Friday, July 31, 2015

The Library of Babel

Borges in the modern world (From The Paris Review)

Classic commentary …

… A Commonplace Blog: Bad Writing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Help for the science-challenged …

… The Unsettling, Anti-Science Certitude on Global Warming - WSJ.

If you haven't had any serious science training — that would be lab courses — the last place you want to get your science from is a politician — or a journalist re-writing advocacy news releases.

An evening and...

...The envelope
I took the envelope and thanked her. Like my mother, she is getting on in years. She has put on weight and colours her hair, which is not as thick as it once was. As I hugged her after taking the envelope, I sensed a certain sadness in her, which is remarkable given that she is a buoyant personality. Maybe I am imagining things, but I think the sadness was on my account.

Actual progress …

 New Email Archive Tool to Sift Literary Legacies - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Grim anniversary …

… Paul Davis On Crime: The Story Of The Only NYPD Officer Ever Sentenced To Death—100 Years Ago Today.

J. Blue and Jay Gatsby …

… The improbable career of Mr. Blue - BCM — Winter 2002.

Introspection …

 Beyond Eastrod: a book review site: Updated Announcement and Question: Religious Retreat; and Your Recommended Fiction and Nonfiction Titles with Religious Themes.

What fiction or nonfiction with religious themes would you recommend for a reader like me (i.e., someone who desperately needs to commune with and better understand God)?
Brideshead Revisited gets across better than any book I can think of the sadness at the heart of our fallen nature. At the other end of the spectrum is Myles Connolly's Mr. Blue, a paean to the almost frivolous joy of sanctity.

But maybe, lacking sensory input, machines will drift away...

The later Wittgenstein would say they lack references to communicate after all.  Augustine and St. Paul did not like sensory input ruling the person.  And then there is floating... 

"Amplifying Human Stupidity"

In their quest to understand minds by trying to build them, artificial intelligence researchers have learned a tremendous amount about what intelligence is not. Unfortunately, one of their major findings is that humans resort to fallible heuristics to address many problems because even the most powerful physically attainable computers could not solve them in a reasonable amount of time. As the authors of a 1993 textbook about problem-solving programs noted, “intelligence is possible because Nature is kind,” but “the ubiquity of exponential problems makes it seem that Nature is not overly generous.” As a consequence, both the peril and the promise of artificial intelligence have been greatly exaggerated.
But if artificial intelligence might not be tantamount to “summoning the demon” (as Elon Musk colorfully described it), AI-enhanced technologies might still be extremely dangerous due to their potential for amplifying human stupidity. The AIs of the foreseeable future need not think or create to sow mass unemployment, or enable new weapons technologies that undermine precarious strategic balances. Nor does artificial intelligence need to be smarter than humans to threaten our survival—all it needs to do is make the technologies behind familiar 20th-century existential threats faster, cheaper, and more deadly.

Sign of the times …

 Dying art by Malcolm Forbes — The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

“I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further,” Eliot wrote, adding that we may anticipate a period “of which it will be possible to say that it will have no culture.” For Vargas Llosa that time is now. His first essay, “The Civilization of the Spectacle,” explores how culture—once a vital, stimulating, edifying force—has been reduced to nothing more than light entertainment. Light literature, light art, and light cinema preponderate; reader and viewer can consume any or all with little intellectual effort. Critics are a dying breed. Fifty years ago Edmund Wilson would make or break a book in The New Yorker: “Now The Oprah Winfrey Show makes these decisions.” Comparisons between the golden past and the tawdry present continue: quality journalism has given way to lifestyle magazines; books are being eclipsed by television and the Internet; and while the Ancient Greeks saw the cultivation of the body and the spirit as mutually beneficial, nowadays we usually play sports “at the expense of, and instead of, intellectual pursuits.”

Something to think on …

A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who died on this date in 1944

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Enlightening errors …

… Laudator Temporis Acti: Humiliating Self-Exposures. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I tend to be amused by my own gaffes. One of my favorites occurred when I was arranging the first issue of the Intercollegiate Review. The fellow who managed the printing company showed me the various kinds of type available, one of which was called at the time "cold type." This was the early version of computer-generated type. It was not very impressive. It looked like something that had been mimeographed. So I took it upon myself to make an oracular pronouncement: "Not in my lifetime will computer type replace hot type." 
Ladies and gentleman, I was wrong.


