10 Reasons Why Cormac McCarthy Is A Badass Cormac McCarthy is one of our greatest living American novelists. Author of Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road (which won the Pulitzer Prize), McCarthy is a poetic storyteller whose challenging novels explore themes of violence, good and evil, and human survival. Although he’s definitely not everyone’s taste (several of my friends positively loathe him), I personally think the guy is a literary badass. Here are 10 reasons why I do. 1. 2. The dead lay awash in the shallows like the victims of some disaster at sea and they were strewn along the salt foreshore in a havoc of blood and entrails. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. You know what the date on this coin is? But McCarthy’s supreme achievement in this regard is Judge Holden from Blood Meridian, whose monologue on war might be one of the most terrifying—and terrifyingly logical—meditations about the will-to-power I’ve ever read: Men are born for games. 8. 9. 10.
Fun With Words: Glossary of Linguistics and Rhetoric ablaut a vowel change that accompanies a change in grammatical function. Same as "gradation." accidence the part of morphology that deals with the inflections of words. accismus pretended refusal of something desired. acrolect a variety of language that is closest to a standard main language, especially in an area where a creole is also spoken. adianoeta an expression that carries both an obvious meaning and a second, subtler meaning. adnominal characteristic of an adnoun. adnominatio assigning to a proper name its literal or homophonic meaning; also, paronomasia or polyptoton. adnoun the use of an adjective as a noun. adynaton a declaration of impossibility, usually expressed as an exaggerated comparison with a more obvious impossibility. alexia inability to read, usually caused by brain lesions; word blindness. alliteration repetition of the same sound beginning several words placed close together, usually adjacent. alphabetism the expression of spoken sounds by an alphabet. ambigram amelioration
Artist Francis Bacon on the Role of Suffering and Self-Knowledge in Creative Expression by Maria Popova “An artist must learn to be nourished by his passions and by his despairs.” “When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer… his unique opportunity lies in the way he bears his burden,” Viktor Frank wrote in his spectacular 1946 treatise on the human search for meaning. We’re immersed in a great deal of cultural mythology regarding spiritual and psychoemotional suffering, but nowhere is it more dangerously romanticized than in the “tortured genius” myth of creative destiny — a myth whose patron saints include tragic heroes like Vincent van Gogh, David Foster Wallace and Sylvia Plath. It’s a formulation of creative pathology that I’ve always found toxic, and yet beneath it lies a deeper conversation about the role of suffering in human life and creative expression. Portrait of Francis Bacon by Irving Penn I think that life is violent and most people turn away from that side of it in an attempt to live a life that is screened. Of course I suffer. Donating = Loving
Pixar's 22 Rules of Storytelling IPA Typewriter If the title above does not display correctly, you should click on "About" to find out how to get a unicode font. Introduction You can use this tool to type phonemic symbols to be inserted in a word processor. You can also use it to produce the code needed to insert phonemic symbols in a web page. To start work, use the buttons below to choose which you want to do. Use the "About" button to get more information anbout using phonetic symbols in word documents and web pages. Use the "Intro" button to get back to this page. I would be grateful for feedback about this tool. Word Processing Use the phonetic chart on the right to type the text that you want. When you are ready to copy what you have typed, first click the button below. Your text will appear in a pop-up window. Go to your word document and press Ctrl+V (Cmd+V in a Mac), or the Paste button, in order to paste in the word. You may need to adjust the font of the text in your document. Web Tool
7 of the most badass women who ever lived (who you've probably never heard of) For centuries, women all over the world have fought and ruled, written and taught. They’ve done business, explored, revolted and invented. They’ve done everything men have done — and a lot of things they haven’t. Some of these women we know about. But so many others we don’t. For every Joan of Arc, there’s a Mongolian wrestler princess; for every Mata Hari, there’s a Colombian revolutionary spy; for every Ada Lovelace, there’s a pin-up Austrian telecoms inventor. More from GlobalPost: 8 reasons Uruguay is not all that The women who shaped our planet are too many to mention, so here are just a few of the most frankly badass females of all time. 1. A modern-day Khutulun takes aim in Ulan Bator. In the 13th century, when khans ruled Central Asia and you couldn’t go 10 minutes without some Genghis, Kublai or Mongke trying to take over your steppe, women were well-versed in badassery. One woman, however, had the combination of both skill and might. Mai Bhago, the 18th-century Sikh Joan of Arc.
