Here's What Humbert Humbert Looks Like (as a Police Composite Sketch) - Megan Garber - Technology An artist uses police sketch software to (re?)create some of the best-known characters in literature. Emma Bovary from Madame Bovary. Rochester from Jane Eyre. Keith Talent from London FIelds. Humbert Humbert -- "lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested," with "thick black eyebrows" and "a face that might twitch with neuralgia" -- had a way with description. But for those who cannot skillfully recreate or instantly evoke a face, in literature or otherwise, there is another way: the police sketch. This week, Brian Joseph Davis launched The Composites, a Tumblr that imagines the appearance of literary characters using both the text that describes them ... and composite sketch-rendering software used mostly by law enforcement. Here is Humbert Humbert: And here is Emma Bovary: The project was inspired, Davis told me, by a James Ellroy reference to "Identikits," which rendered composite images by asking crime witnesses to pick out individual features printed on index cards.
BLOUSE | Blues de consultation – Le blog d'une jeune interne en Médecine Générale | Page 3 Ne JAMAIS relever les erreurs d’un chef. Ne JAMAIS même avoir l’air de remettre une de ses paroles en question. Non, mais vraiment jamais quoi. Pas juste sporadiquement. JA – MAIS. Voilà. Il faut avouer que parfois ça démange quand même beaucoup. Voir une bande de blouses blanches s’extasier devant une radio posée à l’envers (oui oui, comme celle de la série Scrubs) et en plus ajouter au tableau la phrase choc d’un interne un peu suffisant ("Ca confirme bien la dextrorotation cardiaque que j’ai observée à l’ECG ça !") Je prends beaucoup sur moi. J’ai souvent pris sur moi au bloc opératoire. Parfois, c’est le mauvais nom sur l’ordonnance. Parfois le dossier ne colle pas avec le patient? Un vrai petit elfe de maison ce Dr Stitchette. Alors que j’étais de garde un samedi en Gériatrie, je me souviens avoir fait une petite visite de courtoisie avec le Grand Chef, le Dr Vieillardunpeusourd. "Bonjour Mme Nemo, comment allez-vous aujourd’hui ?" Silence. Silence. "Bon. Silence. "Quoi ! Uppercut. Argh.
The Wonderful and Terrible Habit of Buying Too Many Books Not pictured: annoyed roommate “…ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.” -Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library” Last weekend, I found myself killing a Saturday afternoon at one of my favorite bookstores, McNally Jackson. This past weekend, I found myself killing a Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn, at what’s becoming one of my favorite bookstores, Book Thug Nation (extra points for the gentleman working the desk, for his great conversation on horror books and films). Depending on how you feel about books, you could call this either a habit of mine or a problem of mine. If book buying addiction wasn’t a real thing, articles like this and this wouldn’t exist, and searching for “book clutter” on Google wouldn’t turn up 18 million results.
bouletcorp Some of my worst friends are books | Rick Gekoski A number of modern novelists have remarked on the profound oddity – or "madness", as Henry James (among others) once described it – of the way in which a novelist becomes inhabited by persons and voices. Rather than regarding creativity as a benign or even divine form of inspiration, several have gone so far as to label this state of receptivity as a form of mitigated psychosis. Edward Albee calls it "controlled" schizophrenia, while EL Doctorow prefers the qualifier "socially acceptable". I suspect neither of them has much experience of real schizophrenia, of the relentlessness and the terror of being inhabited by voices that are neither summoned nor biddable. But what about the experience of the reader, who is also invaded by voices? They are not of his own making. It is instructive, and a little alarming, to observe how highly literary people write about the crises in their own lives, and the role that books can play in responding to them. There's the rub, of course.
Eolas : Journal d'un avocat The Business Case for Reading Novels - Anne Kreamer by Anne Kreamer | 4:02 PM January 11, 2012 I’ve been a devoted, even fanatical reader of fiction my whole life, but sometimes I feel like I’m wasting time if I spend an evening immersed in Lee Child’s newest thriller, or re-reading The Great Gatsby. Shouldn’t I be plowing through my in-box? Or getting the hang of some new productivity app? Over the past decade, academic researchers such as Oatley and Raymond Mar from York University have gathered data indicating that fiction-reading activates neuronal pathways in the brain that measurably help the reader better understand real human emotion — improving his or her overall social skillfulness. In one of Oatley and Mar’s studies in 2006, 94 subjects were asked to guess the emotional state of a person from a photograph of their eyes. Theory of mind, the ability to interpret and respond to those different from us — colleagues, employees, bosses, customers and clients — is plainly critical to success, particularly in a globalized economy.
L'actu en patates | Martin Vidberg Some thoughts (not mine) on the impatient writer and reader Today, I read two articles shared by friends on Facebook that describe (and justify) two diametrically different approaches to literature as a source of enjoyment. The first article, posted by Sharon Bakar, justifies the impatient, let's-cut-to-the-chase approach (Robert McCrum, "Are you ashamed of skipping parts of books?", The other, posted by Eric Forbes, defends the leisurely, let's-savour-every-nuance approach (Pico Iyer, "The writing life: the point of the long and winding sentence", We may be inclined to think that the preference for short, pithy narratives is a 21st-century phenomenon, the direct result of our technologically enabled habit of consuming (and serving) information in tweets and other small sound bytes. --Leo Lowenthal, Literature and Mass Culture (1984)--
Maître Mô Are you ashamed of skipping parts of books? | Robert McCrum Over recent days, I've been reading Somerset Maugham's Ten Novels and Their Authors in the Vintage edition (a Christmas gift). Before he gets stuck into the lives and masterpieces of 10 great authors (the book began as a commission from Redbook in the early 50s), Maugham gives us an essay on "The Art of Fiction" in which he devotes quite a bit of space to "the useful art of skipping". Skipping, says Maugham, is perfectly fine, because "a sensible person does not read a novel as a task. Whereupon a chasm seemed to open up between this reader of 2012, and the reader (or writer) of 1952, for whom the novel is to be treated as an entertainment. All of this – and there's much more in Maugham's first chapter – led me to wonder about our attitude to skipping now. Either way, I very much doubt that writing schools give any space to the idea that there are some passages in great novels that are so profoundly boring they should not detain our attention. 1. Other nominations, please?
grands moments Is reading on the loo bad for you? The toilet papers ... experts believe the risk of spreading germs to loo-side literature is actually quite small. Photograph: Garry Weaser for the Guardian From the moment Ron Shaoul took it upon himself to investigate the practice of reading on the toilet, scouring medical literature and turning up nothing of note as to its public health consequences, the situation became clear that here, on his hands, was a big job. Shaoul's curiosity was driven by his work as a doctor specialising in paediatric gastroenterology. He mustered some colleagues, drew up a questionnaire and had hundreds of people of all shapes and sizes complete it. What resulted was perhaps the most scientific attempt yet to shine light on a habit that rustles unseen behind closed doors. Shaoul, who published his study in 2009, lamented that toilet reading was woefully neglected by scientists, considering the habit probably dated back to the emergence of printed books. Shaoul cast his net wide.
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