Bill Cheng's Blog, page 27

awesomepeoplereading:Chandler reads and...

awesomepeoplereading:

Chandler reads and edits.

vintagecrimeblacklizard:

Raymond Chandler to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame! 

Said Philip Marlowe, “Hollywood is the kind of town where they stick a knife in your back and then have you arrested for carrying a concealed weapon.”

millionsmillions:“Soccer inspires passions that make fans do...

millionsmillions:

“Soccer inspires passions that make fans do strange things, from the horrifying to the amusing.” The Millions’ own Bill Morris writes about the World Cup, soccer hooliganism, and Bill Buford‘s Among the Thugs.

wagemut:long time no see. Some great capricorn beetles

wagemut:

long time no see. Some great capricorn beetles

believermag:Drawing by Josephine DemmeFiction SeminarBen...

believermag:

Drawing by Josephine Demme

Fiction Seminar

Ben Marcus

Technologies of Heartbreak 

This seminar will examine how emotion is attempted and transmitted in fiction, the various ways readers are captured and made to care about a story.  Emotional effects—rapture, sympathy, desire, empathy, fascination, grief, repulsion—will be considered as techniques of language, enabled or muted by narrative context, acoustics, phrasing, and our own predispositions.  How can a sentence, a phrase, a paragraph cause us to feel things, and is a high degree of feeling akin to “liking” a book?  What is it to care about a character or the progress of a story, and how was that care installed in us?  What are the various kinds and sequences of sentences that, when placed in a narrative, can produce emotional engagement in a reader, affection or distraction, or is it impossible to isolate our reaction to a book in terms of its language?  The focus will be on some rhetorical strategies novelists and story writers have used to impart feeling, among them: concealment, indirection, revelation, confession, flat affect, irony, hyperbole, repetition, sentimentality, elusiveness, and sincerity.  A tentative book list follows. 

2/4 - Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates

2/11 - Mrs. Bridge - Evan S. Connell

2/18 - Everything That Rises Must Converge - Flannery O’Connor

2/25 - A Personal Matter - Kenzabarō Ōe

3/1 - Jernigan - David Gates

3/4  - Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson

3/11 - The Emigrants - W. G. Sebald

3/25 -  Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson 

4/1 - Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

4/8 - The Fifth Child - Doris Lessing

4/22 - Two Serious Ladies - Jane Bowles

4/29 - The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles

5/6 - Correction - Thomas Bernhard

See an interview with Ben Marcus about the syllabus.

Awwwwesome

"Conversations about hospice and end-of-life care often occur only with patients who independently..."

“Conversations about hospice and end-of-life care often occur only with patients who independently choose to have them. Only those who have the desire for control and choice and the resources to pursue them are guaranteed to be informed of their options, including hospice. In such an environment, minority and low income groups often aren’t getting quality care because the medical community has failed to win their trust, to inform them of their choices, to ask them how they want to die, even to tell them that they are dying.

In many of these cases, fear of the medical community is well founded. History has proven that predatory, racialized research and treatment practices can be deadly. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment studied infected black sharecroppers for decades but never treated them. Several U.S. states have a history of performing forced sterilizations on incarcerated and institutionalized black women. The suggestion that a dying patient consider hospice can also sometimes sound insensitive, as if some lives are not worth the effort or cost of aggressive treatment.”

- Ann Neumann: How the Other Half Dies - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics (via guernicamag)

"…it’s a substitute for war. Everything we’re doing in the world today has to do with destruction and..."

“…it’s a substitute for war. Everything we’re doing in the world today has to do with destruction and death and murder and war, and we need something to make us all feel better, and that’s space travel.”

-

Ray Bradbury, speaking about the purpose of manned space exploration in a 2003 interview following the launch of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers to Mars.

The full interview, which you can hear in the video below from Brain Pickings, is a bit of a pessimistic take on things, but his call for inspirational change in our schools and culture is a good one. Either way, his interview is a wonderful mediation on optimism vs. pessimism and the human drive to discover new things and (hopefully) be better than we were yesterday.

What do you think, have things improved since 2003? Would Ray be happy with us?

Source: Ray Bradbury on space exploration, education, and legacy from Maria Popova on Vimeo

Recommended: Peter Diamandis’ TED Talk on Abundance, to which he published a book by the same title, 'Abundance: Why The Future Is Better Than You Think’

Need more convincing? Browse my archive of Peter Diamandis posts.

(via sagansense)

brianmichaelbendis:Would you like a signed and limited copy of...

brianmichaelbendis:

Would you like a signed and limited copy of Words for Pictures my new comic creation book from Random House??

follow the link and interactions!!

http://snapp.to/1oHLrjO

newyorker:A look at photographs from the Coney Island Mermaid...

newyorker:

A look at photographs from the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, a celebration of the beginning of summer: http://nyr.kr/1uYSp1j

All photographs by Jonno Rattman.

The inimitable Jeffrey Rotter’s (@JeffreyRotter) new story...

The inimitable Jeffrey Rotter’s (@JeffreyRotter) new story Autumn leaves, is up on the Boston Review:

I ought to show more concern for the dog’s welfare. Instead, here is what I am thinking: that humans are craven apes. We act so hot, but even our language betrays us.

""Cheshire’s debut novel triangulates between contemporary New York City and Southern California and..."

“

"Cheshire’s debut novel triangulates between contemporary New York City and Southern California and nineteenth-century Kentucky in this vivid, visceral tale about a son schooled in the holy fire of old-time religion who must seek bold new bonds with his evangelical father, his departed mother, his ex-wife, and his own richly transformed inner life."

—Elle

”

- (via scottcheshire)