He approaches literature almost as if it were a branch of science, governed by laws that are quantifiable and predictable, as when he talks of devising an algorithm, later discarded, to determine an optimum chapter order for his novel or when he compares writing to the annealing of metals.
And when he left in the hot noon sun, and walked to his car
{ J. D. Salinger, literary recluse, dies at 91 | Plus: Bunch of phonies mourn J.D. Salinger | via Joe }