Review with a difference …

… Beyond Eastrod: a book review site: Emily Dickinson - Final Harvest - a review of an anthology of Emily Dickinson's poems.

The end has been postponed …

 Apocalypse Later - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The estimated rise in mean global temperature since around 1880 is 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet the extent to which humans are responsible for this change is outweighed by the climate system’s own variability. Nations like Singapore, whose climate is 22.5 degrees hotter than the global average, suggest that urban planning can continue to outpace nature, as former global-warming alarmist James Lovelock rightly noted in his recent book, “A Rough Ride to the Future.”

Apprenticeship …

… Paul Davis On Crime: A Writer In Training: Ian Fleming The Journalist.

Something to think on …

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
— Thomas Sowell, born on this date in 1930

No lie there …

… Salman Rushdie: “We are living in the darkest time I have ever known.” | The Book Haven.

In particular, Rushdie said he was dismayed by the protests that followed a decision by the American branch of the PEN writers’ association to award a prize for courage to Charlie Hebdo after a dozen of its staff were massacred in January. More than 200 writers, including Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, Peter Carey, and Junot Díaz, signed a letter objecting to PEN rewarding the satirical magazine for publishing “material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.”
You can always count on the bien-pensants to get things wrong.

Brave new voice...

The Americans are coming...

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

FYI …

… The Colossal Hoax Of Organic Agriculture.

Vintage Q&A …

… An Interview with Jorge Luis Borges | Commonweal Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Now as to a personal god, I don't like to think of God as a person—though I'm quite fond of people, and I suppose I'm a person myself, after all. But I don't think I have any use for a god who is very much interested, let us say, in ethics, in what I am doing. I would rather like to think of God as being a kind of adventurer—even as Wells thought about him—or perhaps as something within us making for some unknown purpose. I don't think I can really believe in doomsday; I could hardly believe in rewards and punishments, in heaven or hell. As I wrote down in one of my sonnets—I seem to be always plagiarizing, imitating myself or somebody else for that matter—I think I am quite unworthy of heaven or of hell, and even of immortality. I mean I might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer—if there is any afterlife—to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world. But I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist—I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any. So that I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.

Unloading big time …

… Camille Paglia takes on Jon Stewart, Trump, Sanders: “Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but that’s simply not true!” - Salon.com.

And surprised as well …

 Finding Joy ‹ Literary Hub. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In the end it was Joy herself who cleared things up. One early December morning several years into my research, I was on my way out the door when the phone rang. On the other end was the now familiar baritone of Joy’s son Douglas Gresham. “Are you sitting down?” he asked with urgency.

Something to think on …

I am the vessel. The draft is God's. And God is the thirsty one.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, born on this date in 1905

Here it comes...

I love newspapers! Sunday morning, coffee, the sun glinting off the screen...

[T]he advertising revenue of all America's newspapers fell from $63.5 billion in 2000 to about $23 billion in 2013, and is still falling. Traditional news organizations' financial well-being depended on the willingness of advertisers to pay to reach the mass audiences they attracted. Advertisers were happy to pay because no other advertising medium was as effective. But in the digital era, which has made it relatively simple to target advertising in very specific ways, a big metropolitan or national newspaper has much less appeal. Internet companies like Google and Facebook are able to sort audiences by the most specific criteria, and thus to offer advertisers the possibility of spending their money only on ads they know will reach only people interested in what they are selling. So Google, the master of targeted advertising, can provide a retailer selling sheets and towels an audience existing exclusively of people who have gone online in the last month to shop for sheets and towels. This explains why even as newspaper revenues have plummeted, the ad revenue of Google has leapt upward year after year—from $70 million in 2001 to an astonishing $50.6 billion in 2013. That is more than two times the combined advertising revenue of every newspaper in America last year.

I know, it's a chart, and it's early...

But changing the temp record by two degrees to prove "global warming"?    

"It's only a cold sore."
"The check's in the mail."
"I'm from the government and I'm here..."

You know the rest.  sigh


In case you wondered...

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

In Praise of Boredom

Claire Messud in Harper's:

I want my children to embrace doing nothing, to embrace the slowing of an afternoon to a near standstill, when all you can hear is the laborious ticking of the clock and the dog snoring on the sofa, the rain’s patter at the window, the occasional swoosh of a slowly passing car. Remember those days? The exasperation, the excruciating itchiness of them? My kids would have to dive in, live through the agony, and come out the other side. They’d have to learn to lie on the lawn watching ants scale the grass blades; they’d have to linger, digits pruning, in the bathtub; they’d have to stop, to be still, and then to wait, and wait, and wait, allowing time to fatten around them, like a dewdrop on the tip of a leaf. And then, only then, who knows what they might imagine or invent?

