Places to post your writing online « Inkify Websites for writers to post their work on usually fall into two categories: critique groups (for sharing drafts with a limited number of your peers) and public archives (to let a wider audiance enjoy…

Mary Lamb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Mary Anne Lamb (3 December 1764 – 20 May 1847), was an English writer, the sister and collaborator of Charles Lamb.…

The Chess Master and the Computer - The New York Review of Books In 1985, in Hamburg, I played against thirty-two different chess computers at the same time in what is known as a simultaneous exhibition. I walked from one machine to the next, making my moves over a…

Axe Cop

The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict—By W.H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden (Harper's Magazine)

Voltaire's Candide : Online Exhibitions

The best films of the decade - Roger Ebert's Journal "Synecdoche, New York" is the best film of the decade. It intends no less than to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives. After beginning my first viewing in confusion, I began to glimpse its …

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I'm currently reading James Wood's How Fiction Words, which I've so far found to be excellent and well worth reading, though I don't always agree with Wood's specific judgments. I ran across this humorous assessment in a review of Wood's book:

But, like many public figures who are so reliably excellent they risk monotony, Wood is saved from his abilities by his fascinating limitations. He is, in spite of his prodigious gifts, mystifyingly, perversely, delightfully limited. His sensibility—high-minded, self-serious, evangelical—seems to have been pickled back in 1863, so that he appears to be carrying out a Borgesian experiment of restaging Matthew Arnold’s entire career in an era that has learned to ignore Victorian sagery. Among our book blogs and digital libraries and metacritical review-collating hyperlinked global salons, Wood remains provocatively analog. His pronouncements arrive walnut-paneled, camphor-sprinkled, and attended by retinues of white-gloved footmen. (As the journal n+1 once put it, it’s like he seems “to want to be his own grandfather.”) I recently suffered a moment of deep existential disorientation when I realized that Wood, at 43, is actually three years younger than David Foster Wallace, who radiates a generational energy to which Wood is apparently totally immune. Wood’s rare and cursory references to pop culture—Seinfeld, Amazon, Ricky Gervais—are always jarring, like a videotaped hostage holding a copy of today’s newspaper to prove he’s still alive.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Craft of Fiction, by Percy Lubbock Title: The Craft of Fiction…

Weltschmerz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Weltschmerz (from the German, meaning world-pain or world-weariness) is a term coined by the German author Jean Paul and denotes the kind of feeling experienced by someone who understands that physica…

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thesixtyone - a music adventure

Goya and Wellington

"Viva Velinton!" When the Spanish master met the then Lord Wellington in 1812, the 43-year-old Briton was the idol of Spain. The streets echoed with cries of "Y viva Velinton!," and beautiful women rushed forward to cover him with kisses. Had Goya been a less truthful artist, he might have tried to idealize the man into some sort of benign hero surrounded by the trappings of glory.

But the future duke, who had little respect for artists, quickly found that there are artists who have little respect for dukes. In this austere portrait, the trappings of glory are absent. Even the order of the Golden Fleece is hidden beneath the cloak, and the sharp-featured face is neither benign nor particularly heroic. Goya painted exactly what he saw: a cold and contemptuous Englishman who regarded the exuberance of the Spaniards as rather poor taste.

The antagonism between the soldier and the artist was duly reported by Mrs. Havemeyer in her privately printed' memoirs. At one point, she wrote, Wellington bluntly told Goya that the portrait would never do and would have to be changed. In a rage, Goya started to pick up a pistol lying on a table near by, and Wellington went for his sword. "Fortunately the two great men were separated before they could do greater harm than to express their opinions of each other," wrote Mrs. Havemeyer. "Goya would never change the portrait nor allow Wellington any longer to pose for him." The artist had finished Wellington's face, and he painted the rest of the picture from a hired model.

[via Time]

The Black Seas of Copyright Howard Phillips Lovecraft became a major figure in the horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres when pulp fiction magazines published his stories in the 1920s and 1930s. Since his death i…

Sunstein Kann Murphy & Timbers LLP 1"Fixed" means fixed, by the author or with the author's permission, in a tangible means of expression, including, for instance, paper, CD-ROMs, film, or other media. The federal copyright statute do…

Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List - Newsweek.com Declaring the best book ever written is tricky business. Who's to say what the best is? We went one step further: we crunched the numbers from 10 top books lists (Modern Library, the New York Public L…

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Mercurial - Mercurial

Meld : Home Page Say thanks with some tunes. or cash.…

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CairoPlot 1.1 « CairoPlot now has a Mailing List! For more information, refer to: this post. …

matplotlib: python plotting — Matplotlib v0.99.1.1 documentation

The Craftsman / from a working library

HAROLD BLOOM - PART 1 - Vice Magazine

Most common words in English - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The list below of most common words in English, like any superlative list, cannot be definitive. It is based on an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus of over a billion words, and represents one stu…

Commonplace book - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.…

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HTMLGIANT / X-Mas Present: Everything You Always Wanted to Ask David Gates About Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories…

Irradiated Software - Cinch

google-code-prettify - Project Hosting on Google Code A Javascript module and CSS file that allows syntax highlighting of source code snippets in an html page. …

Today I was working on some regular expression sample code, and remembered this from high school Latin: O Tite tute Tati tibi tanta tyranne tulisti! It's fun to say. Read it out loud. It means "Oh, you tyrant, Titus Tatius, such great troubles you brought upon yourself!"

While I was looking for that, I found malo malo malo malo (which makes more sense than Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo).

BibliOdyssey: River Deep Mountain High Comparative Perspectives -Heights of Mountains, Lengths of Rivers[click on any image for the large version. Very large versions also available]Illustration Title: Comparative Heights of the Principal …

David Rumsey Collection: Physical Geography. Edinburgh. Published by A. & C. Black. Engd. by Geo. Aikman.

30 Best Blogs of 2009 - Fimoculous.com Just got my 23andme results back and I'm related to Marie Antoinette! Also, have a high predisposition toward Gout. Related? …

The Millions: The Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far): An Introduction Who says lit coverage can't survive online? Learn about 5 Amazingly Easy Ways to Support The Millions…