July 2011
1 post
Rupert Murdoch's Giggle
An example of what he used to be able to get away with. From Woodrow Wyatt’s diaries:
Wednesday 1 October [1986]. A message to speak to Downing Street urgently. The Prime Minister wanted me to know before the official announcement that Duke Hussey was to be the new chairman of the BBC … I was shattered.
… Rupert rings in a great state: ‘Has she gone mad? What a disastrous...
May 2011
2 posts
“All across the United States, large and small cities are closing public...”
– Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books
““Originally, feathers evolved to retain heat; later, they were repurposed...”
– http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/5131104949/life-is-short-art-is-shorter
April 2011
1 post
From "On the Spirit of Monarchy", by William... →
“The Spirit of Monarchy … is nothing but the craving in the human mind after the Sensible and the One. It is not so much a matter of state-necessity or policy, as a natural infirmity, a disease, a false appetite in the popular feeling, which must be gratified. Man is an individual animal with narrow faculties, but infinite desires, which he is anxious to concentrate in some one...
February 2011
1 post
A memorial to the kind of education British...
Britain is entering a new constitutional period after a gigantic reduction of local government democracy, also the biggest sale of public property since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1540, the abolition of common land in the 1820s. Even Britain’s public water supply, the greatest achievement of Victorian socialism, has been privatised … Despite protests by librarians the...
January 2011
4 posts
Art historians are the real art wreckers
“The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art historians. My God, I often think, sitting here on the settee while the art historians are driving their helpless flocks past me, what a pity about all these people who have all art driven out of...
Interviews you never expected to see, no. 2:... →
“Perhaps you will agree with me on the fact that the very concept of improvisation verges upon reading, since what we often understand by improvisation is the creation of something new, yet something which doesn’t exclude the pre-written framework that makes it possible.” (PDF)
Perking down
From Tony Blair’s A Journey:
‘The great thing about Anji [Hunter] was her indestructible and occasionally incredible optimism. She perked up when others perked down. She saw the silver lining long before the cloud. She was a positive life force, bashing down whole fields of negativity, basking the environs around her with beams of light, joy and hope amid the darkness.’
December 2010
10 posts
John French's tribute to Don Van Vliet
While touring in the UK in 1975, there was a concert we played in a medium sized hall somewhere lost in time, where a bus brought in a group of about 16 wheelchair-bound individuals. After the concert ended, we were headed for our bus when Don stopped and watched as the handicapped individuals were tediously loaded one by one onto their bus. Our bus driver, a bit impatient, called out that we...
Julian Assange - book thief! →
Item description from the University of Melbourne’s library.
The funnest table in town: Van Morrison meets R.D.... →
“The first number I played you “In The Garden” right? I’d been explaining that that is an actual meditation process. If you actually listen to that song and go into meditation, by the end of it you should be - if you’re following the thing attention wise - you should be in a state of transcendental mediation by the end of it. Because that’s what it is that...
Could Obamacare have prevented the Jigsaw... →
The Saw films prove that state-run death panels cause less suffering than free-market death panels.
Don’t speak too soon « LRB blog →
Where ‘The Times They Are A Changin’ ended up.
Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews: A Parable →
lazybookreviews:
Three writers have been invited to participate in a reading at the Harvard Advocate. John Ashbery, Jamaica Kincaid, and Salman Rushdie.
Following the reading, there is a Q&A. The students busy themselves to ask the most self-aggrandizing questions possible. This is common enough.
One student…
The Angry Youth of a TV Naturalist
Chris Packham: “I was 26 going on 16. I’d just started working on The Really Wild Show in Bristol for the BBC but prior to that I’d been a very angry and antisocial young man. I remember sitting on the train in winter, looking out at grey days, scuttling up the tracks to Bristol, and listening to the Jesus & Mary Chain and feeling that it really did reflect my entire...
John Prine: A concert in Ireland, from Roger... →
