Category: Arts and Letters
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
One night in a Dublin street I watched an extraordinary scene between a tramp and a prostitute whose sad little affair had broken up – his hope of a home, hers of a husband. Bit by bit she stripped off the few garments he had bought for her, threw them at his feet, and stood in the cold night air shivering. Suddenly I looked around and saw a beautiful girl who was also watching the scene and realized that she was easily the most interesting figure in the little group. On her face was a look that I can describe only as one of exaltation. Maupassant would have followed that girl to her home.
The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story
Frank O’Connor
The Lonely Voice is the definitive work of Irish non-fiction on the art of writing short fiction, and has long been held up as one of the greatest works in global literature on the short form.
Y’know when the characters in a movie go to see a movie and it feels really meta? Well, with an “Ultimate Double Feature,” we play the first movie up until the point when they enter a cinema to watch a different film… then we play that film… then we go back to the first film to finish that story.
— The Brattle Theatre (@brattletheatre.bsky.social) February 18, 2026 at 4:03 PM
If you are anxious and sad about the state of the world, that’s fine, and there are plenty of strategies for dealing with that. But I think you already know that drive-by online dooming isn’t a strategy. It’s selfish and adolescent. It’s a contagion that only spreads the worst of you, not the best.
— Ken Jennings (@kenjennings.bsky.social) January 7, 2026 at 8:51 PM
BOONDOCK SAINTS was voted movie of the year by the American Association Of Pot Dealers Who Want You To Stay And Hang Out After You Buy Pot From Them seven years in a row
The outside world tends to celebrate the most trivial superficial aspects of an actor’s life, lifting their personality to a plastic God-like status, but the actual joy of acting lies in the absence of personality. In taking on and inhabiting the accoutrements of another’s being—where they are from, their accent, their clothes, their background—you realize that every element of your own personality is malleable. You can do it, you can wear the skin of another human being—and yet still you are you. This, in its own small way, feels profound because it illustrates that none of the things you point to as identity are intrinsic. You are something far more mysterious than a person who is funny, who is angry, who is hurt, who likes Marlboro cigarettes, who is Presbyterian, who is a playboy, who is Nigerian, who is a Real Madrid fan—all of that is dressing.
A Bright Ray of Darkness
Ethan Hawke
Van Der Beek shot to fame in 1998 as Dawson Leery, the teenage film buff who was as obsessed with Steven Spielberg as he was with his neighbour and lifelong crush, Joey Potter (played by Katie Holmes). Later that year, he was voted one of People Magazine’s Most Beautiful People in the World. On the 25th anniversary of the show starting, Van Der Beek wrote: “Twenty-five years ago today, my life changed. Not gradually, not day-by-day … instantly. It was the culmination of five years of auditioning, hundreds of hours on stage, thousands of hours travelling, preparing, dreaming, hoping, hearing ‘no’ and making up reasons to keep going. But the shift was overnight.”
The intense pressures of celebrity proved difficult to cope with given his youth. After Dawson’s Creek became a smash hit, he said in an interview: “Walking around at that time was very tricky because one autograph could turn into a mob scene. So I walked around in fear of teenage girls.”
James Van Der Beek, star of Dawson’s Creek, dies aged 48
Actor who also starred in Varsity Blues and Rules of Attraction revealed in 2024 he had been diagnosed with cancer
From the last Dawson’s Creek recap on Television Without Pity:
…which Dawson picks up at the office in Los Angeles. “It’s us!” Pacey and Joey squeal, offering him their congratulations. “I can’t wait until next season,” Joey says, and Dawson tells them that he can’t wait for the next day. Because he’s meeting Spielberg. Whatev. Pacey and Joey, like good friends (and unlike me), are thrilled for him. The three of the yammer about what he ought to wear to the meeting, as the camera pans to framed photo of Pacey, Joey, Dawson, and Jen, framed on Dawson’s desktop. “Say goodnight, not goodbye,” the soundtrack sings.
And that’s it. We’re out. Thanks for coming along for the ride. It was long and occasionally painful, but I don’t regret a second of it. See you around.
