"Listen!"

                                               

"Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Donʼt be thinking what youʼre going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe."

~ part of Ernest Hemingway's advice to a young writer — and good advice for anybody anytime

 

Precision > luck

“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
          ~ Ernest Hemingway, from his novel The Old Man and the Sea

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man..."

  

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self." 

           ~ attrib. to Ernest Hemingway

. 

"No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful." #QotD

"No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful."
          ~ Ernest Hemingway, from A Farewell to Arms

.

Ernest Hemingway advises ...

"The most solid advice is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough...
    "Finish what you start... Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the romance of the unusual... When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen."
    "[And] never go on trips with anyone you do not love."
~ Ernest Hemingway, attributed, and from 'Advice to Young Writer' in Esquire, 1935

.

Bonus Quote of the Day: On drinking

 

“When things are all right and it is you that is feeling low a drink can make you feel better. But when things are really bad and you are all right, a drink just makes it clearer.”
Ernest Hemingway, from his short story ‘Night Before Battle’

Quote of the Day: Hemingway’s advice to tourists

“Don’t bother with churches, government buildings
or city squares; if you want to know about a culture,
spend a night in its bars.”
~ Ernest Hemingway, quoted in
   ‘To Have and Have Another Revised Edition: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion’
    by Philip Greene

Saturday Reprise: How to Live Without Irony

From the extensive NOT PC archives …

---

“A life without passion is not a life - it is merely an existence.”
                     - Lesley Fieger

“"When a culture is dedicated to the destruction of values - of all values,
of values as such - men's psychological destruction has to follow."
- Ayn Rand

After the carnage of the First World War Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises about a “lost generation” who were outwardly still alive after the cataclysm, but inwardly dead.  “Give them irony and give them pity” exhorts one of the novel’s many expatriates who drift idly through Europe, wondering without caring if they might prefer it somewhere else. Or not.

For these characters, irony is a “cultivated aloofness,” “a strategy of containment and a rejection of idealism” after a war that seemed to destroy virtually every human value.

At least those gorgeous bastards had the war as an excuse.  These days hipsters cultivate aloofness for no reason at all but fashion. To fit in. To be one of the herd. To “go with the flow.”

“If irony is the ethos of our age—and it is,” observes Christy Wampole in a great op-ed in the New York Times, “then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living.”

The hipster haunts every city street and university town.. .He harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny. The hipster is a scholar of social forms, a student of cool. He studies relentlessly, foraging for what has yet to be found by the mainstream. He is a walking citation; his clothes refer to much more than themselves. He tries to negotiate the age-old problem of individuality, not with concepts, but with material things…
    [Today’s hipster] is merely a symptom and the most extreme manifestation of ironic living. For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s — members of Generation Y, or Millennials — particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt.

Where previous generations followed causes, lived with passion, stormed the barricades, this one sits around swapping ironic stories and examining its navel fluff. Blokes wear heavy beards and swandris as if they’re ironic woodsmen, but are incapable even of changing a tyre. Being aroused by anything is uncool. Feeling actual passion for things is unwelcome. Not for them the stirring sounds  of exhortations “to strive, to seek, to find, but not to yield,” which they might once have felt when younger. Life now, instead, as adults, can be summed up in ironic tweets amounting to “Meh,” LOL, “Whatevers.”

The hipster “goes with the flow,” regardless of where it’s headed; declares that “perception is reality,” synonymous with saying “nothing is real anyway”; affirms that ideals are things “you’ll grow out of,” while not noticing that without them they have become grown-ups who neither  know what they are doing nor care.* They live  lives in the world while detaching themselves from  it, making them dead inside while devaluing everything in the world they touch—made dead and devalued by what amounts to quotidian self-immolation, a steady drip, drip, drip of what was once their passions, values, enthusiasms and loves. Wampole speaks for that generation’s destruction of themselves:

Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings — of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems relatively irony-free. The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude, with a combative stance against authority, which the punk movement had also embraced. In my perhaps over-nostalgic memory, feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed: all of these stirrings contained within them the same electricity and euphoria touching generations that witness a centennial or millennial changeover.
    But Y2K came and went without disaster. We were hopeful throughout the ’90s, but hope is such a vulnerable emotion; we needed a self-defense mechanism, for every generation has one. For Gen Xers, it was a kind of diligent apathy. We actively did not care. Our archetype was the slacker who slouched through life in plaid flannel, alone in his room, misunderstood. And when we were bored with not caring, we were vaguely angry and melancholic, eating anti-depressants like they were candy.
    From this vantage, the ironic clique appears simply too comfortable, too brainlessly compliant. Ironic living is a first-world problem. For the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime. He doesn’t own anything he possesses.
    Obviously, hipsters (male or female) produce a distinct irritation in me, one that until recently I could not explain. They provoke me, I realized, because they are, despite the distance from which I observe them, an amplified version of me.

Self-awareness is the beginning of self –cure. “The simple act of noticing my self-defensive behaviour,” she says, “has made me think deeply about how potentially toxic ironic posturing could be.”

As a function of fear and pre-emptive shame, ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise? Or a symptom?

Or both?

Bewailing the cavalcade of coolness in which modern life is drowning, and offering his own antidotes to avoid what he calls “the swamp sirens,” Lindsay Perigo quotes Ayn Rand:

In her Journals, making notes for her upcoming novel, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand said:

"This may sound naïve. But - is our life ever to have any reality? Are we ever going to live on the level? Or is life always to be something else, something different from what it should be? A real life, simple and sincere, even naïve, is the only life where all the potential grandeur and beauty of human existence can be found. Are there real reasons for accepting the substitute, that which we have today? No one has shown today's life as it really is, with its real meaning and its reasons. I'm going to show it. If it's not a pretty picture - well, what is the alternative?"

In The Fountainhead, of course, she showed us, not just today's life as it really is, but the alternative also. And many years later, writing a weekly newspaper column for the Los Angeles Times, she said:

"When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some undefinable splendour, of the unusual, the exciting, the great, is an attribute of youth - and the process of aging is the process of that expectation's gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen."

One doesn't - and one shouldn't. To let it happen is to succumb to spiritual death long before one's physical demise - to spend maybe half one's life jaundiced, jaded, cynical, listless, atrophied, desiccated …. Or, in the case of many of today's youth, to spend nearly all one's life like that.

Tragic. The best lack all conviction … and the world is the worse for it.  But intense passion is the effect of profound conviction, observes Perigo.

[The hipster however] says that intense passion is improper, unseemly, bad form, or in modern parlance, "uncool." "Hot" is "uncool." "Cool" - neither hot nor cold - is "cool." By implication, the best way to avoid the embarrassment of intense passion is to eschew its cause - profound conviction. So if you find yourself starting to believe in something, abandon it quickly, before you make a fool of yourself.

This is no way to live, is it. Christy Wampole offers her own antidotes to begin making your way back into the world.

What would it take to overcome the cultural pull of irony? Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks. It means undertaking the cultivation of sincerity, humility and self-effacement, and demoting the frivolous and the kitschy on our collective scale of values. It might also consist of an honest self-inventory.

Saying what you mean and meaning what you say.

Considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities.

The cultivation of sincerity.

These are all frightening prospects, right? But they offer an excellent recipe for beginning to find your way back to life.

Take as your fuel for that journey these words by Ayn Rand addressed to the hero within each of you:

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not at all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved but have never been able to reach. Check your road, and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."

[Hat tip Paul Litterick]

POSTSCRIPT:

Here’s a link to seven websites poking fun at hipsters. My favourite, from which the pics above and below are purloined, is Unhappy Hipsters.

So these 4 drunks walked into a bar …

If it’s true that the drunk you is really just you with the bark off – the real person revealed without all the armour you normally wear out in public – then if there are only four kinds of drunks, as a study published in the Addiction Research & Theory journal suggests, then deep down there are only four kinds of people.

