![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.
thoughts?
Friends
Frequency and Serenity
08 January 2010 @ 03:55 pm
07 January 2010 @ 08:26 pm
"You don't understand what I mean," says her mother. "I'm trying to tell you. What perturbs me, in the few quiet moments I have when not worrying about feeding myself and my ugly daughters, is that life has wrung from me any ability to respond to the beauty of the world. I'm not sure I ever had the ability in the first place, even as a child. Whether it be Young Woman with Tulips," she goes on, holding her hand up high, "or this portrait of a burgher, or that study of a sleeping housemaid, or, for that matter, the moon that spills its cold light on this floor. I derive no pleasure from any of these effects. I look on them coldly and without interest. Is it my eyes, I wonder, or is it my soul that is bruised?"
-Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire
-Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire
07 January 2010 @ 11:58 pm
Yola was in a foul mood. She had discovered that morning, don't ask how, that the Slovak women who shared their hotel room had no pubic hair. How could this be permitted? Presumably they were not born this way -- well, presumably they were, but acquired it in the natural course of things, and had taken unnatural steps to remove it. There are many bad things that can be said about communism, but one thing is certain, in communist times women did not abuse their pubic hair in this way -- a practice which is unnatural, unsightly, undignified and, without being too specific, potentially dangerous.
07 January 2010 @ 01:10 pm
It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.
Stuff you liked
- Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif)
lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work. - We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more pouring through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
- Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
- Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
- After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
- Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.
You got your fix
- We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
- In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. For more info on voice posting, read here.
- At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.
Paid features you enjoyed
- In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
- This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
- When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
- How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted.
We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry inpaidmembers or check out the FAQ.
Mixed reviews
- The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
- This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
- We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
- We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.
Missing Inaction
- We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.
Stumbling points
- Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
- A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
- That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.
Full steam ahead!
As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!
07 January 2010 @ 01:44 pm
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
07 January 2010 @ 11:32 am
07 January 2010 @ 07:57 pm
Current Mood: 
bouncy
bouncyCurrent Music: Lykke Li - Possibility
07 January 2010 @ 12:01 pm
...The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.
But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history's absolution.
But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history's absolution.
07 January 2010 @ 02:58 am
♥ The Darwin Awards, named in honor of Charles Darwin, salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it - thereby ensuring that the next generation is descended from one less idiot. We applaud the heroic self-sacrifice of these noble men and women, who gave their all to improve the human race.
Of necessity, this Award is usually bestowed posthumously.
♥ In order to qualify for a Darwin Award a person must remove himself from the gene pool via an "astounding misapplication of judgement." Three liters of sherry up the butt can only be described as astounding.
♥ This is a true Darwin Award trifecta: two people die, while in the act of procreation, due to an astonishingly poor decision. Bottom line: If you put yourself in a precarious "position" at the edge of a pointy roof, you may well find yourself coming and going at the same time.
♥ The Darwin Awards provide ample evidence that huimans have no problem shuffling off this mortal coil as a result of plain old bad decisions. But adding mind-addling drugs to the decision-making process further impairs judgment and increases risk-taking behavior, setting the stage for some amusingly lethal acts of stupidity. From jumping into a bear cage while drunk (page 223) to partaking in alcohol enemas (page 4) acute inebriation has been the impetus behind many Darwin Awards.
♥ In a world full of wonders man invented boredom. So work time becomes playtime. If you work in an office, you reproduce your naughty bits on the copy machine. If you work for an arc welding company? A plastic bucket, welding materials, and a single spark can combine for a playdate with a bang.
♥ Any story that begins, "Well I was building a pipe bomb," can never end well.
♥ FAQ: How can I avoid a Darwin Award?
Take a few personal pledges:
"I will keep pointy metal objects away from electrical wires."
"I will not suck bees into a vacuum cleaner."
"I will not disable the safety."
"No rooftop romantic interludes for me!"
Beware of the following ideas:
"Instead of following standard procedure..."
"Attempting to impress the lady..."
"So he could save himself time..."
"They tested the ice by jumping up and down."
"A case of beer went into the planning."
"He is still convinced that the toadstool is harmless."
"He refused to let anyone call an ambulance."
"He thought he could outsmart the police."
"The diver had kissed hundreds of sharks."
"He deceived the radiation control supervisor."
"It's a nice snake. Nothing can happen."
