efficiency

but I love adjectives

As a writer, and a pretty bad writer at that, I’m greatly fond of adverbs, particularly enamoured of pretty adjectives and head over heels with the exclamation mark! You’ll see, then,  if you read the following, why I found it so disheartening.   Margaret Atwood, Elmore Leonard and  PD James amongst others, tell you how [...]

A good read

From  The Wall Street Journal
There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans. And it’s still exciting—when Eliot does it. But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag. Which is probably why millions of adults are cheating on the [...]

The Horror, the horror

Being the kind of graduate snob who pretends to have read all of Ulysses, when I have only read the dirty bits, you will not be surprised to find out that I am a huge fan of Joseph Conrad.  So it comes as a shock to discover that he has a relative who is also [...]

would you do it for free?

Old pro, Harlan Ellison giving some extremely firm opinions on why he should be fucking paid…

The Odyssey – LULZ!

link

commit to memory

We have spent time on these pages discussing the eccentricities of various team members, their inclination for self aggrandising gestures, their vanities, their desire to be seen as more than what they are.  Can’t these poor puppets accept their place in the system and numb themselves to the endless ennui of contemporary urban life? One [...]

The Purloined Letter

Here’s a NYT’s review of “The Letters of Samuel Beckett, volume 1″
Thus he is broke: he wears his shoes until they finally “explode” on the Boulevard St.-Michel. He is exuberantly ill disposed to established writers (Eliot is a “nice man” but a “bad poet,” and his book on Dante is “insufferably condescending”). He writes, with [...]

mistakes

computer error messages as Haiku, from Authorware
The Web site you seek
Cannot be located, but
Countless more exist.
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.
Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.
Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.
Your [...]

very awesome indeed

A very cool kids book that I also happened to find rather appealing (I am 45)

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