Another one …

… Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion - The Daily Beast. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Because this isn’t what is actually on the Antiracists’ mind. The call for people to soberly “acknowledge” their White Privilege as a self-standing, totemic act is based on the same justification as acknowledging one’s fundamental sinfulness is as a Christian. One is born marked by original sin; to be white is to be born with the stain of unearned privilege.
The problem here is arithmetical. There is a reason a given group is called a majority. There are more of them, often many more. They may just grow to dislike being stigmatized as the enemy.

Submissions invited …

… SolLit: A Magazine of Diverse Voices — Call for Bloggers | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog.

From Germantown to farm life …

 The Progress of Poet Maxine Kumin - Books – Forward.com. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)
Julia Klein and I were colleagues at The Inquirer. This piece is characteristically excellent.

More about Gottschee …

… Memories of Gottschee: A Narrated History of Fidelity and Fragility: Bobbi Thomason: 9781449901332: Amazon.com: Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull, who also tells me that he got the original from his daughter, Emily.)

Of axes and guitars …

… What really happened the night Dylan plugged in his guitar? — The Washington Post. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Making the old new again forever …

… And Don’t Call Me Shirley: 35 Years of ‘Airplane!’ - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Memory …

… Each year in New York, Gottscheers celebrate the culture of a city that no longer exists | Public Radio International.

Listen in …

 Episode 127 – Michael Dirda: The Meandering Reflections of a Literary Sybarite | Virtual Memories.

Something to think on …

The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, born on this date in 1844

Google+ going away?

When we launched Google+, we set out to help people discover, share and connect across Google like they do in real life. While we got certain things right, we made a few choices that, in hindsight, we’ve needed to rethink. So over the next few months, we’re going to be making some important changes. Here’s more about what you can expect:

There was a Star Trek episode about this...

Robotics experts from around the world have called for a ban on autonomous weapons, warning that an artificial intelligence revolution in warfare could spell disaster for humanity.The open letter, published by the Future of Life Institute, has been signed by hundreds of AI and robotics researchers, as well as high-profile persons in the science and tech world including Stephen Hawking, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Celebrated philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett is among other endorsers who've added their names to the letter.Developments in machine intelligence and robotics are already impacting the tech landscape -- for instance, camera-equipped drones are prompting new debates on personal privacy and self-driving cars have the potential to revolutionise the automotive industry. However, many experts are concerned that progress in the field of AI could offer applications for warfare that take humans out of the loop.The open letter defines autonomous weapons as those that "select and engage targets without human intervention". It suggests that armed quadcopters that hunt and kill people are an example of the kind of AI that should be banned to prevent a "global AI arms race."

Monday, July 27, 2015

Interview …

 Paul Davis On Crime: Good Hunting: My Q & A With Former CIA Official Jack Devine.

Not what you have been led to believe …

 Darwinian Inheritance and the Evolution of Evolutionary Theory — Campaign for Open Science.
Much remains to be discovered about epigenetic inheritance. But it is already clear that evolutionary theory needs to be extended or revised. The dogmas of Neo-Darwinism have been superseded. Not surprisingly, this is the subject of a lively debate within contemporary biology.

Poetry and people …

… Quid plura? | “But Lorca’s corpse, as he had prophesied, just walked away…” (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I was startled to open the latest issue of the literary magazine The Dark Horse and find “Poetry as Enchantment,” an essay by former NEA chairman Dana Gioia that makes many of the same points Lewis makes, but solely about poetry, and with a far more subdued tone. Defending poetry as a universal human art with roots in music, charms, and incantations, Gioia recalls that not long ago, it was ubiquitous and widely enjoyed. I remember that too: my grandfather was a machinist with a grade-school education, but he could rattle off snippets of verse that I now know were the work of Longfellow, Joyce Kilmer, and the (utterly forgotten) Sam Walter Foss.

I write when I must...

