Clipmarks | Kore7's Literature collection

Mapping Kerouac: The Grammatical Artwork of Stefanie Posavec

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:14:40 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: Posavec dissects every word, phrase, sentence, and subject of Kerouac's On the Road to invent new ways of looking at the familiar masterpiece. The diagrams make for beautiful art in their own right. (See source for high-res pictures.)

In her structure analysis, each chapter explodes in a color-coded starburst of topical breakdowns. At a glance, you can see Kerouac's focus wander from the sketches of local life in the beginning, to depictions of work and travel in the middle, with women and the subject of love dominating the latter chapters.

The comparative sentence diagrams are what really drew me in. It's fascinating to behold an entire literary work all at once on one page. What's more, Kerouac's casual prose style can be differentiated immediately from the stately, grandiose writing of Faulkner, not to mention the terse, claustrophobic style of Orwell's fiction.

Literary reductionism at its most fun and beautiful.

Clip Source: www.notcot.com

Stefanie’s maps capture something above and beyond that of the others. Rather than mapping physical geography, her maps capture regularities and patterns within a literary space.

The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor.

Tags: art, artwork, literature, kerouac, grammar, map

Mark Twain's "The War Prayer"

Mon, 28 May 2007 20:47:48 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: In 1904, disgusted by the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent Philippine-American War, Mark Twain wrote a short anti-war prose poem called "The War Prayer." His family begged him not to publish it, his friends advised him to bury it, and his publisher rejected it, thinking it too inflammatory for the times. Twain agreed, but instructed that it be published after his death, saying famously:

None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.

"The War Prayer" was eventually published after World War I, when its message was more in tune with the times. Now, Washington Monthly's publisher, Markos Kounalakis, who was affected by Twain's words when he covered the war in Yugoslavia in the early 90s, has made "The War Prayer" into a short video for release this Memorial Day weekend. It features stunning illustrations by Akis Dimitrakopoulos and is narrated by Peter Coyote, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Erik Bauersfeld.

*

Clip Source: youtube.com

The War Prayer Pt. 1

[Video]

Clip Source: youtube.com

The War Prayer Pt. 2

[Video]

Tags: mark twain, war, anti-war, prayer, god, nationalism, patriotism, animation, video, literature

25 Greatest Science Books of All Time

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 02:26:37 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks:

The Origin of Species (1859)

Darwin's masterwork is, undeniably, The Origin of Species, in which he introduced his theory of evolution by natural selection. Prior to its publication, the prevailing view was that each species had existed in its current form since the moment of divine creation and that humans were a privileged form of life, above and apart from nature. Darwin's theory knocked us from that pedestal. Wary of a religious backlash, he kept his ideas secret for almost two decades while bolstering them with additional observations and experiments. The result is an avalanche of detail—there seems to be no species he did not contemplate—thankfully delivered in accessible, conversational prose. A century and a half later, Darwin's paean to evolution still begs to be heard: "There is grandeur in this view of life," he wrote, that "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
Clip Source: discover.com

1. and 2. The Voyage of the Beagle (1845) and The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin [tie]

3. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) by Isaac Newton (1687)

4. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei (1632)

5. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus (1543)

6. Physica (Physics) by Aristotle (circa 330 B.C.)

7. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius (1543)

8. Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein (1916)

Clip Source: discover.com
9. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
10. One Two Three . . . Infinity by George Gamow (1947)

11. The Double Helix by James D. Watson (1968)
12. What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger (1944)
13. The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan (1973)

14. The Insect Societies by Edward O. Wilson (1971)
15. The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg (1977)
16. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
17. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (1981)

18. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1985)
Clip Source: discover.com
19. The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1814)
20. The Feynman Lectures on Physics by* Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands (1963)

21. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey et al. (1948)
22. Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey (1983)

23. Under a Lucky Star by Roy Chapman Andrews (1943)
24. Micrographia by Robert Hooke (1665)

25. Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
Honorable Mentions

Tags: science, book, books, reading, best of, list, history, literature, discover, darwin, newton, galileo

What Did Descartes Really Know? (Book Review)

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 17:03:19 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: Great review of two new Descartes biographies that set some of the records straight on the great naturalist's works.

Despite his current reputation, the man himself seems to have been less interested in metaphysics than in applying algebra to geometry and delving into the innards of cows. He turned to philosophy relatively late in life, and out of fear that the Catholic Church would condemn his science. He would have been surprised at how he is remembered.

