on not writing

some may fancy a warm delve into the wellness of a found poem this weekend. such is the challenge from the new york times' learning network today, and a chance for me to go straight.

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/our-second-annual-found-poem-challenge/?nl=learning&emc=learninga1


to whom may flounder upon the prospects of this literary critic can do no worse than study the cowboy and indian, or movies that matter most in places like Haiti, at any given time — schools its thirst for the white bitch — and how, now, humanity fades a little deeper and further worries us to go nation building elsewhere, poverty chic or not.

we see from Mount Hollywood, over there, the billboard which suggests chaos as the unforgiving backdrop to well-oiled men and savages struck with the scalp of God. We, meanwhile, sit at the burning bush threshold and warp the legends all the more, all the way to eternity.

we must make up the most fabulous wants and demand between shows a spill a minute lifetime for the price of a cheap whore. And when all is said and done, whom among us takes the blame home willingly and tucks it to bed with a cup of cool milk — with more than a little help, someone like me maybe. Have fun.

http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_fenimore.html


ciao, ciao


Tomas







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Loved reading this, dax. Wonderful language, sharp sharp jabs of feeling and thought all through. Tom

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Found .......Found Life

BBC World Service for March 29th, 1997.

http://newstalgia.crooksandliars.com/gordonskene/march-29-1997-you-could-have-been-cult


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shucks guys, t'wern nothin


ciao, ciao

Tomas

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http://www.thefix.com/content/narconons-big-con

Why Scientology's Rehabs Are a Dangerous Scam


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Aspiring Authors Get Help Online

By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: April 26, 2011

   
In the old days of publishing, getting your manuscript into the hands of an editor often meant mailing the unsolicited finished product to the offices of literary agents or editors, where it would receive a cursory look from an editorial assistant — or none at all.

A modern version of the slush pile is the online “writing community,” a Web site where aspiring novelists can post their ideas, writing samples or manuscripts and open them to comments and reviews from strangers.

On Tuesday Penguin Group USA, the publisher of Tom Clancy, Kathryn Stockett and Nora Roberts, will unveil its own venture, Book Country, a Web site for writers of genre fiction.

In its initial phase Book Country will allow writers to post their own work — whether it’s an opening chapter or a full manuscript — and receive critiques from other users, who can comment on points like character development, pacing and dialogue. Later this summer the site will generate revenue by allowing users to self-publish their books for a fee by ordering printed copies. (The books will bear the stamp of Book Country, not Penguin, and the site is considered a separate operation from Penguin.)

The site will also explain the business of finding an agent, marketing and promoting a book, using social media and handling digital and subsidiary rights.

Penguin hopes the site will attract agents, editors and publishers scouting for new talent, and allow writers to produce work with more polish and direction than they could otherwise.

The project has been spearheaded by Molly Barton, the director of business development for Penguin and the president of Book Country.

“One of the things I remember really clearly from my early editorial experiences was this feeling of guilt,” Ms. Barton said in an interview. “I would read submissions and not be able to help the writer because we couldn’t find a place for them on the list that I was acquiring for. And I kept feeling that there was something we could do on the Internet to really help writers help each other.”

Book Country users are invited to submit work in certain genres: romance, fantasy, science fiction, thriller and mystery. Those categories are broken down into subgenres like military science fiction, steampunk, space opera and alternate history.

In one discussion in a test version of the Web site, users debated the question, “Is your hook ‘high concept?’ ” (A sample from a writer who signed in as K. S. Brown: “A vampire is kidnapped and tortured, and the man her secret government sends to rescue her is a weredragon, the ancient enemy of all vampires.”)

To discourage plagiarism, administrators have disabled the copy-and-paste and print mechanisms on the site.

Ms. Barton said she had been influenced by Web sites like Ravelry, a popular site for knitters and crocheters. It has more than 1.3 million registered users.

Countless writers’ Web sites have popped up in recent years, including Writers Cafe, Protagonize and Mibba, but executives at Penguin said other sites did not provide so comprehensive an experience as the site they wanted to create.

“It’s connecting disparate pieces that writers had to go to three or four different sites to find,” Ms. Barton said.






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maybe some bright spark could connect the dots and spend the next few moments together with a few good reasons for us not to follow suit, create something worth fighting for in a jam, or are we just going to settle for all this harmony and hail to another shot of absinthe for the chef



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Glass harp-Toccata and fugue in D minor-Bach-BWV 565

Glass harp-Toccata and fugue in D minor-Bach-BWV 565

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2011 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Published: April 18, 2011
 
       
The Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday. The complete list of winners in Letters, Drama and Music is below.

Related
2011 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced (April 19, 2011)
2011 Pulitzer Prizes for Journalism (April 19, 2011)
Times Topic: Pulitzer Prizes
FICTION: "A Visit from the Goon Squad," by Jennifer Egan (Alfred A. Knopf)


Ms. Egan, 48, was cited for fiction for her “inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed.”

She radically re-imagined the novel genre by writing a series of interlocking stories. In hardcover, the book was not identified as a novel on the cover, leading some readers to believe that it was a nonfiction study about music.

