“Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.”
–Paul Goodman, “Can Technology Be Humane?” The New York Review of Books, November 20, 1969
Quotes
Quote: “The art of writing is…”
“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”
Gustave Flaubert (via absynthe-words)
Quote: “poems are like dreams…”
But poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
Adrienne Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (via thedaysarenotfullenough) (via libraryland)
Quote: “Our brains are affected … by the media we use”
“I’ve always been suspicious of those who seek to describe the effects of digital media in generational terms, drawing sharp contrasts between young “Internet natives” and old “Internet immigrants.” Such distinctions strike me as misleading, if not specious. If you look at statistics … the average adult has spent more time online than the average kid. …. And the idea that those who grow up peering at screens will somehow manage to avoid the cognitive toll exacted by multitasking and persistent interruptions is a fantasy contradicted by neuroscientific research. All of us, young and old alike, have similar neurons and synapses, and our brains are affected in similar ways by the media we use.”
Nick Carr, from the afterword of the paperback edition of The Shallows (via wwnorton)
“Lock up your libraries if you like…”
“Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
Virginia Woolf (via nocureforcuriosity)
Quote: “Art is not a handicraft…”
“Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.”
Leo Tolstoy (via subcreation)
Quote: “The short story is the art form…”
“The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.”
Frank O’Connor (via libraryland)
Quote: “Turn the unspeakable into words”
“The writer’s job is to turn the unspeakable into words – not just any words, but, if you can, into rhythm and blues.”
Anne Lamott (via teachingliteracy)
Gen-Yers changing the workplace
Gen-Yers are using their personal networks and profiles as an extension of their professional personality. Even though they are using Facebook to mostly socialize with family and friends, they are inadvertently blending the two. Sixty-four percent of Gen-Y fails to list their employer on their profiles, yet they add an average of 16 co-workers each to their “friend” group.
Illiteracy in America
44 million adults in the U.S. can’t read well enough to read a simple story to a child.
National Adult Literacy Survey (via firstbook)
Quote
A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
~Leo Rosten (via solitudeandsolicitude)
Quote
When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.
~Michel de Montaigne (via libraryland)
Quote: Patti Smith
Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.
Patti Smith (via libraryland)
What you seek is seeking you.
Rumi (via libraryland)
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
C.S.Lewis
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
C. S. Lewis (via ermarty)
Quote: “Stop talking about ‘social’ “
Social is not a feature. Social is not an application. Social is a deep human motivation that drives our behaviour almost every second that we’re awake. It doesn’t matter if we’re online or offline, on a browser or using an app. Humans are social creatures.
Conversations that seem a sin to break off
For me to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.
Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011
Quote: Productivity and self-control
Very often when we talk about the skill of ‘productivity’ what we are really talking about is ‘self-control.’
James Shelley (via the 99%)
Read: 200 million Tweets per day
Every day, the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book in Tweets or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Reading this much text would take more than 31 years and stacking this many copies of War and Peace would reach the height of about 1,470 feet, nearly the ground-to-roof height of Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world.
The Twitter Blog, 200 million Tweets per day. (via futurejournalismproject)
Quote: “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed…”
“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook” (via missmollymary)
On sending private messages
it’s like whispering to your companion during a dinner party: you might not get heard loud and clear, but only a fool wouldn’t take note of the possibility of leakage.
Susan Orlean on sending private messages via social media (via newyorker)
Media diet
Though I was groomed in traditional, old-school journalism with a capital J, I realize that the world—and that includes journalism—is evolving and I have to adapt and evolve with it. In this digital age and with social media I think the fact that viewers can reach out and tell us things instantly is amazing for us, but we can’t allow those tools to make us paranoid about what we say or do. We walk a fine line between objectivity and being too vulnerable to the whims of the audience. We have to balance that by making sure we go back to old-school fact checking regardless of what’s trending. We have to give viewers the truth and tell them the news.
CNN’s Don Lemon lays out his media diet. Read the rest of the interview at The Atlantic Wire. (via theatlantic)
“Blogs look to me illiterate”
I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look to me illiterate, they look hasty, like someone babbling. To me writing is a considered act. It’s something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn’t seem to have any literary merit at all. It’s a chatty account of things that have happened to that particular person.
Paul Theroux discusses blogging, travel writing, “Three Cups of Tea,” and his new book “The Tao of Travel.” Read the whole interview at The Atlantic. (via theatlantic)
Coffeehouse Junkie 