Heed good advice:
"Never surf on a flooded street."
"We urge people not to drive with a burning grill in the vehicle."
"The stupidity of cutting through power cables should be obvious."
"Tossing random chemicals down the drain is not wise."
"Only an idiot would jump into the bear cage."
~~The Darwin Awards: Next Evolution, Chlorinating the Gene Pool by Wendy Northcutt.
Of necessity, this Award is usually bestowed posthumously.
♥ In order to qualify for a Darwin Award a person must remove himself from the gene pool via an "astounding misapplication of judgement." Three liters of sherry up the butt can only be described as astounding.
♥ This is a true Darwin Award trifecta: two people die, while in the act of procreation, due to an astonishingly poor decision. Bottom line: If you put yourself in a precarious "position" at the edge of a pointy roof, you may well find yourself coming and going at the same time.
♥ The Darwin Awards provide ample evidence that huimans have no problem shuffling off this mortal coil as a result of plain old bad decisions. But adding mind-addling drugs to the decision-making process further impairs judgment and increases risk-taking behavior, setting the stage for some amusingly lethal acts of stupidity. From jumping into a bear cage while drunk (page 223) to partaking in alcohol enemas (page 4) acute inebriation has been the impetus behind many Darwin Awards.
♥ In a world full of wonders man invented boredom. So work time becomes playtime. If you work in an office, you reproduce your naughty bits on the copy machine. If you work for an arc welding company? A plastic bucket, welding materials, and a single spark can combine for a playdate with a bang.
♥ Any story that begins, "Well I was building a pipe bomb," can never end well.
♥ FAQ: How can I avoid a Darwin Award?
Take a few personal pledges:
"I will keep pointy metal objects away from electrical wires."
"I will not suck bees into a vacuum cleaner."
"I will not disable the safety."
"No rooftop romantic interludes for me!"
Beware of the following ideas:
"Instead of following standard procedure..."
"Attempting to impress the lady..."
"So he could save himself time..."
"They tested the ice by jumping up and down."
"A case of beer went into the planning."
"He is still convinced that the toadstool is harmless."
"He refused to let anyone call an ambulance."
"He thought he could outsmart the police."
"The diver had kissed hundreds of sharks."
"He deceived the radiation control supervisor."
"It's a nice snake. Nothing can happen."
Heed good advice:
"Never surf on a flooded street."
"We urge people not to drive with a burning grill in the vehicle."
"The stupidity of cutting through power cables should be obvious."
"Tossing random chemicals down the drain is not wise."
"Only an idiot would jump into the bear cage."
~~The Darwin Awards: Next Evolution, Chlorinating the Gene Pool by Wendy Northcutt.
06 January 2010 @ 09:29 pm
In reference to a conversation I was just having:
"No one can read two thousand books. In the four hundred years I have lived, I've not read more than a half dozen. And in any case, it is not the reading that matters, but the rereading. Printing, which is now forbidden, was one of the worst evils of mankind, for it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to a dizzying degree."
And in reference to pretty much my view of power:
"Elections were called, wars were declared, taxes were levied, fortunes were confiscated, arrests were ordered, and attempts were made at imposing censorship--but no one on the planet paid any attention."
--Jorge Luis Borges, "A Weary Man's Utopia"
"No one can read two thousand books. In the four hundred years I have lived, I've not read more than a half dozen. And in any case, it is not the reading that matters, but the rereading. Printing, which is now forbidden, was one of the worst evils of mankind, for it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to a dizzying degree."
And in reference to pretty much my view of power:
"Elections were called, wars were declared, taxes were levied, fortunes were confiscated, arrests were ordered, and attempts were made at imposing censorship--but no one on the planet paid any attention."
--Jorge Luis Borges, "A Weary Man's Utopia"
07 January 2010 @ 11:55 am
“Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.”
“I hate them for it,” cried Hallward. “An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I hate them for it,” cried Hallward. “An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
06 January 2010 @ 07:42 pm
"A stranger enters a god-forsaken town locked in conflict between two factions, where both sides are equally bad and repugnant, and the audience welcomes the swathe of destruction that the hero creates as he exacts justice. There is something inherently appealing about this scenario. It speaks to a desire latent within all of us: that some agency will come and clean up the mess we have made of our society."
