Any aspiring artist should watch this. I don’t think it’s realistic to expect these exact same techniques from every artist but you have to understand the technique if you want to make it in the current social media environment.
The purpose of this post is not so much to write my own review of the book (I read it many years ago and I’m left mostly with a fierce impression of quality) but instead to build out a more coherent link structure from my too longstanding goal to read all of the Modern Library novels. You can see my progress at Herein, I Attempt to Become a Man of Letters.
Lolita is one of best books I’ve ever read not in terms of the content but in terms of prose. No reasonable person could read the book and not commit a few lines to memory. I even named a playlist after one of my favorite lines: She moved like a fair angel among horrible boschian cripples.
However, the thing which I would very much like to draw your attention to is this review of the book by Christopher Hitchens, which is absolutely spectacular. I strongly recommend it.
The wikipedia article is also worth pursuing. If you’re into it these are 185 covers of Lolita over 37 countries and 56 years.
The 113th United States Congress was sworn into office in Washington, D.C. The new Congress features the most women and racial minorities of any Congress in history, with 43 African Americans (8 percent of the total number of representatives), 32 Hispanics (6 percent), 12 Asian Americans (2 percent), and 101 women (19 percent), as well as the first Buddhist, the first Hindu, and the first openly bisexual legislator. The Democratic Party formed the first caucus in which white men were not the majority, and the Republican Party welcomed the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction.
:: from The Weekly Review via Harpers (which is about my favorite email all week, thanks Ash!) ::
The game Interlocked for iOS is one of the better puzzle games I’ve played in the last year. Fully worth the 99cents I paid for it. It’s also short so you can’t destroy the rest of your life playing it. 
I feel like it’s opened up new parts of my brain. I feel smarter in hard to quantify ways as a result of playing it.
An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received, and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation and abuse.
Perhaps it should be comforting when calling a woman fat and ugly is the best response to her arguments, but it’s a chill comfort, especially when one realises, as I have come to realise over the past year, just how much time and effort some vicious people are prepared to expend trying to punish and silence a woman who dares to be ambitious, outspoken, or merely present in a public space.
Very Good Article via The Independent
People with a growth mindset are more resilient to challenges related to their abilities and performance than those with a fixed mindset.
As to what leads people to these different perspectives, a lot of media in recent years has cited Dweck’s work on this with respect to parenting. In the American culture of positive reinforcement, praise is often the main socially acceptable way to encourage your kids. However, Dweck’s studies have suggested that the type of praise you receive can strongly impact whether you end up with a fixed or growth mindset.
An excerpt where Dweck references one of her earlier papers on effects of praising innate qualities versus effort and process (http://www.stanford.edu/
People can also learn these self-theories from the kind of praise they receive (Mueller & Dweck, 1998). Ironically, when students are praised for their intelligence, they move toward a fixed theory. Far from raising their self-esteem, this praise makes them challenge-avoidant and vulnerable, such that when they hit obstacles their confidence, enjoyment, and performance decline. When students are praised for their effort or strategies (their process), they instead take on a more malleable theory— they are eager to learn and highly resilient in the face of difficulty.
Thus self-theories play an important (and causal role) in challenge seeking, self-regulation, and resilience, and changing self-theories appears to result in important real-world changes in how people function.
This is a short video on the One Point Perspective in Stanley Kubrick’s films. I’m not a film nerd so I’m not exactly sure what’s up here. I’ve heard that it’s not practically accepted for films to be made in one point but Kubrick did anyway and it’s obviously awesome. My friend sent me this video a few months ago and it’s radically changed the way I view media.
Yesterday I went to a private screening of the first two episodes of Season 5 of the Star Wars: The Clone Wars. In case you are not a Star Wars nerd that would be the animated series from cartoon network that is about to enter it’s fifth season. Here is the trailer for seaon five. It is fucking awesome.
I’ve long had complaints with the show, primarily in the writing and how lots of it just doesn’t even make any sense. However, they have just brought on a writer from The Wire and it shows. The first episode from the fifth season might be the best yet. It was also kind of amazing to hear the show in a theatre designed by the people who invented THX sound. Actually, that part was facerockingly asskicktacular.