So which one are you?

1. If you can "drink hells any amount of whiskey without getting drunk," you're an Ernest Hemingway drunk—and you're in the majority. These are "drinkers who tend not to undergo drastic character changes or experience harms." So they’re probably the same all the way down.
2. About 23% could be called Mr. Hyde—or Ms. Hyde, since more than half of the subjects who fell into this category were women—meaning they became "particularly less responsible, less intellectual, and more hostile when under the influence of alcohol." Conversely, that suggests they’re the most repressed when sober.
3. One-fifth are labelled Nutty Professor, meaning “they were more introverted before imbibing and became much more gregarious and uninhibited afterward.” Maybe they realise people actually like some of their stories?
4. Finally, the Mary Poppinses made up about 15% of the pool; “they are ‘particularly agreeable’ after drinking—in other words, the happy, ‘sweet’ drunks who don't cause any trouble. These people really are nice all the way down.

So how much of this is anything but bollocks? Well, the “scientists” surveyed 187 pairs of undergraduate "drinking buddies" from a Midwestern university about their sober and intoxicated states. And that’s your sample size.

Mind you, that’s no bar to it being reported in the Guardian, in Time magazine and (now) even here at NOT PC.

[Hat tip Geek Press]

Ten Books That Changed Your Life

A while back a friend on Facebook¹ challenged me to list for her the Ten Books That Changed Your Life. So I thought long and I thought hard, and then I wrote this instead². Not necessarily my ten favourite books as we speak. In fact not even just ten. Because I cheated…

Ten books that changed my life:

1= Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
1= Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture – Selected writings 1894-1940, ed. By Frederick Gutheim
1 = Economic Sophisms – Frederic Bastiat

2 = Ninety-Three – Victor Hugo
2 = Time Enough For Love – Robert Heinlein
2 = Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology – Ayn Rand

3 = The Four Million – O. Henry

4 = Austrian Economics: A Reader – Richard Ebeling, editor
4 = Foucault's Pendulum – Umberto Eco
4 = The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature – Ayn Rand

5 = Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics – George Reisman
5 = Aristotle – John Herman Randall

6 = The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
6 = No Highway – Nevil Shute
6 = Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
6 = We – Yevgeny Zamyatin

7 = Martini: A Memoir – Frank Moorhouse
7 = The Complete Saki – Saki
7 = The Old Man and The Sea – Ernest Hemingway

8 = All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty – PJ O’Rourke
8 = How to Lie With Statistics – Darrell Huff
8 = Up the Organisation: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People & Strangling Profits – Robert Townsend

9 = The Book of Tofu – William Shurtleff & Akiko Aoyagi
9 = Willard & His Bowling Trophies – Richard Brautigan
9 = Architecture as Nature: The Transcendentalist Idea of Louis Sullivan – Narciso Menocal

10 =The Landscape of Man: Shaping the Environment from Prehistory to the Present Day – Geoffrey & Susan Jellicoe
10 = The Noblest Triumph: Property Rights Through the Ages – Tom Bethell
10 = The Roosevelt Myth – John Flynn
10 = Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature’s Favourite – Tibor Machan

So which ten or so books changed your life?

---

1. No, not a Facebook friend, but an actual friend who communicated with me on Facebook. It happens.
2. And promptly forgot about until just now when I found a copy down behind the printer.

How to Live Without Irony [updated]

“A life without passion is not a life - it is merely an existence.”
                     - Lesley Fieger

“"When a culture is dedicated to the destruction of values - of all values,
of values as such - men's psychological destruction has to follow."
- Ayn Rand

After the carnage of the First World War Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises about a “lost generation” who were outwardly still alive after the cataclysm, but inwardly dead.  “Give them irony and give them pity” exhorts one of the novel’s many expatriates who drift idly through Europe, wondering without caring if they might prefer it somewhere else. Or not.

For these characters, irony is a “cultivated aloofness,” “a strategy of containment and a rejection of idealism” after a war that seemed to destroy virtually every human value.