FYI …

hugs, Con-Men, Pigs and More by g emil reutter is still available from Red Dashboard Press.
.h“There are few neatly wrapped endings in Thugs. The reader meets men and women who are, for the most part, living lives of quiet desperation, some seem perfectly at home in the depths while others are trying to claw their way out. A lazy reader accustomed to knowing which are the “good guys” and which are the bad will likely be frustrated. Every character is a little of each—and that is what gives these stories their momentum and emotional punch.”  – The Levittown Leader, December 13, 2014

“Reutter is so adept at feigning lack of literary style that you get swept up in a sense of pulpy authenticity.” – Matthew Kirshman

“Great collection of short stories. Reutter sheds his unique outlook through the characters he brings to life in these tales which range from grim to heartwarming. Excellent read; couldn’t put it down.” – George Wylesol

“Reading these short, muscular stories by G Emil Reutter is like walking into the lives of good people who experience bad things. When trouble comes, these people do the best they can, but often it isn’t enough. Violence and heartbreak are just around the corner, and most of the stories end with a twist—perhaps the twist of a knife. As you keep reading, though, you find the humanity, community and even love in each difficult situation.”

—Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Haywire, Tetched and Roughhouse

“These are stories that knock you back with short powerful jabs of empathy.”

–           Stephen Page – The Type and Byte Review

Life in a box

… Joseph Cornell: how the reclusive artist conquered the art world – from his mum’s basement | Art and design | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What do you want to be …

… when you grow up: Review of Sonja Livingston’s Queen of the Fall | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog.

Hmm …

… The Death of Satire — The Daily Beast. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I won't miss Stewart or Colbert — not that I ever watched them much — because the "satire" was mostly partisan spin. Stewart, I admit, could be very funny at times.

Haiku …


A sparrow hops up
To the old man on the bench,
Takes a look, hops on.

In this corner …

… Buckley vs. Vidal: When Debate Became Bloodsport - The New York Times. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I remember watching their debate in 1968. I was living in Chicago at the time.

Something to think on …

The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
— Hilaire Belloc, born on this date in 1870

Tradition vs modernity...

Sunday, July 26, 2015

The everlasting pilgrimage …

 Beyond Eastrod: the journey continues: Notes from the Damascus road: an essay on solitude, silence, and peace.

Haiku …


See how clouds and sky,
Oak trees, grass, sparrows, roses,
Intimate meaning.

Worry, worry, worry...a modern invention?

Directly after the First World War, the self-help manual market exploded, presumably because everybody in Europe was dead or traumatized. It had become a world of Dick Heldars. As “worry began to appear on the book shelves,” O’Gorman writes, “it was ironically clear that it was here to stay.” If self-help books worked to banish worry, one generation of them should have been enough. Take William S. Sadler’s Worry and Nervousness or The Science of Self-Mastery (1914), an early and little-remembered self-help volume. Sadler defines “chronic fear,”—i.e., worry—as “a purely psychic condition characterized by inability to relax the attention when it has once fastened itself on a given idea—usually a persistently entertained fear of some sort.” Strangely paradoxical stuff, and not very helpful either. Rather than offering practical strategies Sadler seemed to think that, if one could understand what ailed you, you might find relief.
Darkly mirroring this sort of talk, the arcane rituals of worry and doubt formed strange twentieth century magics—T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce all stretched worry over big frames to make ambitious art about what it is like to live inside a mind.

Writing Scholarship! From JD Salinger's college...


In the spiritof J.D. Salinger, we are looking for creative writers of outstanding originality and potential.


Dissing Keynes...

Tamny is a fierce, well-informed critic of the whole notion of Keynesian economics. He writes, in exposing the illogic of the demand side focus of Keynes, “[O]ur wants are unlimited. We always desire something more, and the exchange of our labor for the food, clothing, and shelter that we do not possess makes economic growth a simple matter of reducing the barriers to production.”
In other words, human wants are insatiable. Therefore, insufficient aggregate demand can never be a problem for economic growth, as Keynesian economics fundamentally claims. Tamny explains further, “At the most basic level, a person must first supply something before he can purchase something else. The path to economic growth, then, is stimulating the supply side of the economy. Government can stimulate the supply side by reducing tax, regulatory, trade, and monetary barriers to production."

Appreciation …

 … Paul Davis On Crime: William McIlvanney: The Father Of Tartan Noir.

Triple play

… Poetry: John Burnside, Jane Hirshfield, Rebecca Foust, Deborah Landau - SFGate.

I have written a review of Rebecca Foust's Paradise Drive. It is quite an extraordinary collection. The review languishes in the bin at The Inquirer. When it will run, I can't say. That's above my pay grade these days.

