A chapter from the novel that decided Patrick White’s Nobel Prize was submitted to a range of publishers and agents in Australia, and rejected by each. The reaction to the fallout from Peter Craven is spot on. See here.
James L. McGaugh, “Make mild moments memorable: add a little arousal”, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 10, Iss. 8, August 2006, pp. 345-390.
The paper also includes the lovely section title, “Preserving the uneventful recent past”.
Anonymuncule.
A petty anonymous writer.
1867 SWINBURNE Let. 25 Dec. (1962) VI. 263, I have always found that these ‘anonymuncules’ vanish or collapse as soon as one attempts to set foot on them. a1869 C. READE in Swinburne Ess. & Stud. (1875) 3 Anonymuncules who go scribbling about. 1883 PROCTOR in Knowl. 25 May 313/2 Charles Reade [...]
Details from a photo of Barbara Epstein released by the New York Review of Books with her obituary.
From the entrance exam for Chinese civil servants (via Harper’s).
8. Often, when a thing is just begun, it is impossible to know how it will end, much less whether society will acknowledge it. If you want success you must make every possible effort, you must keep a cool head and resist anxiety. If you work [...]
To lie in wait, patiently observing, watching, breathing, and then, as soon as the man reveals his position, shooting him in the head: it’s not exactly what a writer does, but it’s not so dissimilar.
Keith Gessen, “Under Siege”, in The New Yorker, 3 June 2006.
Other examples include the interaction between a ray of white light and a red filter, the deformations of fenders of automobiles that bump into one another, and the mutual arousal of lovers who exchange a passionate kiss.
Salmon, Wesley C. 1980. “Probabilistic Causality”, in Causality and Explanation, 1998 Ed, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980, pp. 208–232. [...]
While many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large, with plenty of resources to accommodate all the people He knew would come into existence. All the 5 billion people on the earth could live in the state of Texas in single-family homes with front and back [...]
From a 1943 medical history of Jack Kerouac, then a twenty-one-year-old serving in the U.S. Naval Reserves. The file was included in about 1.2 million personnel files of U.S. Navy and Marine Corps members released in June by the National Archives (via Harper’s, Vol. 311, Iss. 1865, October 2005, p. 18)—
Habits: Enjoys reading and writing. [...]
Recently I bought a beautiful old copy of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici from Berkelouw Books. I had been looking for a nice copy for some time, having been intrigued by William Sebald’s description of Browne’s life and work in his masterpiece Austerlitz. The copy was around AU$40, but I decided it was worth it. Having [...]
Once, nationality was something that an ambitious writer hoped to transcend. A novelist aspired to recognition not as a New Zealand writer or a Nigerian writer but as, simply, a writer. Now nationality is transcended downward. Recognition comes from having one’s work identified with a marginalized or “endangered” community within the larger national or global [...]
One
This evidence suggests that female beauty depends upon specific highly visible hormonal markers that indicate high fecundity. In other female primates, fecundity signals such as labial swelling, chest blisters, or face reddening are quite common and males who are attracted to such cues enjoy clear reproductive beneits. However, in contrast to the pronounced cyclical fecundity [...]
Via The Age:
Breast augmentation, at about $US2,000 ($A2,700), is a third of the price in the US. A nose can be sculpted for $US1,500 ($A2,000), as little as a tenth of the US price.
Which prompts the question, how long before there exists a vibrant sector of the travel industry—cosmetic tourism. Venezuela! Get a new tan, [...]
So he was taken along on a hockey trip to France, where he probably got drunk but managed to conceal it, and in due jollity acquired the nickname “Ça Va”. Before the expedition I had tried to hammer in a few phrases of useful as distinct from merely grammatically accurate French. This, the colloquial equivalent [...]
Thane Rosenbaum writes:
It is for this reason that Franz Kafka has never received a cinematically successful treatment of his fiction, even though he has been arguably the most important literary figure of the past century.
I think this is unfair to Michael Haneke’s version of The Castle. Indeed, though I think the novel is generally a [...]
But suddenly I was 29, earning my living as a freelance public-relations writer—an activity I can recommend to no one—and it was increasingly clear that I had better write a novel soon.
(Richard Yates, “Some Very Good Masters”, in The New York Times Book Review, 19 April 1981).
I’m currently reading Blake Bailey’s Yates biography, A Tragic [...]
In the year 2004, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States of America sent two remote-controlled rovers to Mars, hoping to discover traces of water on the barren desert surface of that planet. From a scientific and political point of view, it was uncertain whether the mission could be justified, however [...]
Walking home under this afternoon’s blanched grey sky, I followed two jaunty drunks from parking meter to parking meter, their pockets jangling with coins extracted with some sort of wire contraption. Outside the AMWU office on Elizabeth Street, a union lackey sat with his feet up on a collapsible table, bottle of VB in one [...]
Wolfram himself is a lapsed elementary particle physicist, and I suppose he can’t resist trying to apply his experience with digital computer programs to the laws of nature. This has led him to the view (also considered in a 1981 article by Richard Feynman) that nature is discrete rather than continuous. He suggests that space [...]
I always thought I was a good father, being proud of both my kids and not trying to push them into any particular direction. I did not want them to be professors like me. I would be just as happy if they were truck drivers or ballet dancers, provided they really enjoyed what they were [...]