“At one point I was calling it entangled stories,” Ms. Egan said. “It’s a little mysterious in its genre. In a way, who cares? As long as it feels like a story.”


Related: Sunday Book Review | Books of The Times Review | Excerpt |  Jennifer Egan on the Book Review Podcast (mp3)
Finalists: "The Privileges," by Jonathan Dee (Random House); "The Surrendered," by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead Books).


DRAMA: "Clybourne Park" by Bruce Norris

“Clybourne Park,” a comedy about race relations inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s “Raisin in the Sun,” is set in the same house in Chicago in 1959 and 2009.

In the first act, residents of an all-white neighborhood grow anxious as blacks move in; by the second act, the neighborhood has become predominantly black, and it is the arrival of a white couple that stirs tension.

The Pulitzer jury noted that the characters “speak in witty and perceptive ways to America’s sometimes toxic struggle with race and class consciousness.” Mr. Norris, 50, said in a statement that he was “deeply honored and totally flabbergasted.”


Related: Theater Review

Finalists: "A Free Man of Color," by John Guare; "Detroit," by Lisa D'Amour.



HISTORY: "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery" by Eric Foner (W. W. Norton & Company)

At a moment when attention is focused on the start of the Civil War 150 years ago, Dr. Foner, 68, was cited for “bringing unforeseeable twists and a fresh sense of improbability to a familiar story.”

An expert on the politics of the Civil War era, he argues that Lincoln initially reflected many of the prejudiced racial attitudes of his time, but grew morally and politically in the presidency until he came to embrace the Civil War’s “fundamental and astounding” result: emancipation and the recognition of blacks as American citizens.


Related: Sunday Book Review

Finalists: "Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South," by Stephanie McCurry (Harvard University Press); "Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston," by Michael Rawson (Harvard University Press).



BIOGRAPHY: "Washington: A Life" by Ron Chernow (The Penguin Press)

No American is so revered as George Washington, yet Mr. Chernow, 62, was troubled that “in recent years people had an image of Washington as wooden, bland and boring,” far from the “passionate, complex and sensitive man — dynamic and commanding and charismatic,” whose contemporaries viewed him as an authentic hero, the author said Monday.

 Striving to uncover Washington’s hidden side, Mr. Chernow achieved what the citation called “a sweeping, authoritative portrait of an iconic leader learning to master his private feelings in order to fulfill his public duties.” 


Related: Sunday Book Review | Books of The Times Review | Excerpt (pdf)

Finalists: "The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century," by Alan Brinkley (Alfred A. Knopf); "Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon," by Michael O'Brien (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).



POETRY: "The Best of It: New and Selected Poems" by Kay Ryan (Grove Press)

Ms. Ryan, 65, labored outside poetry’s mainstream for decades before she started gaining recognition for her sharp, aphoristic work, much of which is gathered in her eighth book. “I was trying to offer a review of a fairly long career that was not much remarked on for the first 25 years of it,” said Ms. Ryan, who last year was the 16th poet laureate of the United States. “My things are little, and it’s nice if you pile them up. It’s a bigger sock in the jaw.”


Related: Books of The Times Review | Profile of Kay Ryan

Finalists: "The Common Man," by Maurice Manning (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); "Break the Glass," by Jean Valentine (Copper Canyon Press).



GENERAL NONFICTION: "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner)

Dr. Mukherjee, an oncologist and laboratory researcher in cancer at Columbia University, began taking notes years ago when he was working in Boston as a fellow in cancer medicine. “It was a journal, and then slowly it began to grow bigger and bigger,” said Dr. Mukherjee, 40. “Because it got to the essence of the question, which is: ‘Where are we in the history of cancer and how did we get here’?”


Related: Sunday Book Review | Books of The Times Review | Profile of Siddhartha Mukherjee |  Siddhartha Mukherjee on the Book Review Podcast (mp3)

Finalists: "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain," by Nicholas Carr (W.W. Norton & Company); "Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History," by S.C. Gwynne (Scribner).



MUSIC: "Madame White Snake" by Zhou Long, premiered on February 26, 2010 by the Boston Opera the Cutler Majestic Theatre.

The Pulitzer committee described Mr. Zhou’s work as “a deeply expressive opera that draws on a Chinese folk tale to blend the musical traditions of the East and the West.” Mr. Zhou, 57, was exiled during the Cultural Revolution but enrolled in the first composition class just after the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing reopened in 1977. “I felt the opera is a reflection of all my works combined,” including music for Chinese ensembles and Western orchestras and choruses, Mr. Zhou said. “I’m not following fashions. I don’t reject anything. I look at everything equally.”


Related:  Premiere Recording

Finalists: "Arches," by Fred Lerdahl, premiered on November 19, 2010 at Miller Theatre, Columbia University; "Comala," by Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, recording released in June, 2010 by Bridge Records.