Maya Angelou on Identity and the Meaning of Life by Maria Popova “Life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you.” The light of the world has grown a little dimmer with the loss of the phenomenal Maya Angelou, but her legacy endures as a luminous beacon of strength, courage, and spiritual beauty. Angelou’s timeless wisdom shines with unparalleled light in a 1977 interview by journalist Judith Rich, found in Conversations with Maya Angelou (public library) — the same magnificent tome that gave us the beloved author’s conversation with Bill Moyers on freedom — in which Angelou explores issues of identity and the meaning of life. Reflecting on her life, Angelou — who rose to cultural prominence through the sheer tenacity of her character and talent, despite being born into a tumultuous working-class family, abandoned by her father at the age of three, and raped at the age of eight — tells Rich: I’ve been very fortunate… I seem to have a kind of blinkers. The kindnesses … I never forget them. Donating = Loving
The Ego and the Universe: Alan Watts on Becoming Who You Really Are by Maria Popova The cause of and cure for the illusion of separateness that keeps us from embracing the richness of life. During the 1950s and 1960s, British philosopher and writer Alan Watts began popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, offering a wholly different perspective on inner wholeness in the age of anxiety and what it really means to live a life of purpose. Alan Watts, early 1970s (Image courtesy of Everett Collection) Though strictly nonreligious, the book explores many of the core inquiries which religions have historically tried to address — the problems of life and love, death and sorrow, the universe and our place in it, what it means to have an “I” at the center of our experience, and what the meaning of existence might be. The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are — as now practiced — like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. Religions are divisive and quarrelsome. 'Möbius Structure of Relationships' by David Byrne.
Andy Warhol on Sex and Love by Maria Popova “Romance is finding your fantasy in people who don’t have it.” “Is sex necessary?” young E.B. White and James Thurber asked in their endlessly delightful 1929 collaboration. Warhol, who identified as gay and whose work drew heavily on his participation in the LGBT community, confessed to his biographer in 1980, at the age of fifty-two, that he was still a virgin. Portrait of Andy Warhol by Jack Mitchell Warhol’s central premise is that our greatest anguish about love and sex comes from the buildup of our fantasies and their inevitable clash with reality — the bodily counterpart to Stendhal’s “crystallization” theory. The most exciting thing is not-doing-it. Consciously or not, his facetious approach to the subject becomes a meta-testament to his core admonition — that we, as a culture, are taking sex far too seriously to actually derive joy from it. There should be a course in the first grade on love. Illustration from 'This Is Warhol.' Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Little-Known, Gorgeous Art by Maria Popova An important side of the beloved writer, who was as much an artist of pictures as he was of words. Storytelling icon J.R.R. Wayne G. We have long felt that Tolkien’s art deserves to be as well known as his writings. Fortunately, a wealth of Tolkien’s art survives, for the beloved author seems to have had “an archivist’s soul,” as Hammond and Scull aptly put it: He kept nearly everything he drew, down to the scraps of paper filled with spontaneous doodles, and carefully tucked his most prized creations into special envelopes which he opened periodically to add captions and inscriptions years after the drawings were made. 'They Slept in Beauty Side by Side' | Pencil Tolkien drew this in early 1904, when he was twelve, when his mother was hospitalized for diabetes and he had to stay with her younger sister, Jane, in Sussex. 'Untitled (Two Boys at the Seaside)' | Watercolor, pencil 'Water, Wind & Sand' | Pencil, watercolor, white body color. 'Gandalf' | Pencil, colored pencil
"I Like To Employ The Power Of No": Jared Leto Jared Leto is backstage at a major concert venue in Romania just a few hours before his band, Thirty Seconds to Mars, will headline for throngs of ecstatic fans. Leto could be boasting about the group's triumphant growth over the past decade, from minor opening act to bona fide phenomenon. (Two days before, the group packed a venue in Hungary, and tomorrow it will be Bulgaria, part of a worldwide tour that will extend from South America to South Africa.) Leto could be harping on his Academy Award earlier this year for his role in the movie Dallas Buyers Club. Instead, though, he is talking about enterprise software. Yep, Leto is a tech geek. Leto is not just a pretty face, though his pretty face has been getting him noticed since he starred as Jordan Catalano in the ABC sitcom My So-Called Life in the 1990s. What Leto has embraced is that he can't engage in all these activities without discipline. Leto turns almost philosophical in explaining why focus is so important in today's world.
Ursula K. Le Guin on Aging and What Beauty Really Means by Maria Popova “There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.” “A Dog is, on the whole, what you would call a simple soul,” T.S. Eliot simpered in his beloved 1930s poem “The Ad-dressing of Cats,” proclaiming that “Cats are much like you and me.” Le Guin contrasts the archetypal temperaments of our favorite pets: Dogs don’t know what they look like. Artwork from 'The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs.' Cats, on the other hand, have a wholly different scope of self-awareness: Cats know exactly where they begin and end. Illustration by Wendy MacNaughton based on Gay Talese's taxonomy of cats. More than that, Le Guin notes, cats are aesthetes, vain and manipulative in their vanity. Cats have a sense of appearance. Artwork from 'The Big New Yorker Book of Cats.' A master of bridging the playful and the poignant, Le Guin returns to the human condition: It was endearingly funny, but it was also simply true: his body is almost perfect. Ursula K.