Clipmarks | ouyangwulong's Reading And Writing collection

Subjective Reality and Autobiographical Fiction

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:39:45 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: People are still getting worked up over this? Dare I call them gullible?

I mean, normally when I read an autobiography where the author claims to have been raised by a pack of wolves I chuckle to myslef and presume that some obscure sense of humor is at work.

I mean, seriously, how was ANYONE fooled into thinking this story was real? Apparently it's gonna be an awkward Rosh Ha-Shanah at the Defonseca household, that is, of course, if they don't just skip it.

Still, back in the 60s and 70s the work of Hunter Thompson was considered JOURNALISM.

Is it safe to say that the public has moved towards a naive objectivism, presuming that all that is printed as fact must be true, and that we have lost touch with the subjective nature of human experience?

I hope we get this spasm under control in time to save the beautiful subjective art of Literature!

Clip Source: www.iht.com

Liar, liar, best-seller on fire

If this plot line sounds familiar, that's because it is. Last week, Misha Defonseca revealed that she made up her critically lauded memoir, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years." It turns out, she did not live with a pack of wolves. She did not wander Europe searching for her parents. She is not Jewish.

Tags: fact, fiction, lies, holocaust, wolves, rosh ha-shanah, misha defonseca, subjectivism, hunter thompson

The Vice of Reading Diversified

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 04:57:36 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: What this author only hints at, and the NEA overlooks entirely, is that literacy and the processing of information in text format has been radically transformed by modern communication.

For instance, when I was young people dispaired that the art of letter writing and written expression would disappear entirely. On the contrary, with email, blogging, and other assorted media, we are as a society writing more than ever before.

And it's not just the privileged and educated who get to read and write. Writing has become a daily habit for billions of people around the world, and one of the most egalitarian ways of communicating in the developing world.

And the NEA also fails to appreciate that the way we live our lives has been altered by how we process information. The line between reading for pleasure, reading for work, reading for education, and reading for spirituality is now hopelessly, and wonderfully blurred.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

You Are What You Read

Last month, the National Endowment for the Arts lengthened that list. “To Read or Not to Read,” its 2007 report on American reading habits, identifies who reads as the best predictor of who exercises, plays sports, volunteers, votes and stays out of jail.

Paradoxically, though, the N.E.A. shuns the literal workplace — and, by extension, any use of literacy for something other than disinterested pleasure.

Its 2004 report, “Reading at Risk,” excluded not just nonfiction (giving credit for “The Da Vinci Code” but not “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”), but also reading done “for work or school.”

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

It’s harder to remember that mind-blowing literary experience isn’t the only thing the written word is good for. That all-time best seller, the Bible, fits nowhere within the survey’s neat division between “reading for literary experience,” “reading for information” and “reading to perform a task.” Nor does pornography.

Tags: reading, pleasure, intelligence, education, modernity

You Darkness, from which I came

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:38:24 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: You Darkness, from which I came,
I love you more than all the Flames,
Limiting the World,
by shining
all around us, (?)
so that no one knows of the darkness.

But the darkness actually holds everything:
Form and Flame, Animals and me,
How easily it gathers them, (?)
Men and Might -

And it is possible: a great Power
is coming closer.

I believe in Nights.

***
by Ranier Maria Rilke
(My own terrible German translation...)

Clip Source: rainer-maria-rilke.de

Du Dunkelheit, aus der ich stamme,
ich liebe dich mehr als die Flamme,

welche die Welt begrenzt,

indem sie glänzt
für irgend einen Kreis,

aus dem heraus kein Wesen von ihr weiß.

Aber die Dunkelheit hält alles an sich:
Gestalten und Flammen, Tiere und mich,
wie sie's errafft,

Menschen und Mächte -

Und es kann sein: eine große Kraft

rührt sich in meiner Nachbarschaft.

Ich glaube an Nächte.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 22.9.1899, Berlin-Schmargendorf

Tags: rilke, poetry, darkness, night

A Literary Perspective on the Subjective Nature of Memory

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 18:38:17 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: I am consistently impressed with Hungarian literature, and the language is moving up my "Must Learn" list.

Nadas Peter seems like a particularly relevant novelist today, in an era where facts, and even recent history are extraordinarily maliable. The most amazing part is the way in which the "free" press has been not only complacent but complicit in these revisions.

More than any time in the recent passed, these days we need to be reminded that human beings are not inheriently empirical creatures. Emotions and perceptions; desires and frustarations; these are the key architects of our collective memories.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

A Writer Who Always Sees History in the Present Tense

From Spain recently came news of a proposal by the government to erase all physical signs of the Franco dictatorship, as if by getting rid of the plaques and statues and street names from the old regime the country could rectify and obliterate a past it has preferred not to linger over.

Americans tend to be amnesiacs. Europeans, however, worry history, and no writer in Europe today has dealt more eloquently with the obligations and moral conundrums of memory, private and collective, than the Hungarian novelist and essayist Peter Nadas. Berlin, it happens, is where he came years ago to work on what turned into “A Book of Memories,” which, when the Hungarian censors finally consented in 1986 to let it be published, invited comparison to Proust and Thomas Mann, and caused Susan Sontag, after its translation into English 11 years later, to call it “the greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century.”

Tags: hungary, hungarian literature, literature, history, memory

The Orthodox Patriarch visits Greenland

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 06:49:52 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: Neal Ascherson writes with clear but contemplative prose about the surreal beauty of Greenland as it comes in contact with the surreal union of Religion and Science.

An interesting look into the ideas of the much-overlooked Orthodox Christian Churches on the issues of global politics and the environment.

Clip Source: www.lrb.co.uk

Diary

Neal Ascherson

Below the crowd, I leaned against the granite sides of the rock, hearing only the occasional phrase of what was being said on the summit, staring at the hillsides red and green with the dwarfish growth of Arctic summer. His All Holiness Bartholomew I, ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople and spiritual head of the Orthodox Churches of the world, had come to Greenland on his seventh Symposium voyage, repeating his call to humanity to respect and rescue natural creation. These voyages are organised by the Athens-based group Religion, Science and the Environment and bring together marine biologists, ecologists, politicians and representatives of all faiths. Each Symposium visits some of the threatened waters of the world, gathers the experience of local and indigenous people and debates the planet’s future.

Tags: religion, environment, science, literature

A Beautiful Elegy for the Buddhas of Bamyan

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:45:14 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: Cohen is perhaps the most eloquent writer in the opinion pages of the International Herald Tribune. This is perhaps the most genuine and insightful appraisal of the War on Terror that I have seen to date.

Clip Source: www.iht.com

The Cold War ended, only to be replaced by the explosive conflict of secular and theocratic worlds. What began here in March, 2001, has spread. The Taliban are back, sort of, seeping across the Pakistani border in a campaign fed by an Internet-borne jihadist message. The Web is a force multiplier for any guerrilla movement.

This was the Afghan burning of the books. The Nazis burned Brecht. The Taliban, then sheltering Osama bin Laden, bombarded the "un-Islamic" Buddhas. The burning presaged war. The destruction presaged 9/11: two Buddhas, two towers.

Heinrich Heine noted that "When they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings." When Buddhas buckle, people will be crushed.

Memory, however, is another matter. It is stubborn and volatile and hard to eradicate. The keyhole-like niches in the rock face are charged. Absence is presence. The visitor is drawn into the void as if summoned, not by vacancy, but by the towering Buddhas themselves.

Tags: afghanistan, bamyan, taliban, buddhas