Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 100
June 8, 2012
A Golden Age of Books? There Were Only 500 Real Bookstores in 1931
In the entire country, there were only some four thousand places where a book could be purchased, and most of these were gift shops and stationary stores that carried only a few popular novels,” Davis writes. “In reality, there were but five hundred or so legitimate bookstores that warranted regular visits from publishers’ salesmen (and in 1931 they were all men). Of these five hundred, most were refined, old-fashioned ‘carriage trade’ stores catering to an elite clientele in the nation’s twelve largest cities.
Kinsight for Kinect tracks household items, finds the remote for you, is super spooky
The Kinsight can tell you the last place the object was seen to aid
your search. Currently, different objects need to be manually
programmed to be searchable, but New Scientist reports that developers
intend to make a smartphone app for this function. The program still
runs into issues with small, distant, grouped, or transparent objects,
so we’ll likely be asking “where did I leave it?” for a while to come.
Is Death Bad for You?
In thinking about this question, I am simply going to assume that the death of my body is the end of my existence as a person. (If you don’t believe me, read the first nine chapters of my book.) But if death is my end, how can it be bad for me to die? After all, once I’m dead, I don’t exist. If I don’t exist, how can being dead be bad for me?
"Although officially stifled, Akhmatova’s work continued to circulate in secret (samizdat), her work..."
Although officially stifled, Akhmatova’s work continued to circulate in secret (samizdat), her work hidden, passed and read in the gulags.
Akhmatova’s close friend and chronicler Lydia Chukovskaya described how writers working to keep poetic messages alive used various strategies. A small trusted circle would, for example, memorize each others’ works and circulate them only by oral means. She tells how Akhmatova would write out her poem for a visitor on a scrap of paper to be read in a moment, then burnt in her stove. The poems were carefully disseminated in this way, however it is likely that many complied in this manner were lost. “It was like a ritual,” Chukovskaya wrote. “Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.”
”-
Anna Akhmatova (via mollycrabapple)
create dangerously.
(via champagnecandy)
June 7, 2012
Up from the Streets
“It shocks me when young kids still say, ‘I want to do a magazine,’ ” he says. “Really? Do you want to do a magazine because you want to be an editor—what you think that life is, that romance—or do you want to communicate? Because if you want to communicate, why the fuck would you put all those obstacles in your path and have to print pages, as opposed to going right on the Internet and actually communicating?”
