Quick, who are these six people?
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Apparently, it’s all in the eyebrows. In an MIT study subjects were asked to identify celebrities by altered photos: without eyebrows, and without eyes. With eyebrows, but sans eyes, celebrities were recognised 60% of the time. With eyes but sans eyebrows, only 46% of the time. So, stop plucking them [...]
Postmodern Writer Is Found Dead at Home
Headline, New York Times, Sept 14, 2008
Interviewer: ‘What does postmodern mean in literature?’
Foster Wallace, smiling: ‘After modernism.’
‘… I think that postmodernism has to a large extent run its course.’ This, in 1997.
He doesn’t loom large in the Australian landscape as he does in the US. No matter, his effect [...]
Okay I’m not buying into the fight. (As Sophie Cunningham said, a few days ago: “When someone is clearly picking a fight, the temptation is just to ignore them.”) That’s the one over the Big Fat (1500 pages) Anthology of Australian Literature. But if you are interested in it, here are the links.
The most provocative [...]
As it is officially spring one turns towards poetry, much as Moe of the Stooges turned towards slapstick:
‘Niagara Falls! … Slowly I turned … and step by step, inch by inch I walked up to him and I smashed him, I *&% him, I $#@ him, I ±@* him, and I knocked him down!’
Niagara [...]
Celebrity schadenfreude* involving an author, and a philosopher at that, elevates it far above the midden material of a Britney or TomKat or Christian Bale fracas. The brow clash of Jonathan Franzen (high) and Oprah (lower middle) brought literary skirmishes into new media. (Martin Amis’ The Information moment in ’94 was a newspaper affair – [...]
Or Raymond Carver, or Joyce Carol Oates, or Alice Sebold, or John Irving, or Richard Ford? They all attended a Creative Writing course. If you’d like to learn to write but aren’t sure about hanging with all the other wannabes, check out the New Yorker, which asks – at fascinating length – should creative writing [...]
Yup, that’s all Winton below. Look, I was going to keep this post short, but the issue – the Productivity Commission report on “Copyright Restrictions on the Parallel Importation of Books”, in the hands of the government as of today – suffers from being crazy esoteric* while being indescribably crucial to whatever it is we [...]
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