It’s tempting to look back no further than the origins of the word “blurb,” coined in 1906 by children’s book author and civil disobedient Gelett Burgess. But blurbs, like bullshit, existed long before the term coined to describe them (“bullshit,” in case you were wondering, appeared in 1915)
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Another of the nurses, when I asked her if he’d ever be normal again, said, “Maybe, but wouldn’t it be wonderful just to have him like this?” She was right; she humbled me. I can’t imagine anything more hopeful or hilarious than having a seat at the spectacle of my brother’s brain while it reconstructed reality.
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When the researchers put this information together, they found that Hadza who contributed more to the common good were more likely to be friends with other cooperative people. These connections formed clusters that were often near the center of the social networks.
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Maybe in the future you’ll be able to sip some juice, and eat the package.
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We should worry less about how people get their books and — say it with me now! — just be glad that people are reading.
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This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: It’s not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it’s not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data.
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A decade after his death technology has finally caught up to Lomax’s imagination. Just as he dreamed, his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online.
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Operating on money and equipment scrounged from the public and from Silicon Valley millionaires, and on the stubborn strength of their own dreams, a band of astronomers recently restarted one of the iconic quests of modern science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — SETI, for short — which had been interrupted last year by a lack of financing.
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“It was no longer necessary that the book say, ‘I am an African-American child going out into the snow today,’ ” Pope says. “They realized that you don’t put a color on a child’s experience of the snow.”
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China’s use of near-slave labor conditions creates its “competitve edge.” But its advantage is not so much due to lower wages as to speed and turnover—an on-demand supply of workers who are housed little better than assembly parts, stacked in multiple dorm beds per room with no chance to escape.
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As he did with the death penalty doctors in Texas, Egbert weighed the choices that Nazi doctors made — choices that eventually led to unspeakable evils — against the choices he made.
“It makes me suspicious of everything I do — that I might be doing something evil,” he says. “I think about it a lot.”
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“I wish we would have known. Why weren’t they screaming this from the rooftops?” said [Victoria] Brown[, author of "The Education of Jane Addams"]. Addams “was known as gentle, not confrontational, but one of her favorite words was `stupid.’ She would say, `This is just stupid. How could this have happened?’”
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“Part of what made it seem so liberating to so many girls is that it allowed those with an analytic mind and an interest in the pursuit of science to read about a subject that at the time was not perceived of as a suitable course of study for girls,” said Leonard Marcus, author of a biography of L’Engle, “Searching for Madeleine,” to be published this fall. “At the same time, at its core it’s about a girl’s love for her father, and that emotional level transcends the genre aspect of the book.”
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Writers are generous enough to gracefully, patiently work with a micropress. They are generous enough to let you publish their work for little or no money up front. These presses would not be possible without writers being great. I’ve heard horror stories about writers but have not experienced any yet. I hope to never be a horror story as a publisher.
Check out Tiny Hardcore Press–great stuff!
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The take-home from the trials shouldn’t be that poisonous plants can make you hallucinate, but that a perfectly capable, religious, and law-abiding community that laid the roots for American justice legally and conscientiously executed 20 of its own innocent citizens; that over 150 people in Salem that year who were charged as having consorted with the Devil. In Witten’s theory, the girls went crazy. In Norton’s, the town went crazy.
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History is in a hurry. It moves like a woman
Corralling her children onto a crowded bus.
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Dick Tufeld, a longtime radio and TV announcer who intoned “Danger, Will Robinson!” as the voice of the robot in the 1960s science-fiction TV series “Lost in Space,” has died. He was 85.
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Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.
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Some time ago, a writer friend told me that he was working on a novel, and that once the novel was finished, he would begin to publicize it. He would update his website, go on Facebook. Maybe even tweet. And I thought, how do I tell him that he’s leaving it way too late? That you should start doing publicity at least a year before you have anything coming out? If you start doing it when you have a novel coming out, no one will know who you are.
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But the really interesting thing is how science fiction does its best tricks: through creating the narrative vocabularies by which futures can be debated, discussed, adopted, or discarded.
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Writers and readers coexist and invent and reinvent each other in some symbiotic way, but that doesn’t make me mistake James Joyce for a friend. He died before I was born. I would never have met him even if he hadn’t. If I had, I wouldn’t have liked him and he wouldn’t have been interested in me. Not a friend.
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I can no longer reason and cannot be trusted to make a decision. My brain is distracted by second-hand sensations. When the slightest complexity arises in my life, I crave the screen world – the simple goal of building a house in Minecraft or the easily dis-entangled one-hour conundrums that beset the Voyager crew.
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It is easy to feel overwhelmed, confused, weary, and crushingly sad. In this context, the idea of the Apocalypse can be comforting. At least then, the human story, swinging unstably as it does between heights of imagination and bottomless depths of depravity, doesn’t end, as T. S. Eliot’s bleak The Hollow Men would have it, with a whimper.
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The radicals who lent this movement so much of its character have offered American political life a gift, should we choose to accept it. They’ve reminded us that we don’t have to rely on Republicans or Democrats, or Clintons, Bushes or Sarah Palin, to do our politics for us.
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His iconic image, “A Morning’s Work,” shows a pile of amputated legs he himself had sawed off earlier that day.
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I’d brought along a photo album, and passing it around helped mitigate the awkwardness. Onwas was interested in a picture of my cat. “How does it taste?” he asked.
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“He was a serious and well-respected photographer who worked in a tradition that was denigrated as tabloid photography. He didn’t know the world of museums and galleries, but he did know one thing very well: the streets of New York. He took that seriously.”
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These make fascinating companion pieces:
Swamp’s Last Day on Earth:
Tomorrow morning, Swamp will leave town and head for L.A.; after that, “Swamp” will cease to exist. He does not know where he’ll go or who he will be. All he knows is that he will dedicate himself to the goal –revolution — maybe by hooking up with some animal-rights activists and anarchists from the Southwest and taking it from there.
Judith Clark’s Radical Transformation:
Among those supporting Clark’s release was Elaine Lord, who retired as Bedford Hills superintendent after 22 years at the prison. “I watched her change into one of the most perceptive, thoughtful, helpful and profound human beings that I have ever known, either inside or outside of a prison,” Lord wrote the governor.
I’m hugely honored that my publishers have nominated two of my works for annual awards this year.
Dad’s Eye View, my book about great kids’ activities in the Twin Cities from Minnesota Historical Society Press, has been nominated for the Minnesota Book Awards. Sponsored by the The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library, the Minnesota Book Awards showcases books by Minnesota authors and Minnesota presses; in the past, the finalists have included writers like Anton Treuer, Kevin Kling, Kate DiCamillo, Eleanor Arnason, and Bill Holm–a pretty great group. This year’s finalists will be announced January 29th.
And in a surprising bit of news, my story Open Every Womb has been sent to the Best American Short Stories editors for the 2011 anthology. The competition for inclusion is pretty stiff–there are a lot of great stories published every year, by people like Alice Munro and Ann Beattie. But to even be considered is a great honor–a huge thanks to the folks at Atticus Review!
