Amazon - This "fascinating" (Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times bestselling author of Outliers) examination of literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante, shows how writers have created technical breakthroughs—rivaling scientific inventions—and engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind.
Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere—from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others—each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature’s great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all.
Wonderworks reviews the blueprints for twenty-five of the most significant developments in the history of literature. These inventions can be scientifically shown to alleviate grief, trauma, loneliness, anxiety, numbness, depression, pessimism, and ennui, while sparking creativity, courage, love, empathy, hope, joy, and positive change. They can be found throughout literature—from ancient Chinese lyrics to Shakespeare’s plays, poetry to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and crime novels to slave narratives.
A "refreshing and remarkable" (Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me: An Encounter) exploration of the new literary field of story science, Wonderworks teaches you everything you wish you learned in your English class, and "contains many instances of critical insight....What’s most interesting about this compendium is its understanding of imaginative representation as a technology" (The New York Times).
#1
Why is it that the works of the many authors supported in academe are so damned boring? Eliot, Joyce, Faulkner, Wolfe, every damned French and Italian novelist, etc., etc., etc.
#5
Allegedly, Roy Scheider told his agent he'd fire him if the guy couldn't get him the part of Dr. Benway in the Naked Lunch movie. He got the role. Peter Weller as Bill Lee.
Worth a look.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/19/2023 8:43 Comments ||
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Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/19/2023 8:44 Comments ||
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#7
And, yeah, À la recherche du temps perdu is not light reading. But worth the trouble.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/19/2023 8:47 Comments ||
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#8
People say it's pretentious to bring up those authors and titles, but, as Satchel Paige said, "It ani't showin' off - if you can do it."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/19/2023 8:58 Comments ||
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#9
You are allowed to not like (or understand) Cormac McCarthy, but you are not allowed to say he couldn't write.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/19/2023 8:59 Comments ||
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#10
And. Anyone commenting on the Russia-Ukraine war posts who doesn't get Tolstoy / Solzhenitsyn / Bulgakov / Chekov / Pasternak better just stop.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/19/2023 9:04 Comments ||
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#11
Meanwhile, to circle back to the actual original post, Gladwell has made a fortune mis-stating actual smart people's ideas while TED talk addicts drool over him.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/19/2023 9:30 Comments ||
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#12
Literature, like art, if it doesn't touch your inner being, then it isn't "great". Saying it is, just puts off those that can't feel it. Zane Gray, E.R. Burroughs is great for those who can feel it. Just as Dali and Picasso. Pushing your opinion on others is disgusting. Share it if they ask but don't bully them.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/19/2023 10:40 Comments ||
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#15
If you want to read good, true to the era "rayciss cause that's how it was back then" literature, get into James Ellroy.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/19/2023 10:42 Comments ||
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#16
#12 - Good art pushes very universal psychological buttons. "Art" tailored to a narrow audience is more appropriately labelled "commercial product."
See: Mozart, et al vs Taylor Swift.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/19/2023 10:48 Comments ||
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[FoxNews] An expert on Hamas said the terrorist group, whose attack on Israel last week was called a "historic win" by a far-left campus organization, believes the destruction of Israel is a key to its desire to see the world subjugated under a radical Islamic caliphate after a Qatar-based leader called for global "Jihad."
Dr. Jonathan Schanzer is an expert on Iran-backed terrorist groups as a senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Schanzer explained the terror group's ideology after last week, Khaled Meshaal, the former chief of Hamas's political bureau for more than 20 years, called for Muslims across the world to get involved in Jihad.
"The first thing that [Hamas] wants to do is to conquer Israel," Schanzer said. "And then from there, it would like to see the world subjugated to an Islamic caliphate. In other words, a governing structure in the world that is led by Muslims… [since] it believes in Muslim supremacy as a general principle."
"Hamas believes that the conquest of Israel is the first step that is needed along the way. This actually… [is] the sort of thing that we saw from al-Qaeda, from ISIS and others."
The loud and frequent cry for a cease fire coming from Iran and its lackeys indicates to me that Hamas is afraid of an IDF close up cleansing of its military infrastructure.
Posted by: lord garth ||
10/19/2023 9:04 Comments ||
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#2
They like the slaughter orgy. The getting killed part is less popular unless they can combine both in splodey fashion. Getting shot in the face is the part of the death cult experience that is least popular.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
10/19/2023 19:44 Comments ||
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It's long, just like all of his best stuff. Go read the whole thing. It's gold. Then, after you're done reading, share it all over.
[GrayMirror] “Nomos,” as in Carl Schmitt’s great book Nomos of the Earth, is a Greek word usually translated as “law.” I think it does better as “standard”—the standards of the earth.
The difference between a law and a standard is that no power enforces a standard. For example, what we mean by “the Internet” is a standard called TCP/IP. No one forces your computer to speak TCP/IP. There is just no gain in speaking anything different.
....
In the Global American Empire (GAE), or in any unipolar order, all conflicts can be categorized as four kinds of dogfight:
Dogfights in which America has no dog in the fight.
Dogfights in which America has one dog in the fight.
Dogfights in which America has two dogs in the fight.
Dogfights in which America leaps into the pit itself.
This simple theory can help you understand all kinds of international relations. For instance, the current Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict (see more below) is a conflict of type 1. The current war in the Ukraine war is a conflict of type 2. The Vietnam War was a conflict of type 4.
It will readily be seen that the Gaza war is a war of type 3. Our type 3 wars are the worst kind, for obvious reasons. At least the type 4 wars end quickly (or used to lol).
THE LIVE COAL
What happened here? Why do we have two dogs in the same fight? How did we get from the rules-based international order to the nomos of Bad Newz Kennels? Is the purpose of US foreign policy just to generate tank porn and GoPro snuff movies?
What is US foreign policy? What—assuming a unipolar order in which America is at least first among equals in economic and military strength—should it be? Where do we need to go? Where are we? How did we get here? How do we go there?
The great philosopher Mike Tyson famously said, "Everyone has a plan until I punch them in the face." He was, of course, paraphrasing the great Prussian field marshal, Helmuth von Moltke, who said, "No plan survives contact with the enemy." That is an abbreviated version of the original. Some version of this expression no doubt exists in most languages, as it is an essential part of human existence. All plans suffer from the faults of the people making the plans.
We may be seeing this unfold in the Levant, where the Israeli plan to exterminate Hamas and anyone near them is running into trouble. The narrative unleashed on the public was that the attack on the drug rave near Gaza, in which an undetermined number of people were killed, was the red line. The Israelis were now justified in taking any and all necessary steps to eradicate this threat. All media nodes were activated to whip up support for maximum vengeance against Gaza,
Curiously, it was not just Israel whipping support. The Washington regime swung into action with more than just words of support. Every administration official was sent out to cry in public while demanding blood. Word was leaked to regime media that Washington told Tel Aviv they had a green light for anything. They sent two carrier groups the eastern Mediterranean in support of the project. Top diplomats were sent to Israel to express their unwavering loyalty to Israel.
As an aside, the dispatching of two carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean only makes sense if Washington expects to be in an air war. Given that Hamas lacks an air force, it must mean they are thinking about a neighboring country. There has also been talk about moving another attack group to the northern part of the Indian Ocean, within reach of Iran. You do not need these assets to launch a rescue mission into Gaza and they are not needed to supply Israel with weapons.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Angus Fletcher] Story Thinking
