Other Notebooks Are Available

For those of you who didn’t watch Eurovision this year, you missed this. An operatic gem from Disco Dracula; Cezar ‘It’s My Life’ (Romania).

It didn’t win because Eurovision prefers butter over cheese (Denmark ran away with it)

sadybusiness:

Gatsby is a novel about an impresario of gaudy, full-bore, bad-taste excess. And so, unlike the (mostly unimpressed) reviewers who seemed to never get past their shock that Luhrmann had the nerve to make the film at all, I found the film’s take on Jay Gatsby to be an inspired one. Only a director capable of genuine vulgarity could present the character in all his original, pre-canonized glory. Fitzgerald’s novel has been largely killed by our respect for it: We’re so entranced by the knife-sharp social distinctions and glittering descriptions of parties that we miss the fact that the parties themselves were stuffed with weirdos, proscribed substances, vomit and pop music you could hump your partner to, as offensive to genuinely sophisticated tastes as … well, as The Great Gatsby in 3-D. Jay Gatsby has been cited as an inspiration for the dashing, astute Don Draper, but with his joyous vulgarity, his tasteless emulation of the “celebrated people” he crams into his mansion and his endless pursuit of swag, the contemporary character Gatsby actually most closely resembles is Parks and Recreation’s Tom Haverford. 

— Gatsby is one of those books I have semi-embarrassing Personal Feelings About. And I have complaints about this version, namely WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY PRECIOUS JORDAN BAKER complaints. But, although this piece is about race, class, gender, and Gatsby, I think the connection made in the final line here will go down as one of the things I’m most personally proud of. My standards for myself aren’t all that high. 

Behold an awesome review.

I’d woken up early and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

—The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa (via skiesofaugust)

(Source: delicateswans, via tenthousanddaysandnights)

I fail remarkably. I write Eye when I mean Tooth. I write Fornicate when I mean Caress. I write Wine when I mean Blood.

—

I, Mary Maclane by Mary Maclane (via marginalutilite)

Mary.

(via melvillehouse)

Gatsby’s desire is revealed to be that of a 16-year-old boy: not only does he want to win Daisy, he wants to control her affections. It reminds me of my high school relationships, where I tortured girlfriends for getting fingered by other boys when they were freshmen. Just move on, dude. We are obsessed by his obsession but aren’t significantly moved by his accomplishment of the goal.

—

James Franco’s review of “The Great Gatsby” for Vice reads like your 9th grade English essay with some graphic personal details. This is what it takes to be a Yale PhD candidate, ladies and gentlemen.  (via quintessentiallyquirky)

He makes me feel better about having my English PhD and being roundly bad at in-depth essay writing.

But the intelligence involved in criticism is a different beast to creative intelligence. Journalist and critics perform one function, creative writers (and whatever Franco is to himself) perform another, and it takes a rare spark to be both. I hope Franco’s doing a process-based PhD like I did.

(Source: Vice Magazine, via quintessentiallyquirky)

onthestrand:

Show us around your favourite ancient tracks, holloways, and sea paths and you could spend your summer trekking across the country for Penguin Books and The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane. We’re looking for someone who doesn’t mind getting their boots dirty, can string a sentence or two…

Perhaps for the first time in his political career, Nigel Farage, the scourge of British politics, found himself in retreat on Thursday evening as dozens of protesters hounded him out of central Edinburgh.
*
The Ukip leader was finally whisked away in a police riot van under a tirade of abuse from a crowd of about 50 young demonstrators – students, anti-racist campaigners and activists in the radical left pro-Scottish independence movement – after being forced to retreat not once, twice or three times, but four times.
*
Farage was first forced out of the Canon’s Gait pub on the Royal Mile after the landlord took fright as the demonstrators disrupted his casual press conference with shouts of “racist”, “scum” and “homophobe”. Out on the street, as the fingers pointed and taunts escalated, he was rejected by one taxi and turfed out of a second.
*
Then, finally, the harassed and ill-prepared handful of officers were forced to push him back into the Canon’s Gait, slamming its front doors shut, as the demonstrators chanted: “Nigel, you’re a bawbag, Nigel you’re a bawbag, na, na, na, hey!” with gusto.

—

Story on The Guardian this morning.

I have never been more proud to live in Edinburgh. Sad I missed this in person.

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

—Adrienne Rich (via mttbll)

(Source: brainpickings.org, via mttbll)