At least those gorgeous bastards had the war as an excuse.  These days hipsters cultivate aloofness for no reason at all but fashion. To fit in. To be one of the herd. To “go with the flow.”

“If irony is the ethos of our age—and it is,” observes Christy Wampole in a great op-ed in the New York Times, “then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living.”

The hipster haunts every city street and university town.. .He harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny. The hipster is a scholar of social forms, a student of cool. He studies relentlessly, foraging for what has yet to be found by the mainstream. He is a walking citation; his clothes refer to much more than themselves. He tries to negotiate the age-old problem of individuality, not with concepts, but with material things…
    [Today’s hipster] is merely a symptom and the most extreme manifestation of ironic living. For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s — members of Generation Y, or Millennials — particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt.

Where previous generations followed causes, lived with passion, stormed the barricades, this one sits around swapping ironic stories and examining its navel fluff. Being aroused by anything is uncool. Feeling actual passion for things is unwelcome. Not for them the stirring sounds  of exhortations “to strive, to seek, to find, but not to yield,” which they might once have felt when younger. Life now, instead, as adults, can be summed up in ironic tweets amounting to “Meh,” LOL, “Whatevers.”

The hipster “goes with the flow,” regardless of where it’s headed; declares that “perception is reality,” synonymous with saying “nothing is real anyway”; affirms that ideals are things “you’ll grow out of,” while not noticing that without them they have become grown-ups who neither  know what they are doing nor care.* They live  lives in the world while detaching themselves from  it, making them dead inside while devaluing everything in the world they touch—made dead and devalued by what amounts to quotidian self-immolation, a steady drip, drip, drip of what was once their passions, values, enthusiasms and loves. Wampole speaks for that generation’s destruction of themselves:

Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings — of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems relatively irony-free. The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude, with a combative stance against authority, which the punk movement had also embraced. In my perhaps over-nostalgic memory, feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed: all of these stirrings contained within them the same electricity and euphoria touching generations that witness a centennial or millennial changeover.
    But Y2K came and went without disaster. We were hopeful throughout the ’90s, but hope is such a vulnerable emotion; we needed a self-defense mechanism, for every generation has one. For Gen Xers, it was a kind of diligent apathy. We actively did not care. Our archetype was the slacker who slouched through life in plaid flannel, alone in his room, misunderstood. And when we were bored with not caring, we were vaguely angry and melancholic, eating anti-depressants like they were candy.
    FROM this vantage, the ironic clique appears simply too comfortable, too brainlessly compliant. Ironic living is a first-world problem. For the relatively well educated and financially secure, irony functions as a kind of credit card you never have to pay back. In other words, the hipster can frivolously invest in sham social capital without ever paying back one sincere dime. He doesn’t own anything he possesses.
    Obviously, hipsters (male or female) produce a distinct irritation in me, one that until recently I could not explain. They provoke me, I realized, because they are, despite the distance from which I observe them, an amplified version of me.

Self-awareness is the beginning of self –cure. “The simple act of noticing my self-defensive behavior,” she says, “has made me think deeply about how potentially toxic ironic posturing could be.”

As a function of fear and pre-emptive shame, ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise? Or a symptom?

Or both?

Bewailing the cavalcade of coolness in which modern life is drowning, and offering his own antidotes to avoid what he calls “the swamp sirens,” Lindsay Perigo quotes Ayn Rand:

In her Journals, making notes for her upcoming novel, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand said:

"This may sound naïve. But - is our life ever to have any reality? Are we ever going to live on the level? Or is life always to be something else, something different from what it should be? A real life, simple and sincere, even naïve, is the only life where all the potential grandeur and beauty of human existence can be found. Are there real reasons for accepting the substitute, that which we have today? No one has shown today's life as it really is, with its real meaning and its reasons. I'm going to show it. If it's not a pretty picture - well, what is the alternative?"