Most of all, he would have been aghast at the way in which “I think, therefore I am” has been ripped from its context, inflated into a one-sentence summary of his ideas, and turned into something absurd. The rot set in at the start of the nineteenth century, when Hegel made heavy weather of “I think, therefore I am” and took it to mean that thought and being are fundamentally the same thing.

Clip Source: www.newyorker.com

THINK AGAIN

What did Descartes really know?

by ANTHONY GOTTLIEB

Issue of 2006-11-20

Posted 2006-11-13

In “Descartes: A Biography” (Cambridge; $40), Desmond Clarke, a leading Descartes scholar at the National University of Ireland, Cork, argues that Descartes’s philosophy is distorted if it is not seen in the context of his wider scientific enterprise. Descartes certainly played down his own purely philosophical writings. In a letter to his friend Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, in June, 1643, and again in a conversation with a theology student, Frans Burman, who interviewed him in April, 1648, Descartes warned against paying too much attention to his metaphysics. Read it once, he said, and move on. His “Discourse,” with the famous slogan, was published merely as a preface to a collection of treatises on optics, meteorology, and geometry. Clarke reminds us that Descartes’s philosophical works were intended to establish credentials for his system of nature, and to make it theologically acceptable. The “Meditations” originally bore the subtitle “in which are demonstrated the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.” Indeed, Clarke’s most distinctive claim is that Descartes’s account of the mind as an immaterial substance—his famous “dualism” of the mental and the physical, sometimes known as the doctrine of “the ghost in the machine”—is at best a provisional theory, aimed at providing support for the Catholic doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and sits uneasily with many other things that he wrote.

Tags: descartes, rene descartes, grayling, desmond clarke, philosophy, thinking, existence, metaphysics, science, nature, math, mathematics, history, biography, review, dualism, theology

"Politics and the English Language" - George Orwell

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 18:02:01 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: Geroge Orwell on the art of writing clear English and how the language is abused at the hands of politics. One of Orwell's most famous essays and still as relevant as ever.

Advice from the author:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable.

Clip Source: www.orwell.ru

George Orwell

Politics and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Tags: orwell, george orwell, politics, english, language, writing, essay, article, propaganda, advice

C.S. Lewis on Theocracy

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 17:32:23 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: Famous Christian author, C.S. Lewis, from "A Reply to Professor Haldane," (1966).

Clip Source: time.blogs.com

"Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations...

The nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political programme can never in reality be more than probably right."

Tags: theocracy, religion, fundamentalism, doubt, government, cs lewis, christian

Top 10 most viewed books on Google Book Search

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 17:02:43 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: English-language books, to be exact. From the official Google Book Search blog.

Clip Source: booksearch.blogspot.com

Friday, October 06, 2006

For me, the most notable characteristic of our top 10 is that, aside from one title, the list bears little resemblance to bestseller lists. Rather, it includes both current and backlist titles, reflecting the rich diversity of readers’ interests.

Diversity and Evolutionary Biology of Tropical Flowers

Merriam Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms

Measuring and Controlling Interest Rate and Credit Risk

Ultimate Healing: The Power of Compassion

The Holy Qur’an

Peterson’s Study Abroad 2006

Hegemony Or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage

Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense

Build Your Own All-Terrain Robot

Tags: top, list, books, book, read, google, search, free

A Portrait of Bush as a Victim of His Own Certitude (Book Review)

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 00:26:38 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: The New York Times with what promises to be only the first in many reviews of Bob Woodward's highly anticiapted new book, State of Denial.

The writer said that when Bush invited key Republicans to the White House to discuss Iraq, the president told them, 'I will not withdraw even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me,"' referring to his wife and Scottish terrier.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: September 30, 2006

Mr. Woodward reports that when he told Mr. Rumsfeld that the number of insurgent attacks was going up, the defense secretary replied that they’re now “categorizing more things as attacks.” Mr. Woodward quotes Mr. Rumsfeld as saying, “A random round can be an attack and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you’ve got a whole fruit bowl of different things — a banana and an apple and an orange.”

Mr. Woodward adds: “I was speechless. Even with the loosest and most careless use of language and analogy, I did not understand how the secretary of defense would compare insurgent attacks to a ‘fruit bowl,’ a metaphor that stripped them of all urgency and emotion. The official categories in the classified reports that Rumsfeld regularly received were the lethal I.E.D.’s, standoff attacks with mortars and close engagements such as ambushes.”

