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Category: Books

A Christmas Poem for Anna

The taste of Anna and red wine.So lovely to drink and drink. Somehow without her sweet nectar the wine is not so fine.So without wine now I swim onpool water a poor substitutefor past Dionysian revels,future promises in every stroke.

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No Jane Austen Heroines…

No Jane Austen heroines for meall prose and no poetry,reason and norm insistentin every dawn anda faultless sense of society,infallible propriety.I’ll dally to ventilatethe tight sphincter which crampsher every breathin hope to release the emotionsstifled so long below.Hopeless though, these women -function of their most intimate organsgoverned so strongly from the headand not the heart. One pure breath of unfiltered emotion, more, sadlythan six months of stifling devotion.

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Sparrow Nights | David Gilmour | Book Review

But if you looked longer you noticed her slightly stooped posture, a button missing from her shirt cuff, here red sweater pulled up at the back; she was a woman who could leave a wet towel on a bed, so to speak…. It struck me that my time with Emma had been a kind of gorgeous treading water but that her absence (follow me here) provided, in itself, a kind of happiness because it gave me a precise object of desire, without actually giving me the thing itself, the ultimate possession of which could only diminish the pleasure that came from wanting it so unequivocally.

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Self-censorship: the inner voice and the artist in society

and if you don’t put these innermost thoughts on the screen then you are looking down on not only your audience but the people you work with, and that’s what makes so many people working out there unhappy…. so many people have so much to say and there are so many really worthwhile things to say that it seems impossible that we could cut ourselves off from this whole avenue of enormous excitement.”

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Hey Northern Europeans – You’re Irrelevant! Warm Congratulations from San Francisco for Elfriede Jelinek

Big news in Austria over the last week has been the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature to their citizen Elfriede Jelinek. A controversial writer even in Austria, this is a brave and forward-looking decision from the Stockholm-based jury.

Jelinek is no New York Times bestselling author. But not content with their president’s failed commandeering of the United Nations, many Americans would like to put the Nobel prize jurors in their place and assure a more level playing field for American writers.

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romans and us | publilius servus

If you refuse where you have always granted you invite to theft. some days you just look up from your book and find that the world is rich in reflection and sense. for me such a day was when i discovered one of the maxims of publilius servus, the first great author of mimes (circa 80 BC). very little of his writing survives apart from his maxims. but they are as applicable today as when he wrote them. the roman world was perhaps the most similar of all the ancient ones to our own. what makes us so similar? good…

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