In The Fountainhead, of course, she showed us, not just today's life as it really is, but the alternative also. And many years later, writing a weekly newspaper column for the Los Angeles Times, she said:

"When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some undefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great, is an attribute of youth - and the process of aging is the process of that expectation's gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen."

One doesn't - and one shouldn't. To let it happen is to succumb to spiritual death long before one's physical demise - to spend maybe half one's life jaundiced, jaded, cynical, listless, atrophied, desiccated …. Or, in the case of many of today's youth, to spend nearly all one's life like that.

Tragic. The best lack all conviction … and the world is the worse for it.  But intense passion is the effect of profound conviction, observes Perigo.

[The hipster however] says that intense passion is improper, unseemly, bad form, or in modern parlance, "uncool." "Hot" is "uncool." "Cool" - neither hot nor cold - is "cool." By implication, the best way to avoid the embarrassment of intense passion is to eschew its cause - profound conviction. So if you find yourself starting to believe in something, abandon it quickly, before you make a fool of yourself.

This is no way to live, is it. Christy Wampole offers her own antidotes to begin making your way back into the world.

What would it take to overcome the cultural pull of irony? Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks. It means undertaking the cultivation of sincerity, humility and self-effacement, and demoting the frivolous and the kitschy on our collective scale of values. It might also consist of an honest self-inventory.

Saying what you mean and meaning what you say.

Considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities.

The cultivation of sincerity.

These are all frightening prospects, right? But they offer an excellent recipe for beginning to find your way back to life.

Take as your fuel for that journey these words by Ayn Rand addressed to the hero within each of you:

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not at all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved but have never been able to reach. Check your road, and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours."

[Hat tip Paul Litterick]

UPDATE:

Here’s a link to seven websites poking fun at hipsters. My favourite, from which the pics above and below are purloined, is Unhappy Hipsters.

Good news about good drinking

Since drinking is in the news again, courtesy of Jesse Ryder drinking enough to attract the Herald’s sub-editors, perhaps (I thought) I could help redress the balance a little bit from the usual headlines suggesting “drinking is bad” “drinking is dangerous” “drinking should be banned.”

So here’s two recent pieces of research on this important topic that never made the Herald, indicating drinking can be good. I offer them to you as a public service.First, alcohol encourages creativity; or, as Science News reports, “a boozy glow may trigger problem-solving sights”:

A moderate alcoholic high loosens a person’s focus of attention, making it easier to find connections among remotely related ideas, [psychology graduate student Andrew Jarosz of the University of Illinois at Chicago and his colleagues] propose online January 28 in Consciousness and Cognition…

The reason suggested is simple enough: drinking alcohol “lowers the ability to control one’s thoughts,” allowing the drinker to jump outside his canalised ways of thinking about a problem and finding instead new and more inventive ways to think about it.  Sounds like a more fun way to solve a problem than sitting in a room “brainstorming” about it.

    Jarosz and University of Illinois psychologist Jennifer Wiley, a study coauthor, suspect their finding applies to musical and artistic inspiration. “A composer or artist fixated on previous work may indeed find creative benefits from intoxication,” they say.

Composers, artists and writers through the ages from Aristophanes to Mozart to Hemingway would undoubtedly agree with them—as would anyone who’s ever jotted down a great idea produced while wetting their throat in the pub.

One word of warning about this, however. People don't think as clearly when their bladders are full.

Second, in further news that will astonish those who write the Herald’s headlines, "People who consume alcohol earn significantly more at their jobs than non-drinkers..."

The study published in the Journal of Labor Research concluded drinkers earn 10 to 14 percent more than teetotalers, and that men who drink socially bring home an additional seven percent in pay.
    "Social drinking builds social capital," said Edward Stringham, an economics professor at San Jose State University and co-author of the study with fellow researcher Bethany Peters.
    "Social drinkers are out networking, building relationships, and adding contacts to their BlackBerries that result in bigger paychecks" …
    The researchers found some differences in the economic effects of drinking among men and women. They concluded that men who drink earn 10 percent more than abstainers and women drinkers earn 14 percent more than non-drinkers.