Many of the people in this book seem not only dismayed but also flummoxed by some of President Bush’s decisions. Mr. Woodward quotes Laura Bush as telling Andrew Card that she doesn’t understand why her husband isn’t upset about Mr. Rumsfeld and the uproar over his handling of the war . And he quotes Mr. Armitage as telling former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that he’s baffled by President Bush’s reluctance to make adjustments in his conduct of the war.

“Has he thought this through?” Mr. Armitage asks. “What the president says in effect is, We’ve got to press on in honor of the memory of those who have fallen. Another way to say that is we’ve got to have more men fall to honor the memories of those who have already fallen.”

Tags: woodward, bob woodward, state of denial, book, review, bush administration, bush, rumsfeld, cheney, certitude, politics, iraq, fruit bowl, laura bush, barney

White House Web Site Promotes Woodward's Book on Bush Administration...

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 04:06:03 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: ...in 2004, that is. That book was Plan of Attack and the White House liked Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, Woodward, so much that they put a link to buy it on their '04 campaign website. Not just anywhere but at the very top of the "Suggested Reading List." George Bush supports Woodward and wants you to support him too!

(The White House has since removed this info so I clipped the archived version for posterity, as well as a short Newsmax press release.)

Clip Source: web.archive.org

Plan of Attack

by Bob Woodward

Ten Minutes from Normal

by Karen Hughes

Letters to My Daughters

by Mary Matalin

America: A Patriotic Primer

by Lynne Cheney

Bush Country

by John Podhoretz

The Right Man

by David Frum

Deliver Us from Evil

by Sean Hannity

A Matter of Character: Inside the White House of George W. Bush

by Ronald Kessler

Clip Source: www.newsmax.com

Monday, April 19, 2004 11:41 p.m. EDT

White House Web Site to Promote Woodward Book

The official White House Web site will feature a link to Bob Woodward's new book, "Plan of Attack," even though its release has spurred a firestorm of criticism of President Bush and prompted two senior White House officials to issue strong denials of some of the book's key allegations.

"I'm told by the White House they're putting this book on - linking it to their Web site," senior Bush-Cheney adviser Mary Matalin told Fox News Channel's Greta Van Susteren on Monday.

Matalin, who looked somewhat chagrined as she announced the development, explained that the White House thinks the Woodward book "shows the president going through this very complicated decision-making process and puts the effort in Iraq into the bigger picture of the war on terror."

Earlier in the day, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett delivered an enthusiastic plug for the Woodward book, telling reporters: "We encourage people to read it. We think it gives a fuller picture if people do read the book, as opposed to watching programs that may depict aspects of it."

Tags: woodward, bob woodward, plan of attack, book, bush, cheney, white house, campaign, 04, 2004, reading, list

Émilie Du Châtelet: The Scientist Whom History Forgot

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 23:54:25 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: After a life of intellectual prosperity against all the prevailing norms of her time, her life was tragically cut short after finishing her greatest work, the only complete French translation and annotation of Newton's Principia Mathematica to this day.

[T]o her dismay, Du Châtelet discovered that she was pregnant. Then aged 43, she was an elderly women by contemporary standards. Although Voltaire was not the father, he helped Du Châtelet deceive her husband into thinking that the baby was legitimate. Plagued by gloomy premonitions, Du Châtelet intensified her work schedule, working 18 hours a day to finish in time. Although she did succeed, she died soon after the baby was born. On her last day she recorded the date on her Newton commentary. Her Principia was published 10 years later, in 1759, to coincide with the return of a comet vindicating Newton's physics.

Clip Source: physicsweb.org

According to Francois-Marie Voltaire - Enlightenment France's great writer and philosopher - Emilie du Châtelet "was a great man whose only fault was being a woman". Du Châtelet has paid the penalty for being a woman twice over. In her own lifetime she fought for the education and the publishing opportunities that she craved. Since her death, she has been cast in the shadow of two men - Voltaire, with whom she lived and studied, and Isaac Newton, whose work she criticized and interpreted. Her translation from Latin of Newton's Principia, his great work on gravity, remains the only complete version in French.

In 1738 Voltaire published their extraordinarily successful Elements of Newton's Philosophy. Well illustrated, it clearly explained the basic principles of Newton's discoveries in mathematical astronomy and optics, so that for the first time the new physics became accessible to a wide range of French people. Voltaire hero-worshipped Newton but recognized that he himself could not match Du Châtelet intellectually. "I used to teach myself with you," he wrote 10 years later, "but now you have flown up where I can no longer follow."

Tags: emilie du chatelet, châtelet, chatelet, scientist, science, mathematics, physics, newton, principia, principia mathematica, france, french, history, voltaire

Southern Discomfort: Getting Through the Civil Rights Era

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 20:15:45 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: Book review of There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975, by Jason Sokol.