To sum up the whole matter very simply, if Mr. McCabe asks me why I import frivolity into a discussion of the nature of man, I answer, because frivolity is a part of the nature of man. If he asks me why I introduce what he calls paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I answer, because all philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. If he objects to my treating of life riotously, I reply that life is a riot. And I say that the Universe as I see it, at any rate, is very much more like the fireworks at the Crystal Palace than it is like his own philosophy. About the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity—like preparations for Guy Fawkes’ day. Eternity is the eve of something. I never look up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a schoolboy’s rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall.
Heretics
Gilbert K Chesterton
Rest in peace, mass market paperbacks.
As reported by Publishers Weekly, book distributor ReaderLink will “stop distributing mass market paperback books at the end of 2025 … the latest blow to a format that has seen its popularity decline for years.”
There are several causes of death for the mass market paperback. One is the reduced cost of designing and producing books in the now ubiquitous trade market format. The cheaper price point for a mass market book is no advantage when it isn’t also cheaper to manufacture.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/12/27/biblioracle-mass-market-paperbacks/
In this quick beginner-friendly blues guitar lesson, we’ll dive into the basics of playing blues in the key of E. Perfect for anyone wanting to get a feel for the 12 bar blues on the guitar.
GROSS: You have a great story in your book about how you co-wrote – well, how you got “Satisfaction” started. You co-wrote the song with Mick Jagger, but you originated it and you didn’t know you were doing it. Can you…
RICHARDS: I wish all the songs would come this way, you know, where you just dream them and then the next morning there they are presented to you. But “Satisfaction” was that sort of miracle that took place. I had a – I had one of the first little cassette players, you know, Norelco (inaudible) Philips – kind of the same thing, really. But it was a fascinating little machine to me, a cassette player, that you could actually just lay ideas down, you know, wherever you were. I set the machine up, and I put it in a fresh tape. I go to bed as usual with my guitar, and I wake up the next morning, I see that the tape has run to the very end. And I think, well, I didn’t do anything, you know. I said, maybe I hit a button while I was asleep, you know? So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play. And there in some sort of ghostly version is (vocalizing) I can’t get no satisfaction. And so there is a whole verse of it. I won’t bother you with it all. And after that, there’s – I don’t know – 40 minutes of me snoring.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/29/1119640101/fresh-airs-summer-music-interviews-keith-richards
Then came “Satisfaction,” the track that launched us into global fame. I was between girlfriends at the time, in my flat in Carlton Hill, St. John’s Wood. Hence maybe the mood of the song. I wrote “Satisfaction” in my sleep. I had no idea I’d written it, it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player. The miracle being that I looked at the cassette player that morning and I knew I’d put a brand-new tape in the previous night, and I saw it was at the end. Then I pushed rewind and there was “Satisfaction.” It was just a rough idea. There was just the bare bones of the song, and it didn’t have that noise, of course, because I was on acoustic. And forty minutes of me snoring. But the bare bones is all you need. I had that cassette for a while and I wish I’d kept it.
Life
Keith Richards
“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning. Every day at eight o’clock he was brought his breakfast by Frau Grubach, the cook, but today she did not come.”
Annotation: where description collapses into self
1. Apparent fact – but already contaminated
“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.”
This sounds like explanation of an external situation. But notice: No evidence. No witness. No uncertainty marker except “must”. This is not world-description. It is K.’s assumption. The world has not yet been described at all — only K.’s defensive inference.2. Moral assertion posing as fact
“for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning.” Key phrase: “without having done anything wrong.” Arrest is an external event. Innocence is an internal claim. Kafka fuses them grammatically, as if innocence were observable. The “world” here is already being narrated from inside K.’s self-justifying consciousness.3. Routine as psychological anchor
“Every day at eight o’clock he was brought his breakfast by Frau Grubach.” This is a real-world habit. But its function is psychological: K. defines reality by routine. Normalcy is his measure of legitimacy. The description is telling us how K. stabilizes his sense of self.4. The disturbance (pure projection)
“but today she did not come.”
Objectively: someone is late.
Subjectively: A violation
A threat. A sign that order has broken. Kafka gives us no external confirmation that this matters. The importance of the event exists only in K.’s inner framework.What we learn
About the world:
Almost nothing verifiable. Only actions stripped of motive
About Josef K.:
He equates innocence with order. He treats routine as legitimacy. He assumes accusation requires malice. He experiences authority as intrusion, not structure.The world is opaque. The self is over-exposed.
