“The Small Print: (1) Enter your limericks one to a post, with only your name and e-mail, and nothing else. Unlimited number of separate entries. (2) Comments on entries and the entry itself may be in either prose or poetry. (3) “On-topic” strictly enforced. Anything off-topic, post at previous entry. (4) Mind your apostrophes!”
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Roger Ebert’s Journal: Archives
Anyone up for a limerick contest?
92y:
(via anin)
Mr. Pamuk writes by hand, in graph-paper notebooks, filling a page with prose and leaving the adjacent page blank for revisions, which he inserts with dialogue-like balloons. He sends his notebooks to a speed typist who returns them as typed manuscripts; then he marks the pages up and sends them back to be retyped. The cycle continues three or four times.Pamuk makes his first appearance at 92Y tonight.
…The mind is most settled when there is coherence to our thoughts. We seek to resolve conflicting thoughts by remembering them and processing them. So, a dangerous cycle can develop with traumatic events. Because they are fragmented, there are constant reminders of them. But, because they are painful, we do not process them deeply. And so, we suffer the stress of remembering a painful situation without resolving the incoherence.
Research by my colleague Jamie Pennebaker and his colleagues suggests that one of the best therapies for this kind of psychological trauma is also one of the simplest: writing. He describes this procedure in a 1997 paper in Psychological Science. People are asked to spend three consecutive days writing about one or more traumatic events. They are encouraged to really explore the thoughts and emotions surrounding the event, and to tie it to relationships with significant others. In studies of this technique, people doing this writing are compared to others who write about unemotional topics like time management.
As you might expect, writing about these emotional events was very difficult for people. They did not enjoy the experience, and they found it painful. However, the long-term effects of this writing were fascinating. If you followed the people in these studies over time, they reported fewer illnesses, they went to the doctor less often, and they suffered fewer symptoms of depression in the future. They were less likely to miss work and school, and their performance at work went up. These effects lasted for months and years after writing.
a big thank you to ryan for sending me this article!
Our mission is to put unwanted books into the hands of those who want them.
“My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven’t read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may — need is the word I use — to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill’s history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed. That 1957 best-seller by James Could Cozzens was eviscerated in a famous essay by Dwight Macdonald, who read all the way through that year’s list of fiction best sellers and surfaced with a scowl. It and the other books on the list have been rendered obsolete, so that his essay is cruelly dated. But I remember reading the novel late, late into the night when I was 14, stirring restlessly with the desire to be by love possessed.”
(via peterwknox) (via givemesomethingtoread): During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history.
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