And the winner is …

… Southside Sukrungruang Selebration | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog.

Je ne sais quoi …

 Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Catalog of Beautiful Untranslatable Words from Around the World | Brain Pickings. (Hat tip, David Tothero. )

Something to think on …

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
— Carl Gustav Jung, born on this date in 1875

Inquirer reviews …

Kate Atkinson's 'God in Ruins': Engrossing tale of doomed love, interior galaxies.



Saturday, July 25, 2015

The boldest journey …

… Crimes in the Library: A race against time: Exiting the library and entering instead the Christ-haunted world of Flannery O'Connor.

By focusing on O'Connor's world, and by reading her words and all other texts that an understanding of O'Connor's world would seem to require, I hope to satisfy a death-defying need to better understand God's grace. This will be a difficult and lonely journey. And it is a race against time. But it is necessary.
God's grace, however, is not meant to be understood, is not, in fact, an object of understanding — because it is grace, a gratuity, unearned, undeserved. We all have hard time figuring why God would forgive is. We have a hard time grasping that God loves us.

Joan Didion...

...and the world of literary celebrity

Poetry as prophecy …

… A Poet’s Apocalyptic Vision — WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The G.A.N.

Do We Have a Great American Novel?

14 Scary Books!

From a new Random House books/social media site Read It Forward

Who knew?

… Paul Davis On Crime: P.J. O'Rourke: How I Killed 'National Lampoon'.

Just wonderful …

… both poem and masks: Zealotry of Guerin: Omta (Julia Guerin), Sonnet #252.

Something to think on …

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.
— Eric Hoffer, born on this date in 1902

Friday, July 24, 2015

Sharing …

… Crimes in the Library: Prepare yourself for great things at a superb crime-detective-mystery fiction website: Detnovel.com.

OWL (Omnipresent Wisconsin Librarian) flies off …

… Breaking news: Dave Lull retires.

Dave writes: "I've spent 39 years in librarianship, 14 in Wisconsin in various jobs at a public library, an academic library, and a regional system's headquarters, and the last 25 in Minnesota at the Duluth Public Library, first as a reference librarian, then as the lead cataloger, next as the librarian in charge of Technical Services, then as supervisor of Technical and ILS Services, and at the end as the supervisor of Adult and Technical Services."
One of the the great people. It is a privilege to know him. Go, Dave!

Q&A …

EXCLUSIVE JOHN COLAPINTO INTERVIEW. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Something to think on …

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
— Robert Graves, born on this date in 1885

Haiku

Overflowing air
tangible and the sun too

bread and breath of life

About books about visiting heaven...

The broad outline of Er’s tale [from Plato's The Republic] – a soul leaves the body only to return with a message – is a narrative arc that pervades all ages, literatures and cultures. A rational response to the silence of death. Though endless in style and form, it was long unified by one inalterable truth: it can never be verified or thoroughly denounced. 
Yet it is curious, at the beginning of the 21st century, to observe how this timeless arc underwent a radical transformation. 

Umm...Hi St. Peter?

...to strike the right note? I tussled with this question until I came across a masterclass from Retired US Lieutenant-General William Boykin, addressing a conference of apocalyptic Christian Zionists in April 2008. He is a man who knows how to present himself to the Almighty.
Here’s the way I want to show up at the gates of heaven. I want to come skidding in there on all fours. I want to be slipping and sliding and I want to hit the gates of heaven with a bang. And when I stand up, when I stand before Christ, I want there to be blood on my knees, and my elbows. I want to be covered with mud. And I want to be standing there with a ragged breastplate of righteousness, and a spear in my hand. And I want to say, “Look at me, Jesus, I’ve been in the battles, I’ve been fighting for you!”
a/k/a a guy's approach...

Polling the Pope

Pope Francis' Favorable Rating Drops in U.S.
I know Christ really worried about His polling numbers

Young Chekhov …

 What Rubbish They Publish - The Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The art of the flâneur …

… The Poetry of Pedestrians | Full Stop. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Thursday, July 23, 2015

More on Doctorow

From The Guardian

Anniversary …

 Paul Davis On Crime: Happy Birthday To The Late, Great Crime Writer Raymond Chandler.

Zzzz...

Paging Jeff Sypeck …

… Medieval Video Games — White Supremacy | National Review Online.



Jaw-droppingly dumb. Let's hope the people in charge of granting her a doctorate clear things up for her.

