Amanda Palmer on the Art of Asking and the Shared Dignity of Giving and Receiving. By Maria Popova “When we really see each other, we want to help each other.”
“It would be a terrible calamity,” Henry Miller wrote in his meditation on the beautiful osmosis between giving and receiving, “for the world if we eliminated the beggar. The beggar is just as important in the scheme of things as the giver. If begging were ever eliminated God help us if there should no longer be a need to appeal to some other human being, to make him give of his riches.”
And yet, we live in a culture that perpetuates the false perception of a certain power dynamic between giver and receiver, and — worse yet — stigmatizes the very act of asking as undignified. Last week, I had the pleasure of spending some time with the wonderful Amanda Palmer who, besides being an extraordinarily talented musician, is also a fellow champion of open culture and believer in making good work freely available, trusting that those who find value in it will support it accordingly.
Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr. Mary Gordon on the joy of notebooks and writing by hand as a creative catalyst. By Maria Popova “However thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.”
Every few years, a new anthology of essays on why writers write comes along. While most tend to be invariably excellent, one of the best presents I’ve ever received was a copy of the 2001 collection Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times (public library). What made this particular tome special, besides the wonderful selection of essays by contemporary literary icons like Saul Bellow, Ann Patchett, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike, was that many of the essays were signed by their respective authors.
One of my favorite pieces in the volume comes from Mary Gordon, at the time in her early 50s, and is titled “Putting Pen to Paper, but Not Just Any Pen to Just Any Paper.” Gordon begins: There may be some writers who contemplate a day’s work without dread, but I don’t know them. Writing by hand is laborious, and that is why typewriters were invented. February webinar: "Listening to Our Eyes: Seeing as Meditation" Bradford C.
Grant is Professor and Director of the School of Architecture and Design and Associate Dean of the College of Engineering, Architecture and Computer Sciences at Howard University, Washington DC. MIT’s Free Creative Learning Class Teaches You How to Learn Almost Anything. Essay Book Reviews - Irish Book Reviews - Dublin Review of Books. The FBI’s Obscene File: J.
Edgar Hoover and the Bureau’s Crusade Against Smut, by Douglas M Charles, University Press of Kansas, 200 pp, £21.50, ISBN: 978-0700618255 “Or as they say in New York, sophisticated ...” As god is my witness, I don’t think it mattered Whether it was Aemilius’s gob or arse I was smelling. One’s no cleaner nor dirtier than the other, but in fact his arse is both more clean and pleasant, because at least it has no teeth.
The mouth has teeth that stretch for a foot, gums like a go-kart, jaws that always gape wide as the cunt of a pissing mule on heat. We can probably agree that this (Catullus 97, my translation) is disgusting, and our poet is clearly attempting to get his reader to share in a disgust that he himself has already felt. Hilary Mantel · Royal Bodies · LRB 21 February 2013. Last summer at the festival in Hay-on-Wye, I was asked to name a famous person and choose a book to give them.
I hate the leaden repetitiveness of these little quizzes: who would be the guests at your ideal dinner party, what book has changed your life, which fictional character do you most resemble? I had to come up with an answer, however, so I chose Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, and I chose to give her a book published in 2006, by the cultural historian Caroline Weber; it’s called Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. It’s not that I think we’re heading for a revolution. It’s rather that I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung. In those days she was a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore. Marie Antoinette was a woman eaten alive by her frocks. Trap Streets. In 2001, the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain took the Automobile Association, a motoring organization, to court over copyright infringement, claiming the Automobile Association was using Ordnance Survey maps as the source material for its atlases and town plans.
The Ordnance Survey originates in a 1747 plan to facilitate the subjugation of the Highland clans following the Jacobite uprising of 1745, when Lieutenant Colonel David Watson proposed that a comprehensive survey of Scotland would assist in further campaigns. The result—The Duke of Cumberland’s Map produced under the command of its namesake by William Roy, Paul Sandby, and John Mason—was the first military-quality map of the British Isles, and grew into the Principal Triangulation of Great Britain (1783–1853), which set the standard for the Ordnance Survey’s work.