Good news all round really.

But it must be countered with another word of warning: apparently drinking could also make you carry a Blackberry. Perhaps because you’ve been blinded by endorphins.

So it’s not all good.

[Hat tip Geek Press]

The world’s best man-caves.

These “fourteen famous man rooms” were selected by the Art of Manliness blog to show where great men went to collect their thoughts, to do their work --“a study where they would retreat to think, read, and write … a garage or workshop where they would tinker and experiment …  places a man could call his own.”

From Ernest Hemingway to Thomas Edison to Frederick Douglass to Thomas Jefferson to Charles Darwin, the blog showcases some great work and withdrawing spaces in which some great men have found inspiration. These are my favourite two, the Oak Park Drafting Room of Frank Lloyd Wright—with the upper mezzanine storey hung on chains above the workroom below—and Mark Twain’s Writing Hut, in which he completed Life on the Mississippi, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Describing his eyrie to a friend he talked of it “perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.

It is a cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lightning flashes behind the hills beyond and the rain beats upon the roof over my head—imagine the luxury of it.

Wright’s aim was inspiration. And experiment. And production. This was the workspace he created when he set up on his own , and in which over the next twenty years he and his assistants produced 125 structures the like of which the world had never before seen. Visit the Art of Manliness blog to read about the importance of man spaces, and to see the other dozen places in which world-beating work was done. They might inspire you to do your own. [Hat tip Gus Van Horn]

PS: I couldn’t resist adding this picture of Wright, below, at work (many  years after leaving Oak Park) in his writing office in Taliesin, Wisconsin.  It’s one of my favourites.

Beer O’Clock: In praise of the eloquent insult

We have twin goals here at here at NOT PC Towers on a Friday afternoon. 

While raising our glasses we also wish to raise the standard of what’s in those glasses - and the quality of insults we hear while drinking from them.  Not for us the simple four-word epithet, not at least when a more silver-tongued sally could prove more devastatingly effective.

That, at least, is our goal.

To this end, why not shake up your martini and peruse the following.

The famous exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison." He said, "If you were my wife, I should drink it."

Lord Sandwich to John Wilkes: "You sir, will either die on the gallows or of the pox." "That must depend, Sir," said Wilkes, "whether I embrace your lordship’s principles or your mistress."

“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” – Tom Waits on wowsers

"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr on an actor

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill

“The trouble with the world is that everyone is two drinks behind.” – Humphrey Bogart

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas

“A triumph of modern science – to find the only part of Randolph that wasn’t malignant and remove it.” – Evelyn Waugh on Randolph Churchill

“A difficulty for every solution.” – Herbert Samuel on the civil service

“I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.” Mark Twain on Cecil Rhodes

“Do you pray for the senators, Dr Hale?”  “No, I look at the senators and I pray for the country.” – Edward Everett Hale

“Like being savaged by a dead sheep.” - Denis Healey of a verbal attack on him by Geoffrey Howe

“Is there no beginning to your talents?” - Clive Anderson to Jeffrey Archer

“Mr Speaker, I said the honourable member was a liar it is true and I am sorry for it. The honourable member may place the punctuation where he pleases.” - Richard Brinsley Sheridan, MP

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend.... if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one." - Winston Churchill, in response.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating

"In order to avoid the scandal of coquetry, Mme de Genlis always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" - Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."  - Mae West

“When they circumcised Herbert Samuels they threw away the wrong bit.” - David Lloyd George (attrib.)

“You were born with your legs apart.  And they’ll send you to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin.” – Joe Orton in What the Butler Saw

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"You have Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder to Cliff Osmond

“Five bowls of muesli looking for a spoon.” NME magazine on prog-rock group Yes

“Her voice sounded like an eagle being goosed.” – Ralph Novak on Yoko Ono

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx

And finally, George Bernard Shaw who, when asked by the conductor of a restaurant orchestra if he would like to request the orchestra to play anything in particular, replied, “Dominoes.”