--Justin Howe, "Yojimbo", Directory of World Cinema: Japan
Free digital copy of this book available at http://worldcinemadirectory.org/ . It's decent, I'm disappointed to already know quite a bit about these movies from my own viewing of them and reading into Donald Richie and Tom Mes, but for anyone interested in Japanese cinema in general and not already familiar with it, it's a good place to start.
--Justin Howe, "Yojimbo", Directory of World Cinema: Japan
Free digital copy of this book available at http://worldcinemadirectory.org/ . It's decent, I'm disappointed to already know quite a bit about these movies from my own viewing of them and reading into Donald Richie and Tom Mes, but for anyone interested in Japanese cinema in general and not already familiar with it, it's a good place to start.
06 January 2010 @ 06:31 pm
My heart is weak and unreliable. I try to burden it as little as possible. If something is going to have an impact, I direct it elsewhere. My gut, for example, or my lungs. When I pass a mirror and catch a glimpse of myself, or I’m at the bus stop and some kids come up behind me and say, “Who smells shit?”—small daily humiliations that are par for the course—these I take, generally speaking, in my liver. The pancreas I reserve for being struck by all that’s been lost. It’s true that there’s so much, and the organ is so small. But. You would be surprised how much it can take. When I wake up and my fingers are stiff, almost certainly I was dreaming of my childhood. All the times I have suddenly remembered that my parents are dead (even now it still surprises me to exist in the world while those who made me have ceased to exist): my knees. To everything a season; to every time I’ve woken only to make the mistake of believing for a moment that someone is sleeping beside me: a hemorrhoid. Loneliness: there is no organ that can take it all.
- The Last Words on Earth, Nicole Krauss
(ie the short story upon which The History of Love is based)
- The Last Words on Earth, Nicole Krauss
(ie the short story upon which The History of Love is based)
06 January 2010 @ 11:18 pm
05 January 2010 @ 08:50 pm
“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance … till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake.”
05 January 2010 @ 04:38 pm
♥ Blind dates and setups of all kinds are completely useless, I long ago decided. Most intelligent men and women like to go forth into the world and stalk their own prey, choose their own mirrors of dysfunction, and repeat their own patterns of abusive relationships, without the well-meaning but futile efforts of friends.
♥ ...He looks away, his other hand quickly swiping at his eye. Was that a tear?
I fight the urge to gather him in my arms and cradle his head against my breasts. And rip off his clothes.
♥ ..As my bedside candles illuminate a page in the precious first edition I hold in my hands, I understand, as I have long understood through my own insatiable appetite for reading and rereadings of Jane Austen's six novels, why children want the same stories read to them a thousand times. There is comfort in the familiarity of it all, in the knowledge that all will turn out well, that Elizabeth and Darcy will end up together in Pemberley, that Anne Eliot will pierce Captain Wentworth's soul, and that Mr. Elton will be stuck with his caro sposa for the rest of his life. It is so unlike the unpredictability and unfairness of real-life endings and the half-life stasis I inhabit.
♥ We walk on for another minute while I contemplate the prudishness of a society that can hardly admit to the means by which the human species reproduces itself, let alone that those same humans actually participate in the process.
♥ The candlelight casts a flattering glow on everyone in the room, from the servants and old gentlemen in their powdered wigs and the young men with their hair au naturel, to the women, octogenarians and rosy-cheeked teenagers alike, clad in the uniform empire waistlines and long gloves, necks glittering with diamonds, gold, and pearls. This is the perfect light for a woman forced to appear in public without makeup.
Even the smell of the body odor has lost its usual overpowering quality tonight, heavily laced as it is with the mingled scents of soaps, perfumes, and the wax of a thousand melting candles. I can almost understand for a second, even in all my twenty-first-century fastidiousness, that one could come to like the scent of a ballroom. Is that Jane's sensibility, I wonder, that's responding to this particular mélange of scents? Or am I, my real self, responding to something else? Certainly I don't need a nineteenth-century frame of reference to pick up the erotic charge underlying the formality of the curtseys, bows, and nods of this elaborately stylized mating ritual.
~~Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler.
♥ ...He looks away, his other hand quickly swiping at his eye. Was that a tear?
I fight the urge to gather him in my arms and cradle his head against my breasts. And rip off his clothes.
