The February 20 issue of the Guardian contained something remarkable, 28 authors offering advice on how to write fiction (see here and here). It’s a hugely varied recipe book, ranging from terse to wordy, from flippant to earnest, but it’s definitely worth scanning. I noted the following snippets that chimed with me:
Diana Athill: ‘Read it [...]
I’m encouraged by a Grist post: ‘Does Facebook deserve the hell it’s catching from Greenpeace?’ Apparently Facebook’s planned humongous data centre in Ohio will be powered by local utility Pacific Power, which is mostly coal-based. Greenpeace is recommending (and I agree) that the social networking giant should use its size and clout to pressure Pacific [...]
As a recent dropout from the corporate sector, the feral attacks on climate science and the scientists themselves are quite transparent to me. What puzzled me was why this savaging seems to actually work – doubts about climate science do seem have escalated. Why?
Bill McKibben, in ‘The attack on climate science is the O.J. moment [...]
Keeping in touch with what is actually happening with energy – the shifts and battles – is tough. Both the general media and the business press have their distorting prisms, which mostly focus on the sensational rather than the evaluative. So it was refreshing to read this 2009 roundup, published in yesterday’s Huffington Post, from Bruce Nilles, [...]
For a stay-at-home reader like me, seeing two films each week, one hundred annually, represents a major challenge, one I’m only gradually tackling. Even a hundred movies a year is barely sufficient for one to aspire to be a film fan. Over 2009, I managed to view 54 current or near-current movies, so I guess [...]
Melbourne author Jeff Sparrow’s latest book takes him a long way from his previous ‘radical’ histories. After becoming fascinated by the mummified head of a Turkish solder in World War I, discovered in a country town recently, Sparrow embarks on a quest to find out how hard it is for humans to kill. Being fascinated, [...]
I’m still savouring Hilary Spurling’s Matisse biography (I’m a third of the way through her second volume Matisse the Master). One aspect of Matisse that captivates and astounds me is how he is driven by some volcanic impetus, again and again, to innovate, at huge cost to his psyche and his family. In June 1914, [...]
Yesterday I revisited a portion of Damon Young’s Distraction, a fifteen-page section called ‘Looking More Closely’ within a chapter on the philosophy of art. This book section examines why ‘many of our encounters with art are duds,’ straddling Marcel Proust’s early flop experience at the Balbec Cathedral, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s equation of art genre with [...]
Even though Radovan Karodzic, former Bosnian Serb leader now in jail, won’t attend the start of his Hague war crimes (genocide) trial, that trial will commence tomorrow (see the CNN article). I’ll try and follow this, as it seems to me yet another signal from the international community. Signal: no matter how safe you think [...]
Well worth checking out is Stephen M. Walt’s latest post (Does Obama watch “Frontline?”) on the futile games being played so that Obama can avoid being tarred and feathered for ‘losing’ Afghanistan. The Frontline documentary (Obama’s War, not out here yet) evidently damns the continuing effort, with even proponents clearly ‘in damage-limitation’ mode (Walt’s words). [...]