But perhaps the fire may be confined to public buildings. And in any case, after we have paid our tribute of regret to the affair, considered as a calamity, inevitably, and without restraint, we go on to consider it as a stage spectacle. Exclamations of—How grand! How magnificent! arise in a sort of rapture from the crowd. For instance, when Drury Lane was burned down in the first decennium of this century, the falling in of the roof was signalized by a mimic suicide of the protecting Apollo that surmounted and crested the centre of this roof. The god was stationary with his lyre, and seemed looking down upon the fiery ruins that were so rapidly approaching him. Suddenly the supporting timbers below him gave way; a convulsive heave of the billowing flames seemed for a moment to raise the statue; and then, as if on some impulse of despair, the presiding deity appeared not to fall, but to throw himself into the fiery deluge, for he went down head foremost; and in all respects, the descent had the air of a voluntary act. What followed? From every one of the bridges over the river, and from other open areas which commanded the spectacle, there arose a sustained uproar of admiration and sympathy.
On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts
Thomas De Quincey
His favorite was the manageress of the restaurant, a handsome blonde with a very sweet motherly smile, about thirty years old. Bergmann approved of her highly. “I have only to look at her,” he told me,” to know that she is satisfied. Deeply satisfied. Some man has made her happy. For her, there is no longer any search. She has found what we are all looking for. She understands all of us. She does not need books, or theories, or philosophy, or priests. She understands Michelangelo, Beethoven, Christ, Lenin—even Hitler. And she is afraid of nothing, nothing.… Such a woman is my religion.”
The manageress would always have a special smile for Bergmann when we came in; and, during the meal, she would walk over to our table and ask if everything was all right. “Everything is all right, my darling,” Bergmann would reply; “thanks to God, but chiefly to you. You restore our confidence in ourselves.”
I don’t know exactly what the manageress made of this, but she smiled, in an amused, kindly way. She really was very nice. “You see?” Bergmann would turn to me, after she had gone. “We understand each other perfectly.”
Prater Violet: A Novel
Christopher Isherwood
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
byu/oh_bruddah inJokes
Halcione
How many Freudian psychologists does it take to change a life bulb?
Two. One to change the bulb and another to hold the penis, I mean the father, I mean the ladder.
MaxwellzDaemon
How many hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb?
It’s some number you probably never heard of.
GdoubleWB
How many philosophy majors does it take to change a lightbulb?
Doesn’t matter, they never change anything.
1: one that is grungy
2: rock music incorporating elements of punk rock and heavy metal
also : the untidy fashions typical of fans of grunge
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grunge
JONATHAN PONEMAN I read the expression grunge many, many times in music journalism before Everett True used it. Everett took the word from the Sub Pop mail-order catalog description of Green River’s Dry as a Bone that Bruce wrote: “ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.”
MARK ARM The word grunge was tossed around a little bit here and there well before I ever used it. Steve Turner picked up this ’70s reissue of a Rock ’n’ Roll Trio album, and the liner notes talk about Paul Burlison’s “grungy guitar sound.” That was written in the ’70s about a ’50s guitar player.
Grunge was an adjective; it was never meant to be a noun. If I was using it, it was never meant to coin a movement, it was just to describe raw rock and roll. Then that term got applied to major-label bands putting out slick-sounding records. It’s an ill fit.
JACK ENDINO None of us is entirely sure about who used the word first. I saw it in a Lester Bangs record review in Rolling Stone in the ’70s. Mark Arm had used the word in the early ’80s.
Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge
Mark Yarm
From the introduction:
First, let’s get that word out of the way. Grunge. Yes, this is a book about grunge. The term that bedeviled and, let’s face it, benefited (at least temporarily) many a Seattle rock musician in the early to mid-1990s. I cannot count how many times, when I described to an interviewee what exactly it was I was working on, I’d get back, “I hate that word …” And here they would go one of two ways: spit out “that word” grunge or insist, “I don’t even like to say it,” as if uttering that one syllable would somehow validate a now decades-old coinage. (For a thorough, yet inconclusive, probe into how grunge got its name, see chapter 17.) Others reacted to the term thusly: “rubs me raw,” “a marketing tool,” “it’s all just music,” “fuckin’ concocted bullshit.” And this: “When I see the word grunge, especially on books, I kind of go”—and at this point, the guy I was interviewing made a rather convincing vomiting sound.