Clip Source: www.americanheritage.com

Sokol’s book spans the period between World War II, when many white servicemen first came into real contact with black men, albeit in a Jim Crow army, and 1975, when court-mandated busing was rapidly forcing Southern schools to desegregate, and when a combination of court and executive-branch pressure was forcing the last holdout restaurants, bowling alleys, and movie theaters to open their doors to black Americans. Readers will be surprised to know that as late as the 1980s the Terrell County Medical Clinic in Georgia had separate waiting rooms for black and white patients, or that as late as 1985 Terrell County’s courthouse still had Jim Crow bathrooms, or that doctors’ offices and bowling alleys in Walterboro, South Carolina, were still thoroughly segregated in 1974. “These stories do not stand as freakish anomalies that prove the rule of progress.” writes Sokol. “Rather, they question those very claims to progress, and expose the underside of its most glorious triumphs.”

Jimmy Breslin, the New York City newspaperman, saw exactly what was happening. Observing the scene outside Montgomery’s Jefferson Davis Hotel in 1965, Breslin wrote: “You have not lived in this time when everything is changing, until you see an old black woman with mud on her shoes stand on the street of a Southern city and sing ‘. . . we are not afraid . . .’ and then turn and look at the face of the cop near her and see the puzzlement, and the terrible fear in his eyes. Because he knows, and everybody who has ever seen it knows, that it is over. The South as it stood since 1865 is gone.”

Tags: civil rights, south, america, usa, history, politics, book, review, jason sokol, slavery, jim crow, desegregation, race

Nobel Prize Winning Author Naguib Mahfouz Dies

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 14:46:05 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks:

Mahfouz said:

They are trying to extinguish the light of reason and thought. Beware.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the only writer in Arabic to win the Nobel Prize for literature, died on Wednesday in Cairo aged 94, doctors said.

``He came to this world only to write,'' Egyptian writer Youssef al-Quaid told Egyptian television.

``He was the most famous writer in Egypt ... He had an incredible ability to create and create all his life.''

Mahfouz, a prolific writer best known for his Cairo Trilogy, became a literary force when he moved beyond traditional novels to realistic descriptions of Egypt's 20th century experience of colonialism and autocracy.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1988 for works which ''formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind.''

Declared an infidel by Muslim militants because of his portrayal of God, Mahfouz survived a knife attack in 1994 that damaged a nerve and seriously impaired his ability to use his writing hand.

``They are trying to extinguish the light of reason and thought. Beware,'' Mahfouz said after the attack.

Tags: naguib mahfouz, mahfouz, egypt, egyptian, author, novelist, novel, writer, literature, nobel, nobel prize, arabic, fatwa

Nobel-Winning German Author Reveals Secret Nazi Past

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 03:23:02 GMT

clipped by: Kore7
clipper's remarks: Lauded German author and Nobel laureate, Guenter Grass, who made it his life's goal to confront and expose Germany's past war-time moral failures, revealed for the first time that he served voluntarily as a youth in the infamous Waffen-SS, the unit most responsible for Nazi atrocities during the Holocaust. The response across Europe and especially within Germany has been thunderous, with a few defenders but many detractors condemning his long-held secret.

Clip Source: www.forbes.com

Nobel laureate Guenter Grass' surprise admission that he served in the Waffen-SS as a teenager met with sympathy from some fellow German writers, but also drew harsh criticism from literary and political figures, including Poland's Lech Walesa, who asked why he waited so long.

Grass, author of the classic "The Tin Drum" and many other writings, has for decades stood as his country's literary conscience, urging Germany to face up to its Nazi past and warning against any resurgence of imperial ambition. Critics say the 78-year-old's moral authority has been undermined by his silence about his months in the military arm of Adolf Hitler's notorious SS.

It was previously known that Grass did military service and was wounded, ending up as a prisoner of American forces, but he never mentioned the Waffen-SS.

Joachim Fest, a biographer of Hitler and one of the country's most prominent chroniclers of the Nazi period, said Grass' silence was "totally inexplicable."

"I do not understand how someone can elevate himself constantly for 60 years to the nation's bad conscience, precisely in Nazi questions, and only then admit that he himself was deeply involved. I don't know how he could play this double role for so long," Fest was quoted as saying by the Bild newspaper in Monday's edition.

Clip Source: www.time.com

Tags: guenter grass, grass, nobel, literature, author, writer, holocaust, nazi, germany, war, atrocities, secret, poland