♥ ..As my bedside candles illuminate a page in the precious first edition I hold in my hands, I understand, as I have long understood through my own insatiable appetite for reading and rereadings of Jane Austen's six novels, why children want the same stories read to them a thousand times. There is comfort in the familiarity of it all, in the knowledge that all will turn out well, that Elizabeth and Darcy will end up together in Pemberley, that Anne Eliot will pierce Captain Wentworth's soul, and that Mr. Elton will be stuck with his caro sposa for the rest of his life. It is so unlike the unpredictability and unfairness of real-life endings and the half-life stasis I inhabit.
♥ We walk on for another minute while I contemplate the prudishness of a society that can hardly admit to the means by which the human species reproduces itself, let alone that those same humans actually participate in the process.
♥ The candlelight casts a flattering glow on everyone in the room, from the servants and old gentlemen in their powdered wigs and the young men with their hair au naturel, to the women, octogenarians and rosy-cheeked teenagers alike, clad in the uniform empire waistlines and long gloves, necks glittering with diamonds, gold, and pearls. This is the perfect light for a woman forced to appear in public without makeup.
Even the smell of the body odor has lost its usual overpowering quality tonight, heavily laced as it is with the mingled scents of soaps, perfumes, and the wax of a thousand melting candles. I can almost understand for a second, even in all my twenty-first-century fastidiousness, that one could come to like the scent of a ballroom. Is that Jane's sensibility, I wonder, that's responding to this particular mélange of scents? Or am I, my real self, responding to something else? Certainly I don't need a nineteenth-century frame of reference to pick up the erotic charge underlying the formality of the curtseys, bows, and nods of this elaborately stylized mating ritual.
~~Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler.
05 January 2010 @ 09:09 pm
Your thoughts
day-dreaming in a pudden'-soft head
like an overfed lackey on a greasy sofa,
I'll tease with my heart's blood-streaming shred,
deride you, audacious, till you smart all over.
In my soul there isn't a single grey hair,
no senile tenderness does it hold!
My voice thundering everywhere,
I go, - handsome,
twenty-two-years old.
Tender lovers
with violins vie.
The ruder compete with cymbals.
But can anyone turn inside out like I
to be nothing but lips, bodiless and limbless?
Come and I'll teach you,
Miss Now-Now-No-Fooling,
angelic, stiff as the wall of a precipice.
Come you, too, who skim over lips as coolly
as a cook skims through books of cooking recipes.
If you want -
I can be all crazy flesh,
the antipode of polite romance.
Or
sweet and delicate as you wish;
not a man but a cloud in pants.
I'll never believe there's a flowery Nice.
Today once again I sing glory
to men who've sinned till they're sick of vice,
to women worn as a trite old story.
V.V. Mayakovsky
day-dreaming in a pudden'-soft head
like an overfed lackey on a greasy sofa,
I'll tease with my heart's blood-streaming shred,
deride you, audacious, till you smart all over.
In my soul there isn't a single grey hair,
no senile tenderness does it hold!
My voice thundering everywhere,
I go, - handsome,
twenty-two-years old.
Tender lovers
with violins vie.
The ruder compete with cymbals.
But can anyone turn inside out like I
to be nothing but lips, bodiless and limbless?
Come and I'll teach you,
Miss Now-Now-No-Fooling,
angelic, stiff as the wall of a precipice.
Come you, too, who skim over lips as coolly
as a cook skims through books of cooking recipes.
If you want -
I can be all crazy flesh,
the antipode of polite romance.
Or
sweet and delicate as you wish;
not a man but a cloud in pants.
I'll never believe there's a flowery Nice.
Today once again I sing glory
to men who've sinned till they're sick of vice,
to women worn as a trite old story.
V.V. Mayakovsky
05 January 2010 @ 06:06 pm
i just started this today and i already love it!
some choice quotes
PRIOR: I... I'm sorry. I usually say, "Fuck the truth," but mostly, the truth fucks you.
( and another )
some choice quotes
PRIOR: I... I'm sorry. I usually say, "Fuck the truth," but mostly, the truth fucks you.
( and another )
05 January 2010 @ 12:53 am
"A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called the “good bad book”: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished. Obviously outstanding books in this line are Raffles and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which have kept their place when innumerable “problem novels”, “human documents” and “terrible indictments” of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion."
- "Good Bad Books" by George Orwell
- "Good Bad Books" by George Orwell