Minority report …

Why Go Set a Watchman is a much better novel than To Kill a Mockingbird. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Honoring an inspiration …

 Poet William Carlos Williams’ muse found, honored in Rutherford - News - NorthJersey.com. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

The givenness of things …

Flannery O'Connor and Catholic Realism | George Weigel | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Flannery O’Connor’s novels and short stories are not everyone’s literary cup of tea; I once received an impassioned e-mail from a Polish priest who had read “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” after learning about Miss O’Connor in the Polish edition of my Letters to a Young Catholic – and had found the story appalling. How could I promote such things? I tried to explain that Flannery O’Connor was veryhard to translate. But the real problem, I suspect, was that my correspondent couldn’t quite grasp how Miss O’Connor’s genius lay in describing the work of grace (and the wickedness that grace seeks to repair) through what seems, at first blush, repellant, even horrifying.

The reader in the mirror …

… Working Title: Conclusive Evidence  —  Asymptote Blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Something to think on …


The ideal holiday for the truly active man is one doing nothing in beautiful surroundings  . . .  and the ideal exercise for this best form of leisure is the old, natural, spontaneous movement of the body — the walk.
— Salvador de Madariaga, born on this date in 1886

Do they?

RIP...

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Hmm …

 Link Between Religiosity, Good Health Debunked — Pacific Standard.

After examining data from 59 countries, University of Cologne psychologist Olga Stavrova concludes that "the health and longevity benefits of religiosity are restricted to highly religious regions."
Maybe she should look into whether it is simply true of people in general who are highly religious. A purely geographic survey seems rather superficial. Presumably, people in "highly religious regions" are highly religious. But there are people in less highly religious regions who happen to be highly religious. Do they also experience health benefits therefrom?

My absence …

Spent the afternoon jawing in Chestnut Hill with Julie. Hence, little blogging. Wonderful day, though.

Today's music …

Shrewd assessment …

 … Scout, Atticus, Harper Lee Abide as “Mockingbird’s” Companion Volume Finally Arrives | Town Topics. (Hat tip, Virginia Kerr.)

Now at last the whole story has been told, both sides, Go Set a Watchman being not so much a prequel or a sequel as a companion volume, one half of a late-in-coming whole. And if you do justice to the new novel, if you let the Watchman lead you, you’ll see that Atticus is still the man he was in Mockingbird, 20 years older and stoically ailing, perhaps no wiser, the aura of his finest hour long gone, but he’s as far as he ever was from, as Kakutani sees it, “evil views.”

Excitable fellow…

… A Chinese official went berserk after his poetry was criticized online - Quartz. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Appreciation …

 James Tate obituary | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Gourmet poetry …

 Rare or Well-Done - The New York Times. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Listen in …

… Episode 126 – Liz Hand: People From Away | Virtual Memories.

Something to think on …

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
— Stephen Vincent Benét, born on this date in 1898

Much in what he says …

… A Conversation with Bill Kauffman — Front Porch Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I love reading up on the cultural and political history of the provinces. I mean, is there any doubt that North Dakota is far richer and healthier and more variegated and infinitely more interesting than, say, Manhattan? (Except, of course, to a Manhattanite, whose localist pride I honor.) I’ll take Larry Woiwode, Gerald Nye, and Timothy Murphy; you can have Anna Quindlen, Abe Beame, and Lady Gaga.
Hard to argue with that.

Fortuitously...

The trouble with academia...

The moment these ‘Leftists’ figured out that we were not ideologically inclined towards them, we were shut down. It did not matter that the project we were working on was an initiative towards reducing injustices. What mattered to these academics was the language we spoke. If you are not a left-liberal, capitalism-hating, RSS-hating, Modi-abusing person, you are not one of them, and they will not help you. They will not help you if you fall short by even one of those parameters. To quote George W Bush, you are either with them, or against them.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

23 summer reading books

From The Washington Post

Hacking Your Car


Uconnect, an Internet-connected computer feature in hundreds of thousands of Fiat Chrysler cars, SUVs, and trucks, controls the vehicle’s entertainment and navigation, enables phone calls, and even offers a Wi-Fi hot spot. And thanks to one vulnerable element, which Miller and Valasek won’t identify until their Black Hat talk, Uconnect’s cellular connection also letsanyone who knows the car’s IP address gain access from anywhere in the country.“From an attacker’s perspective, it’s a super nice vulnerability,” Miller says.