1. David Foster Wallace on fiction….

    Highlights from The Charlie Rose Show: “A conversation about the future of fiction in the information age with David Foster Wallace, author of “Jest”, Jonathan Franzen, author of “Strong”, and Mark Leyner, author of “Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog”. on Friday, May 17, 1996”

     
  2. (via Woody Harrelson Profile - Woody Harrelson Rampart Interview - Esquire)
Excerpts:
“I was on a bus and some girl sees me blowing my nose,” Harrelson is saying of his early years trying to make it as an actor in New York. “I had acne all over my face, which I’d had for years and years. And she’s like: ‘Hey, you’re lactose intolerant. If you quit dairy, all these symptoms you got will be gone in three days.’ I was like twenty-four. And I was like,No way. But three days later: gone.
“So I started thinking to myself, Jeez, I’ve always been told nothing but ‘Milk does a body good.’ It’s a fundamental thing. So from there it was like, What else are they lying about? I just started realizing: There are all these things we’re brought up to believe that are just a total hoax, just bullshit advertising, you know?”

…
Woody Harrelson is a raw vegan and eco-radical, a close friend of Julia Butterfly Hill, that grrl who lived in the tree. He’s gotten himself arrested demonstrating and planting hemp seeds. He prefers to ride only in energy-efficient cars. If the air-conditioning is on, he’ll ask you to turn it off. “You know how hard it is to be in Austin, Texas, in July and not be exposed to perpetual AC?” It seems like everywhere he looks, somebody is running a leaf blower, “chasing around one fucking leaf for five minutes … only to have the neighbor’s gardener blow it back into their yard the next day.”
He doesn’t eat sugar or flour. He doesn’t eat dairy. He doesn’t consume meat. He looks more like thirty-nine than fifty. He does consume marijuana, but preferably via a vaporizer, which is said to be healthier but kind of lacks the same punch as smoking. He lives with his family on a working organic farm on Maui — biodiesel tractor, five different kinds of avocado trees, tons of coconuts. When his eldest daughter turned four, after more than two years of agitation, she was allowed to sample chicken for the first time. Harrelson lobbied for a total experience, including a backyard slaughter. Mom opted for store-bought. “Tastes just like tofu,” his daughter concluded.

…
His father, Charles Voyde Harrelson, was an encyclopedia salesman and an armed robber who claimed to have participated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He was sentenced to two life terms in connection with the 1979 assassination of U. S. district judge John H. Wood. In 1995, he tried to escape from the Atlanta penitentiary using a homemade ladder but didn’t get far. In 1998, Woody led an unsuccessful effort to secure a new trial for his father, who claimed that evidence had been suppressed in his first trial. He died in his sleep in his cell in 2007 in a supermax prison in Colorado. Google him. There’s a mug shot from 1960. The resemblance is uncanny — Woody circa White Men. ”I look at him as someone who could be a friend more than someone who was a father,” Harrelson has said.
There is a quote from Carl Jung that Harrelson likes: “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/woody-harrelson-profile-0212#ixzz1kapLAcDs

    (via Woody Harrelson Profile - Woody Harrelson Rampart Interview - Esquire)

    Excerpts:

    “I was on a bus and some girl sees me blowing my nose,” Harrelson is saying of his early years trying to make it as an actor in New York. “I had acne all over my face, which I’d had for years and years. And she’s like: ‘Hey, you’re lactose intolerant. If you quit dairy, all these symptoms you got will be gone in three days.’ I was like twenty-four. And I was like,No way. But three days later: gone.

    “So I started thinking to myself, Jeez, I’ve always been told nothing but ‘Milk does a body good.’ It’s a fundamental thing. So from there it was like, What else are they lying about? I just started realizing: There are all these things we’re brought up to believe that are just a total hoax, just bullshit advertising, you know?”

    Woody Harrelson is a raw vegan and eco-radical, a close friend of Julia Butterfly Hill, that grrl who lived in the tree. He’s gotten himself arrested demonstrating and planting hemp seeds. He prefers to ride only in energy-efficient cars. If the air-conditioning is on, he’ll ask you to turn it off. “You know how hard it is to be in Austin, Texas, in July and not be exposed to perpetual AC?” It seems like everywhere he looks, somebody is running a leaf blower, “chasing around one fucking leaf for five minutes … only to have the neighbor’s gardener blow it back into their yard the next day.”

