Steve > Recent Status Updates

My, my! What's going on? First Jean-Paul and then Heidi deleted their GR accounts within two days of each other. I hope this isn't going to be a new trend... :((

Is there no end to the bugs on this site???!!!

The preparations for Hurricane Irma have put a stop to my reading for the past few days (that exhausting struggle has already reached the point of diminishing returns, but it is not in my nature just to sit and wait for something to happen, hoping for the best), and there is no telling what will happen when it comes through here in about 40 hours. I may be offline for quite awhile.

Words of wisdom from the new President on Saturday during a typically rambling speech at the CIA:

"I’m, like, a smart person” (!!!)

It's going to be excruciating.

Well, this is a first. Not only does GR spottily distribute my new review, but it even makes it disappear from my own update page. Things are even worse now than when I took a month's break out of disgust with GR's distribution and the new home feed format.

Noam Chomsky's take on contemporary world politics inThe Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/20...

So this is the Bold New World: According to Oxfam the top 1% possess more than the remaining 99%. Even more obscene: together, a grand total of 62 individuals own more than 50% of mankind.

I haven't the words to express my sorrow and rage at what happened tonight in Paris. Just don't have them.

What the fuck is Goodreads doing? Old reviews are posting themselves and new reviews aren't being circulated! One of my GR friends says some of her reviews are disappearing altogether. This bookselling machine for Amazon is getting on my nerves.

After a much needed three week break from the book sites (though not from books), I return a bit fresher, hoping that you all have been reading wonderful books in the best of health!

Ah, perfect! Now Nigeria's Boko Haram pledges allegiance to ISIS.

Interesting. The conservative Prime Minister of Japan is now challenging American school textbooks which have the bad taste to mention the existence of the Korean and Chinese "comfort women" Japan's military made use of during WW2. Mr. Prime Minister, in the face of witnesses like Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women and other books, you are not doing your country a favor with this...

ISIS in a Sydney cafe?

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/15/world/a...

The Swedish Academy blew it again!

"I lived in boardinghouses or small rooms and worked wherever I could while I finished university. And when I finished university I kept on working wherever I could, because I studied literature, which is what people do before they end up working wherever they can." - Alejandro Zambra

The Tasmanian-born composer Peter Schulthorpe, a unique talent (among other things, he composed a concerto for didgeridoo called Earth Cry), has died. Here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd5GWz...
is a link to a performance of a portion of his 16th String "Quartet". You'll see why the quotation marks are used.

At the link http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/974...
you will find an early discussion (1947) by Simone de Beauvoir on the condition of women.

Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate...but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.

- Franz Kafka, the Diaries (entry of October 19, 1921)

From 2003 till 2013 the inflation-adjusted net worth of the median American household fell by one third:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/bus...

I wake from a nap, light clouds fill the gullyside;

cows and sheep at sunset are coming down the southern slope.

Wealth and status in this floating life are really worth nothing at all:

it's just like bustling ants that live inside a single stump.

- Ni Tsan (1301-1374)

According to the NYT, the Australian novelist Liam Davison and his wife, Frankie,
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
were among the passengers in the plane shot down over the Ukraine.

"For conclusion, I say the philosopher teacheth, but he teacheth obscurely, so as the learned only can understand him; that is to say, he teacheth them that are already taught. But the poet is the food for the tenderest stomachs; the poet is, indeed, the right popular philosopher."

- Sir Philip Sidney, 1581

There is nothing more futile and tedious than aesthetic theory. Art is technique, poetry is a ceaseless working of language, of verse, of rhythm. It is a demanding daily act, without romantic exaltation.
- Nikos Kazantzakis

OK, if Dale Peck actually wrote what Moore says he wrote, then he is on my terminal shit list.

Oh, yes. I'm regaling myself with Steven Moore and heated sake at 4 a.m. - DAMN good thing that it's summer break. :)

Oh yes, this is already amusing: "It's God-damn Litachure!" But why the overemphasis on rhetorical display as the primary mark of Litachure? I think of Thelen's Zweites Gesicht which has everything: character, story (an infinite number), "real" life, AND a burgeoning, flowering, coruscating rhetorical performance.