Today from the Internet:
The Millions’ Ned Beauman is overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of literature: The Million Basic Plots.
And the horrible thing is, it doesn’t stop there. There’s a remark somewhere by (I think) Martin Amis about how all young writers have to confront the fact that there just aren’t many new ways left to describe an autumn sky or a pretty girl. It’s like peak oil for lyricism.
From OpenCulture, a video in which Arthur C. Clarke totally predicted the Internet.
We could be in instant contact with each other, wherever we may be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth, even if we don’t know their actual physical location. It will be possible in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London…. Almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even any physical skill, could be made independent of distance. I am perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand.
A while ago, Flavorwire posted a list of unconventional bookstores.
After the rent at his Brooklyn retail space (that once employed Jonathan Lethem) shot through the roof, [Martin] Seidenberg moved his secondhand bookshop to his first floor Upper East Side apartment, where it exists under the radar, unknown even to many who live in his building.
The New York Times offers a suggestion for a fun evening with friends: The Paperback Game, in which players write sample first sentences based on covers and back-cover copy from a selection of cheap paperbacks, the winner being obviously the most hilarious. (Need some paperbacks? We’ve got plenty.) The best part of this article, though, is imagining Salman Rushdie giggling at “Hysterical Sex in the Time the Time of Cholera”:
[Christopher Hitchens] described a game, played with Salman Rushdie and other friends, that involved replacing the word “love” in famous book titles with the phrase “hysterical sex.”
And on the more caffeinated side of things, a visual lesson in pronunciation from printmaker Brian W. Jones (who has many other coffee-related lessons to offer if you click the link):
So now you know.
