January 2011
55 posts
Déjà Vu: Ride the Revolutionary Wave →
The Swiss Civil War was the tipping point that sent Europe into widespread revolution in 1848. Was Tunisia the spark that might lead to widespread revolt across the Arab world?
“We are not like Baghdad!”
– Shout reported by the AP outside of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo after the army secured the museum against looting. After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, thousands of ancient treasures were looted from Baghdad’s museums.
The Art of War
All the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great art ever yet rose on Earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no art among a shepherd people if it remains at peace. There is no art among an agricultural people if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely consistent with fine art, but cannot produce it. Manufacture not only is unable to produce it, but invariably destroys...
"The Sound and the Furious"
Just a little something that a few of us have been piddling around with on Twitter this afternoon: big-budget adaptations of William Faulkner novels.
“The Sound and the Furious” (duh)
“The Sound and the Furious 2: 2 Sound, 2 Furious”
“The Sound and the Furious 3: The Sounder and More Furiouser”
“Go Down Moses‚ Because I Punched You in the Face”
...
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Déjà Vu: Bigger Than Big
2011, China
“The ‘Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One’ scheme will create a 16,000 square mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales. The new mega-city will cover a large part of China’s manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen,...
Charles Dickens and John Lennon Face the Paparazzi
Charles Dickens: I have come at last, and it is time I did, to my life here, and intentions for the future. I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing that I want to see. If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude. If I stay at home, the house becomes, with callers, like a fair.
John Lennon: The bigger we got, the more unreality we had to face, the more we were expected to do, until when you didn’t shake hands with the mayor’s wife, she starts abusing you and screaming or saying, “How dare they?” There’s one story where we were asleep after a session, somewhere in America, and this mayor’s wife comes and says, “Get ’em up! I want to meet them.” And our publicist Derek said, “I’m not going to wake them up.” And she starts saying, “You get them up, I’ll tell the press!”
Dickens: I take my seat in a railroad car, and the very conductor won’t leave me alone. I get out at a station and can’t drink a glass of water without having a hundred people looking down my throat when I open my mouth to swallow. Conceive what all this is! Then by every post, letters on letters arrive, all about nothing, and all demanding an immediate answer. This man is offended because I won’t live in his house, and that man is thoroughly disgusted because I won’t go out more than four times in one evening. I have no rest or peace and am in a perpetual worry.
Lennon: Couldn’t take it. It hurt me so; I would go insane, swearing at them and whatever. It was awful. All that business was awful. It was a fuckin’ humiliation. One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that’s what I resent. I did it, but I didn’t know, I didn’t foresee that, it just happened bit by bit till this complete craziness is surrounding you. And you’re doing exactly what you don’t want to do with people you can’t stand—the people you hated when you were ten.
“How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!”
– O.W. Holmes, 1858
“She let herself sink backward among the pillows, and already Mr. Palmato was on...”
– Edith Wharton, from Beatrice Palmato, a prose fragment. Happy Birthday Edith! Who wants to finish her erotic incest novel as a present?
Herman Melville Likes Your Beard
towirr:
Or as he calls them, in order, in two chapters of White Jacket:
beards
the crop
suburbs of the chin
homeward-bounders
fly-brushes
long, trailing moss hanging from the bough of some aged oak
love-curls
Winnebago locks
carroty bunches
rebellious bristles
redundant mops
yellow bamboos
long whiskers
thrice-noble beards
plantations of hair
whiskerandoes
nodding harvests
viny...
TED Talks Throughout History →
Have We Been Worshiping the Wrong Sacred Tree?
The Wheel Will Change the Way We Live Forever, Once We Turn It on Its Side and Attach It to Something, But What?
Global Initiatives for Making God Less Angry
We Already Have the Technology to Turn Lead into Gold. Why Aren’t We Doing It?
Edgar Allan Poe: The Original Balloon Boy →
mentalflossr:
Edgar Allan Poe was born 202 years ago yesterday. To celebrate, here’s a Poe story you might not have heard before.
You probably remember 2009’s infamous “Balloon Boy” hoax. Turns out the Heene family that perpetrated that fraud weren’t even being entirely original in their attention grabbing. They were actually cribbing from Poe.
In 1844 Poe cooked up a similar aviation...
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“It is better to read Carlyle in your own study chair than to visit the...”
– Virginia Woolf on the value of writers’ houses. On our Roundtable blog, A.N. Devers recounts the history of literary pilgrimage in her new essay “House Hunters.”
All Hail Sleepover
The design machines at Sleepover—the creators of the LQ Tumblr—have struck again, this time in the form of a beautiful new Tumblr for PRI. Will Sleepover soonrise up and dominate the entire Tumblr media design landscape? We welcome our design overlords!
publicradiointernational:
Exciting news: We’ve launched a new design for the PRI Tumblr! It was done by the very talented folks at Sleepover...
Ben Franklin Pissed in the Brook
mentalflossr:
Ben Franklin turned 305 today! To celebrate, here’s a list of expressions meaning “inebriated” that Franklin first published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on January 6, 1737.
The Drinkers Dictionary
A He is Addled, He’s casting up his Accounts, He’s Afflicted, He’s in his Airs. B He’s Biggy, Bewitch’d, Block and Block, Boozy, Bowz’d, Been at Barbadoes, Piss’d in the...
“I hope you can see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I...”
– Martin Luther King, from a “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Today is the holiday’s 25th anniversary.
“Some [assassins] hoped to achieve notoriety by killing a well-known person....”
– “Secret Service Study Probes Psyche of US Assassins,” Wired.
“The reality is that paper has grown consistently over the past three decades....”
– Anne Mulcahy, CEO of Xerox, 2009. And you thought the internet made paperwork obsolete.
The Space Between Us
Oh the number of people who have told me this is proper typing technique… I would really like to make a chant à la Animal Farm, “One space good! Two spaces bad!”
motherjones:
“In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine’s shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though...
“No more rhyme for—or rather, from—me. I have taken my leave of that stage and...”
– Lord Byron, from a letter to Thomas Moore, 1814
downlookingup asked: Is it a paid internship?
Two New Internships at LQ
Like this Tumblr? Like our events? We’re excited to offer two new internships at Lapham’s Quarterly. Please read carefully, as we will only consider applications that follow the instructions, and please note the deadlines, they’re sooner than you might think!
Web Internship
The web intern should be a creative aggregator and internet obsessive, familiar with history feeds and...
Follow You Until You Love Me
It’s always around this time of day on a Tuesday that I lift my nose out of a yellowing and likely overdue library book and realize that I haven’t recommended anyone on Tumblr. I just get so wrapped up in things you know? Hm…maybe it’s time for tea…NO! Recommendations first!
War is Peace
I Love Charts
Word Brooklyn
McNally Jackson
New Directions
University of...
Liszt Has Entered the Building
He is here—the Attila, the scourge of God for all the pianos of Erard, which tremble already at the news of his coming, and which now once more are convulsed, bleed, and wail under his hands, so that the Society for the Protection of Animals really ought to look after them!
Heinrich Heine, from “The Musical Season of 1844” in which he described various audience reactions to Franz Liszt, and...
“I do have one very brutal writing ritual. If I’m working in the morning, I...”
– Anthony Lane in the Daily Telegraph. Have you earned your cup of tea yet?
Think About It
Yesterday was our fearless leader Lewis Lapham’s 76th birthday, and he disclosed an interesting coincidence to us last night over drinks: He was born in the same year, on the same day, and at the same exact time as Elvis.
“Train cases, blue lung, marines uniform underwear, correct pronunciation of...”
– “Things I Have Needed to Google While Writing Poems to Turn Into My MFA Workshop,” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
