Cancer World

Review of “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” by Siddhartha Mukherjee: newyorker

Roger Ebert: Traveler to the undiscovere'd country

American film critic Roger Ebert on Christopher Hitchens, illness, medicine, religion, and death: Roger Ebert

Ebert's title "Traveler to the undiscovere'd country" is inspired, of course, by a couple of lines in Hamlet's famous soliloquy in William Shakespeare's play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: Act III, Scene I

James Joyce: Ulysses

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the day James Joyce's Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and others go about the business of their ordinary lives on 16 June 1904 in Dublin.

Yes, it's Bloomsday!

The final chapter of Joyce's wonderful novel Ulysses closes with Molly Bloom's interior monologue. Here are the exquisite, extraordinary, only terminally punctuated, final lines:

O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Trieste-Zürich-Paris, 1914--1921

Meditations on noise

Three books:
The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise, by Garret Keiser;
Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence, by George Michelsen Foy;
In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, by George Prochnik.
Reviewed by Dwight Garner: NYT

All Things Reconsidered: The 35th Anniversary of Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks

A dozen and a half essays consider one of Bob Dylan's masterworks, the breakup album Blood on the Tracks: popmatters

God, John Locke, and Equality

Investigating the foundations of equality, by Jeremy Waldron: wsws

Samuel Beckett | 13 April

Samuel Beckett, born 13 April 1906

que ferais-je sans ce monde (what would I do without this world)

Original version:
que ferais-je sans ce monde sans visage sans questions
où être ne dure qu'un instant où chaque instant
verse dans le vide dans l'oubli d'avoir été
sans cette onde où à la fin
corps et ombre ensemble s'engloutissent
que ferais-je sans ce silence gouffre des murmures
haletant furieux vers le secours vers l'amour
sans ce ciel qui s'élève
sur la poussieère de ses lests

que ferais-je je ferais comme hier comme aujourd'hui
regardant par mon hublot si je ne suis pas seul
à errer et à virer loin de toute vie
dans un espace pantin
sans voix parmi les voix
enfermées avec moi

Translation (by Beckett):
what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without this sky that soars
above its ballast dust

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddenness

Samuel Beckett Online Resources

The story of how the ♥, the heart, and love came together

A heart-shaped history, by Iain Gately: Lapham's Quarterly

Matsuo Bashô: Frog Haiku

The original Japanese:

Furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

Alan Watts:

The old pond,
A frog jumps in:
Plop!

Thirty-one Translations and One Commentary: Bureau of Public Secrets

Reading matters

Want to read this article? Then enter your password, by Charlie Brooker: guardian

South China Morning Post

More cuts at Hong Kong's SCMP: asia sentinel
Thanks, Gavin!

Reading matters

Silence: the browser

Reading mattters

i thank you God for most this amazing, by e.e. cummings: american poems

Reading mattters

Professor J N "Jerry" Morris. . . the man who invented exercise.

By Simon Kuper: Financial Times

Reading mattters

Robert Glatzer writes::

The quintessential Foley artist story comes from the Brian DePalma film "The Untouchables," where we see Robert De Niro as Al Capone whack somebody on the head with a baseball bat. So how do you create a sound to match the visual, and make it believable, without actually doing someone bodily harm? After many experiments and many failures, the Foley artist found the right tools: a bowling pin hitting a raw turkey. You could try it yourself

Film credits 101: salon
Who is Alan Smithee: salon

Reading mattters

It turns out that yesterday was the 57th anniversary of the initial patent of the barcode.

Since when, barcodes have become ubiquitous.

So much so that if you become an in-patient in a public hospital hereabouts, all your documents, X-rays, CAT scans, blood samples and other stuff are barcoded as is the white, plastic bracelet around your wrist.

Ha! Make your own barcode: barcoding

Reading mattters

Hemlock writes:

"A date which will live in infamy . . . Geocities, the evil multinational conglomerate that produces its shoddy and environmentally destructive Internet services in Dickensian sweatshops in its ruthless quest for profit, saw fit – as part of its imminent closure – to bar me, wild American friend Odell, the Big Boss and delectable Administrative Officer Winky Ip from our very own home from the middle of last week. They have let me back in briefly in order to retrieve a few essentials, but otherwise this is it. Cast out into the wilderness with maximum prejudice aforethought.
Souvenir hunters, the nostalgic, and the terminally bored are welcome to poke around here – the lights go out permanently at Geocities around the end of October."

Looking forward? A "blog" by D. Ah, here it is: Big Lychee

Reading mattters

Hong Kong in your eyes, Alice Poon: Asia Sentinel

Reading mattters

Lash out and cover up: Austerity nostalgia and ironic
authoritarianism
in recession Britain, by Owen Hatherley: radical philosophy

Reading mattters

In Wal-Mart's Image, by Harold Meyerson: Prospect