Unequivocally, Books
I’ve been busy with a few projects lately. One of them is currently a secret, though you will hear about it soon. But I can tell you about the other project: I found an open-source library management program (OSX only, sorry to (and for) you lonely and forlorn PC folks) that seriously sticks it to the man (how’s that for a cliché?). It has a rather boring name: Books, but its designation is the only thing dreary about it. Besides being completely free it also has the admirable qualities of being user-friendly and visually well-designed. It has robust cataloging features that backend to multiple ISBN databases, so you don’t have to laboriously type in all your data. Enter your data in at least one field (ISBN is best, but title and/or...
Bombastic Textuality
I’ve been mulling over a theory today. It is about writers, writers and their near universal priggishness. This literary priggery quite often may translate into bombastic textual arrogance. Naturally this bombastacism is subtle–if it were outright it wouldn’t be priggish; and that, when it comes down to it, is the entire point. It is hard to write well. And when people feel like they have succeeded admirably in that difficult task it is usually in part because their completed text is overflowing with strong tones and overbearing adjectives; perhaps fanciful metaphors and elaborate alliteration to boot. Writing, it seems, becomes an epic contest, where the author’s word must overpower or undermine anything in its way. Meaning, as most...
Ecstasy
“The reporters who don’t use tape are always the ones who get the story right in the end,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. His 1971 film Land of Silence and Darkness, about a community of blind and deaf people, includes fabricated interviews, while Lessons of Darkness opens with a title card quoting Pascal–but the epigraph is simply made up. “You shouldn’t mix up fact and truth,” Herzog says. “I do not trust facts so much as I trust human ecstasies.”- From Wired My first exposure to Werner Herzog was the film Grizzly Man. The commentary and cinematography in that film captured my imagination and my heart and at the same time prodded me with philosophical questions regarding the relationship between...