 



Op-Ed Contributors
Honoring Those Who Said No

By JAMEEL JAFFER and LARRY SIEMS
Published: April 27, 2011
 
 
IN January 2004, Spec. Joseph M. Darby, a 24-year-old Army reservist in Iraq, discovered a set of photographs showing other members of his company torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. The discovery anguished him, and he struggled over how to respond. “I had the choice between what I knew was morally right, and my loyalty to other soldiers,” he recalled later. “I couldn’t have it both ways.”

So he copied the photographs onto a CD, sealed it in an envelope, and delivered the envelope and an anonymous letter to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. Three months later — seven years ago today — the photographs were published. Specialist Darby soon found himself the target of death threats, but he had no regrets. Testifying at a pretrial hearing for a fellow soldier, he said that the abuse “violated everything I personally believed in and all I’d been taught about the rules of war.”

He was not alone. Throughout the military, and throughout the government, brave men and women reported abuse, challenged interrogation directives that permitted abuse, and refused to participate in an interrogation and detention program that they believed to be unwise, unlawful and immoral. The Bush administration’s most senior officials expressly approved the torture of prisoners, but there was dissent in every agency, and at every level.

There are many things the Obama administration could do to repair some of the damage done by the last administration, but among the simplest and most urgent is this: It could recognize and honor the public servants who rejected torture.

In the thousands of pages that have been made public about the detention and interrogation program, we hear the voices of the prisoners who were tortured and the voices of those who inflicted their suffering. But we also hear the voices of the many Americans who said no.

Some of these voices belong to people whose names have been redacted from the public record. In Afghanistan, soldiers and contractors recoiled at interrogation techniques they witnessed. After seeing a prisoner beaten by a mysterious special forces team, one interpreter filed an official complaint. “I was very upset that such a thing could happen,” she wrote. “I take my responsibilities as an interrogator and as a human being very seriously.”

Similarly, after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told interrogators that they could hold Guantánamo prisoners in “stress positions,” barrage them with strobe lights and loud music, and hold them in freezing-cold cells, F.B.I. agents at the naval base refused to participate in the interrogations and complained to F.B.I. headquarters.

But some of the names we know. When Alberto J. Mora, the Navy’s general counsel, learned of the interrogation directive that Mr. Rumsfeld issued at Guantánamo, he campaigned to have it revoked, arguing that it was “unlawful and unworthy of the military services.” Guantánamo prosecutors resigned rather than present cases founded on coerced evidence. One, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch of the Marines, said the abuse violated basic religious precepts of human dignity. Another, Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld of the Army, filed an affidavit in support of the child prisoner he had been assigned to prosecute.

There were dissenters even within the C.I.A. Early in 2003, the agency’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, began an investigation after agents in the field expressed concern that the agency’s secret-site interrogations “might involve violations of human rights.” Mr. Helgerson, a 30-year agency veteran, was himself a kind of dissenter: in 2004 he sent the agency a meticulously researched report documenting some of the abuses that had taken place in C.I.A.-run prisons, questioning the wisdom and legality of the policies that had led to those abuses, and characterizing some of the agency’s activities as inhumane. Without his investigation and report, the torture program might still be operating today.

Thus far, though, our official history has honored only those who approved torture, not those who rejected it. In December 2004, as the leadership of the C.I.A. was debating whether to destroy videotapes of prisoners being waterboarded in the agency’s secret prisons, President Bush bestowed the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director who had signed off on the torture sessions. In 2006, the Army major general who oversaw the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo was given the Distinguished Service Medal. One of the lawyers responsible for the Bush administration’s “torture memos” received awards from the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Agency.

President Obama has disavowed torture, but he has been unenthusiastic about examining the last administration’s interrogation policies. He has said the country should look to the future rather than the past. But averting our eyes from recent history means not only that we fail in our legal and moral duty to provide redress to victims of torture, but also that we betray the public servants who risked so much to reverse what they knew was a disastrous and shameful course.

Those who stayed true to our values and stood up against cruelty are worthy of a wide range of civilian and military commendations, up to and including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Honoring them is a way of encouraging the best in our public servants, now and in the future. It is also a way of honoring the best in ourselves.

Jameel Jaffer is a deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union. Larry Siems is the director of the Freedom to Write program at the PEN American Center.

Fox News Viewers Know Less
Than People Who Don't Watch Any News

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/21/fox-news-viewers-less-informed-people-fairleigh-dickinson_n_1106305.html

First Posted: 11/21/11 05:28 PM ET Updated: 11/21/11 06:06 PM ET



Fox News viewers are less informed than people who don't watch any news,
according to a new poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University.  http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2011/knowless/

The poll surveyed New Jersey residents about the uprisings in Egypt and the Middle East, and where they get their news sources. The study, which controlled for demographic factors like education and partisanship, found that "people who watch Fox News are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government" and "6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government" compared to those who watch no news.

Overall, 53% of all respondents knew that Egyptians successfully overthrew Hosni Mubarak and 48% knew that Syrians have yet to overthrow their government.

Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson, explained in a statement,

"Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News.
Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all."

This isn't the first study that has found that Fox News viewers more misinformed in comparison to others. Last year, a study from the University of Maryland found that Fox News viewers were more likely to believe false information about politics.


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