    He doesn’t eat sugar or flour. He doesn’t eat dairy. He doesn’t consume meat. He looks more like thirty-nine than fifty. He does consume marijuana, but preferably via a vaporizer, which is said to be healthier but kind of lacks the same punch as smoking. He lives with his family on a working organic farm on Maui — biodiesel tractor, five different kinds of avocado trees, tons of coconuts. When his eldest daughter turned four, after more than two years of agitation, she was allowed to sample chicken for the first time. Harrelson lobbied for a total experience, including a backyard slaughter. Mom opted for store-bought. “Tastes just like tofu,” his daughter concluded.

    His father, Charles Voyde Harrelson, was an encyclopedia salesman and an armed robber who claimed to have participated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He was sentenced to two life terms in connection with the 1979 assassination of U. S. district judge John H. Wood. In 1995, he tried to escape from the Atlanta penitentiary using a homemade ladder but didn’t get far. In 1998, Woody led an unsuccessful effort to secure a new trial for his father, who claimed that evidence had been suppressed in his first trial. He died in his sleep in his cell in 2007 in a supermax prison in Colorado. Google him. There’s a mug shot from 1960. The resemblance is uncanny — Woody circa White Men. ”I look at him as someone who could be a friend more than someone who was a father,” Harrelson has said.

    There is a quote from Carl Jung that Harrelson likes: “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”


    Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/woody-harrelson-profile-0212#ixzz1kapLAcDs
     
  3. 100 Years in 10 Minutes (1911 - 2011 in 10 Minutes)


     
  4. 15:13

    Tags: life

    Good news!  You’ve been given moral free reign to go work for the big-time capitalists….

     
  5. ok, guys, I’ve signed up for

    CS 101: BUILDING A SEARCH ENGINE

    Learn programming in seven weeks. We’ll teach you enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!

    What about you?

     
  6. 14:59

    Tags: learning

    He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn’t continue teaching in a traditional setting. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said.

    One of Udacity’s first offerings will be a seven-week course called “Building a Search Engine.” It will be taught by David Evans, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Virginia and a Udacity partner. Mr. Thrun said it is designed to teach students with no prior programming experience how to build a search engine like Google. He hopes 500,000 students will enroll.

    Teaching the course at Stanford, Mr. Thrun said, showed him the potential of digital education, which turned out to be a drug that he could not ignore.

    “I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill,” he said. “And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”

     
  7. more re Joan Didion….

    I did on post on her “Why I Write” two years ago — which you may or may not remember — see http://kday.tumblr.com/day/2010/10/31

    More recently the Atlantic published this article — “The Autumn of Joan Didion” — which summarized her importance for women of my generation.

    Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. “I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,” a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence.

    Didion is the writer who expressed most eloquently the eternal-girl impulse, the one that follows us into adulthood: the desire to retreat to our room, to close the door, to spend some time alone with our thoughts and our feelings.
    Sometime you must read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”….
     
  8. A must-read blast from the past…

    The piece opens with a long list of the books and thinkers who have influenced Newt, including:

    an Omaha entrepreneur named Herman Cain (“who’s the head of Godfather Pizza, he’s an African-American who was born in Atlanta and his father was Woodruff’s chauffeur”)

    And later….

    The real substance of Mr. Gingrich’s political presence derives from his skill at massaging exhaustively researched voter preferences and prejudices into matters of lonely principle. The positions he takes are acutely tuned to the unexamined fears and resentments of large numbers of Americans, yet he stands, in his rhetoric, alone, opposed by “the system,” by “Washington,” by “the liberal elite,” by “the East Coast elite” (not by accident does a mention of Harvard in 1945 provoke the sympathetic President’s antipathy to “East Coast snobbery and intellectual hauteur”), or simply by an unspecified “they.” 

     
  9. 20:46 9th Jan 2012

    Notes: 20

    Reblogged from righthandturnlayne

    (Source: weheartit.com)

     
  10. 20:45

    Notes: 14

    Reblogged from prolixcorpuslibris

    Tags: poetry

    all new learning looks at first like chaos

    prolixcorpuslibris:

    from adrienne rich’s latest, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

    powers of recuperation

    iv.

    bridges       trajectories arched

    in shelter       rendezvous

    two banks to every river      two directions

    to every bridge

    twenty-eight chances

    every built thing has its unmeant purpose

    v.

    all new learning looks at first

    like chaos