Books

My regular weekend ramble has been stymied by Firefox losing my session with all the tabs ready to go. Bugger.

So instead, let's do books. I'll say this first: I love 'em. Our apartment here is overrun with them, they pile up on shelves, on table, beside the bed; across, under and around my desk; around the kitchen, the bathroom and in every room but the switch cupboard. I like books, and but there's not one in any of those piles I could do without.

A while back I listed what (and whom) looms largest in my musical collection here at home, which has formed itself into similar piles, so perhaps it might be fun to do the same for the books that are stacked up around? Here goes then, ranked in descending order based on whom they're on or by (plays tend to overstate themselves a little--I've excluded Shakespeare since he'd tend to skew the results), which gives a reasonably fair summary of my enthusiasms:

Ayn Rand, 33; Frank Lloyd Wright, 31; Robert Heinlein, 31; Anthony Burgess, 31; Robert B. Parker, 27; Graham Greene, 22; Maria Montessori, 21; Wagner, 21; Dick Francis, 19; Aristotle, 14; Terence Rattigan, 14; FD Roosevelt, 14; Chekhov, 12; Len Deighton, 12; PJ O'Rourke, 10; Lee Child, 10; PG Wodehouse, 9; David Lodge, 9; Herman Wouk, 9; Leonard Read, 9; Ludwig von Mises, 8; Victor Hugo, 8; Umberto Eco, 8; Raymond Chandler, 8; Paul Johnson, 7; Phillip Roth, 7; Ibsen, 7; Lou Reed, 7; Gerald Seymour, 7; Oscar Wilde, 7; Mark Twain, 7; Rothbard, 7; Tibor Machan, 6; Hemingway, 6; Jefferson, 6; Martin Cruz Smith, 6; Mickey Spillane, 6; Bernard Levin, 5; Duke Ellington, 5; Dickens 5; Tom Wolfe, 5; GB Shaw, 5; Euripides, 5; Churchill, 5; Michelangelo, 5; Daniel Silva, 5; Dickens 5; Winnie the Pooh, 5; Sven Hassell, 5; Rodin, 4; Edward Cline, 4; Dostoyevsky, 4; Douglas Adams, 4; Thomas Sowell, 4; Frank G. Slaughter, 4; Richard Brautigan, 4; Aristophanes, 4; Aldous Huxley, 4; Rembrandt, 4; Vermeer, 4; Ken Follett, 4; Stephen Fry, 4; Brian Aldiss, 4 . . .

So how about you and your enthusiasms? What figures highly in the piles around your house?

Who do you look like?

Once again, DPF has come up with a time-waster: a face recognition site that allows you to upload a photo and find out which celebrities you and your friends look like. Oddly, with two photos of myself there was no overlap of names, indicating perhaps that the face recognititon software still needs some work. Anyway, here's what it came up with for me:

The good/interesting:
Vicente Fox (67%)
Patrick Stewart (62%)
Ariel Sharon (62%)
Pedro Almodovar (61%)
Mel Gibson (60%)

The very good:
Andre Breton (71%)
Kevin Spacey (62%)
Ricky Ponting (61%)

The 'You've Got to Be Kidding!':
Boris Trajkovski (68%)
Lyndon B. Johnson (66%)
John Travolta (64%)
Ben Frigging Affleck (62%)
Martin Fucking Sheen (61%)

I'm burning with jealousy that Rodney Hide got Michael Collins, and DPF got Hemingway.

LINK: Face recognition site (requires free registration) [Hat tip DPF]

TAGS: Geek stuff, Quizzes

Books around the house

Here's a bunch of what I'm reading at the moment. If you're not interested, just turn the electronic page.

Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature's Favorite, by Tibor Machan

Ludwig von Mises: The Man and His Economics, by Israel Kirzner

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo

The Business of Ecology, ed. by Leigh Cato

The Essential Hemingway, by Ernest Hemingway

Music and the Mind, Anthony Storr

I'm enjoying all of them immensely. Do you generally have more than one book going at once? It's always worked that way for me.

Categories: Books