++ UPDATE ++
Someone in the comments wanted a bit more info about the episodes. Pablo Hildalgo asked us not to reveal any spoilers but I’ll say that the first episode is a continuation of last seasons final episode about Darth Maul. And here it’s worth noting that I thought the Maul season finale was horrible and cheesy. It was so bad that I wish Lucas would have just let Maul be dead. In particular, I found Mother Talzin just reconstructing his legs with magic to be extraordinarily ridiculous. ESPECIALLY given that she was just defeated by separatist droids. In every way that the season finale was a let down the season premier was amazing and triumphant. The writing made sense (mostly). The action was incredible (I was cheering wildly with everyone in the theatre at one point). And it was hilarious.
The second episode is the first part of what they were calling a feature length film. It was a four or maybe five episode arc that started out slow and deals with an insurrection on Dantooine. There is some, ahem, sexual tension in the episode. It’s alright but still substantially better than I think almost any of the episodes from season four. AND if you pay attention to details the editing is very, very good.
After he’d been stung by almost everything, entomologist Justin O. Schmidt created the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a four-point scale comparing the overall pain of insect stings:
Breaking Bad is good and engaging but the value to time payoff isn’t quite dense enough for me. Some episodes are amazing. Others are suuuuuper boring. I only made it halfway through season two, I think this is generally because I’m not as attracted to stories with a flawed protagonist. Walter should have just taken the job at the company he founded and gotten super rich that way. I also don’t like the way that he lied to his wife so much. Anyway, stories about people who make a lot of bad decisions aren’t that engaging to me.
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On a broader note, people seem to develop problematic relationships with substances when they use them as a coping tool. Alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, sugar (my fav!), marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, etc etc. Those things have nothing inherently wrong with them but using them to cope and escape is when things start to go awry.
Another way to put this is that you should be sober about 90% of the time. I’ll say this again even more carefully, if you find yourself doing some intoxicant everyday, it’s not helping, it’s just making your problems worse.
This is gold. Absolute Gold. If you insist on trying to figure out the plot of the film you could read this.
As part of my ongoing quest to become a man of letters I just finished #67 on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Books of the Century. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a stunning look into racism and colonialism in turn of the 20th century Africa. At once visceral and rich, the entire book is permeated with a psychological tension that exposes empire and raw avarice. It’s short and will almost certainly be even better upon rereading.
The book is a fictional account of a brutal operation by the Congo Free State which was a private colonial operation by King Leopold II.
The Congo Free State was a large area in CentralAfrica which was privately controlled by Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Its origins lay in Leopold’s attracting scientific, and humanitarian backing for a non-governmental organization, the Association internationale africaine. Using first the multi-national AIA, then the “Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo” (French: Comité d’études du Haut-Congo), and finally the International Association of the Congo (French: Association internationale du Congo), Leopold secured control of most of the Congo basin. Unlike the multinational AIA, the AIC was Leopold’s personal vehicle. As the sole shareholder and chairman, he increasingly used it to gather and sell ivory, rubber, and minerals in the upper Congo basin (though it had been set up on the understanding that its purpose was to uplift the local people and develop the area). He gave the AIC the name Congo Free State in 1885. The state included the entire area of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo and existed from 1885 to 1908. The Congo Free State eventually earned infamy due to the increasingly brutal mistreatment of the local peoples and plunder of natural resources, leading to its abolition and annexation by the government of Belgium in 1908.
Under Leopold II’s administration, the Congo Free State became one of the greatest international scandals of the early twentieth century. The reportof the British Consul Roger Casement led to the arrest and punishment of white officials who had been responsible for killings during a rubber-collecting expedition in 1903 (including one Belgian national for causing the shooting of at least 122 Congolese people).[citation needed]
The loss of life and atrocities inspired literature such as Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, and raised outcries, even from such upholders of the colonial mission as Winston Churchill. One view is that the forced labour system directly and indirectly eliminated 20% of the population.[2]
European and U.S. reformers exposed the conditions in the Congo Free State to the public through the Congo Reform Association. Also active in exposing the activities of the Congo Free State was the author Arthur Conan Doyle, whose book The Crime of the Congo was widely read in the early 1900s. By 1908, public pressure and diplomatic manoeuvres led to the end of Leopold II’s rule and to the annexation of the Congo as a colony of Belgium, known as the Belgian Congo.
::: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State :::
Leopold II (French: Léopold Louis Philippe Marie Victor, Dutch: Leopold Lodewijk Filips Maria Victor) (9 April 1835 – 17 December 1909) was the king of the Belgians. Born in Brussels the second (but eldest surviving) son of Leopold I and Louise-Marie of Orléans, he succeeded his father to the throne on 17 December 1865 and remained king until his death.
Leopold is chiefly remembered as the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken on his own behalf. He used Henry Morton Stanley [of Dr Livingston I presume?] to help him lay claim to the Congo, an area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Powers at the Berlin Conference in its final Act in 1885, committed the State to improving the lives of the inhabitants. From the beginning, however, Leopold essentially ignored these conditions and ran the Congo brutally, using a mercenary force, for his own personal gain.
Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory, and after a rise in the price of rubber in the 1890s, by forcing the population to collect sap from rubber plants. Villages were required to meet quotas on rubber collections, and their hands were cut off if they didn’t meet it. His harsh regime was responsible for the death of an estimated five to 15 million Congolese (the indigenous inhabitants of the Congo River basin). The Congo became one of the most infamous international scandals of the early 20th century, and Leopold was ultimately forced to relinquish control of it to the government of Belgium.
:::: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium ::::
The book takes place in a small sailboat on the Thames river outside of London. A group of men are gathered listening to a man tell a story about his trip on a steam ship up the Congo River in Africa. Heart of darkness uses a Frame Narrative (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_narrative) aka a story within a story. For all it’s eloquence, this frame narrative is overly ambitious and turns out clunky. Yet it is one of the critical metaphors in the book. Sunset and darkening night aboard the boat in the Thames bely the darkening tremor aboard the steamship on the congo river. The passage of time and the darkening sky during the storyteller’s narrative parallel the atmosphere of the events in the book.
The writing is at times amazing but it’s not consistent and the story doesn’t always quite make sense. Still, it’s pretty good and it gave me a stronger feeling for how events at the turn of the last century played into colonialism. I give it a nubs up!
I’ll close with this excerpt from The Congo, a 1914 Poem by Vachal Linsay
Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.
* #44 on Modern Library’s list The World According to Garp uses the frame narrative expertly and to great effect.
The head of the DEA, Michelle Leonhart, just said that medical marijuana should be between a patient and their doctor. This is huge news. I love the way that Rep. Steve Cohen used a Navy Seal with cancer as a fulcrum in his argument.
A brief record of what I’ve learned based on looking over my browser history for the last few days.
+ Dentists do not have the highest suicide rate among professions (as we previously thought). Food batchmakers are actually highest followed by physicians, lathe operators, medical scientists, urban planners and THEN dentists. Some reports also list marine engineers.
+ Food batchmakers are the people who set up and operate equipment that mixes or blends ingredients used in the manufacturing of food products which somewhat strangely includes candy makers.
+ Suicide statistics are basically bs because most suicides are reported as accidents to protect the privacy of the family. Also, statistics are rare and involve very low sample sizes.
+ It was posited that dentists have a high suicide rate because they are not much liked by their customers but that turns out to be a small and probably less relevant part of the equation. Psychologists believe that it’s because dentists are typically perfectionists and that perfectionists respond to stress poorly and are much more likely to ignore the signs of depression.
+ Sexist humor actually encourages and reinforces sexism. >>>>>
a·po·ri·a noun
Etymology: The separation of aporia into its two morphemes a- and poros (‘without’ and ‘passage’) reveals the word’s rich etymological background as well as its connection to Platonic mythology ….. the myth of Poros, Penia, and Eros in Plato’s Symposium especially reveals the concept’s untranslatability. Penia, the “child of poverty,” decides to forcefully impregnate herself with the inebriated Poros, the personification of plenty, who is always in opposition with aporia and thus defining aporia. The result of this union is Eros, who inherits the disparate characteristics of his parents (25). The perplexing aspect of the myth is revealed as one realizes that Penia is acting out of resourcefulness, a quality normally attributed to Poros, and Poros’ inaction reveals his own passivity, a poverty of agency or poros. Such a relationship intensely affects not only the context of aporia but its meaning as well.
:: via The Wikipedia ::
The word is from a recent NYTimes op-ed from a NY state supreme court judge asking for the legalization of MJ. It’s the same article we’ve seen before but notable for the characters involved and the general eloquence. The real question, of course, is when will we finally legalize smoking scorpion tail?!?!?