Nepenthe

 Two grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal transmigration. The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and thus excusable. The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers; he accepts the blank look that his dictionary gives him without any qualms; or subjects scholarship to primness: he is as ready to know less than the author as he is to think he knows better. The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days. The howlers included in the first category may be in their turn div...

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, US, 1979) Dawn helicopter attack Apocalypse Now was method filmmaking: the film that was as insane as the war itself. And never more so than during the making of the film's showpiece: the scene where insanely gung-ho Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) and his Air Calvary helicopters swarm out of the dawn light to flatten a Vietcong village, speakers blasting out Wagner's 'Ride Of The Valkyries' as they go (the great film critic Pauline Kael bizarrely tried to dissuade Coppola from using the music on the grounds that it had already been used in a European arthouse movie). Having already set up the hugely expensive scene, Coppola tried to bully the US secretary of defence into providing a lifting helicopter for the scene. The helicopters they did have were borrowed from Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and were called away in the middle of the shooting of the scene to be used in a real war against Communist guerrilla...

Amazing...

'You're Sicilian, ha?' Only in a movie written by Quentin Tarantino, complained critics, would you get Dennis Hopper playing the nice guy. Hopper is Clifford Worley, an alcoholic ex-cop. Christopher Walken is Vincenzo Coccotti, a mobster who arrives at Clifford's trailer wanting to know the whereabouts of Clifford's son. After Clifford has been repeatedly punched, then has his hand slashed open by one of Coccotti's henchman (James 'Tony Soprano' Gandolfini), he is still smiling at Coccotti. Clifford: You're Sicilian, ha? Ya know, I read a lot. Especially about things... about history. I find that shit fascinating. Here's a fact I don't know whether you know or not. Sicilians were spawned by niggers. Coccotti [twitching, very slowly taking in what Clifford has just said]: Come again? Clifford Worley: It's a fact. See, Sicilians have black blood pumpin' through their hearts. If you don't believe me you can look it u...

The idea that the food industry has turned us into fat, helpless beings desperate for our next fast-food fix is based on a degraded view of human beings. “Despite what Kessler suggests, our psychology is far more complex than that of rodents”   “The constant struggle between the desire to eat and the pressure to stay thin is leading to a screwed-up attitude to food” “Food should be a pleasure, and the desire to perfect that pleasure is surely a good one” Read all from Spiked

“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value -- you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-tohand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal; you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.” Twitter ; Towel Day on Flickr ; TowelDay.org

"[W]omen write when the baby naps, while the children are at school, after the dishes are done and the lunches are packed and the house is at last quiet. It teaches us a kind of efficiency, to be sure, but also a resignation to frustration: the omnipresent awareness that no matter how smoothly the thoughts are flowing, they will have to stop when the school bus comes." On Shirley Jackson and the challenge of being both a mother and a writer

Click to enlarge and get all the collective nouns - astounding work, David ;)

Simon Winchester for Lapham's Quarterly The map is almost uncannily similar: a spray of black dots showing the recordings of a foul gray haze spreading all across Europe, from Helsinki to Naples, from Heligoland to Majorca, and reaching eventually to Aleppo and Damascus—and all caused by clouds of ash from an immense volcano erupting far across the sea in Iceland.  This was a map drawn not this year, but created from data collected in 1783. The volcano, called Laki, erupted for eight dismal months without cease. It ruined crops, it lowered temperatures and drastically altered the weather. It killed 9,000 people, it drenched the European forests in acid rain, it caused skin lesions in children and the deaths of millions of cattle and, by one account, it was a contributing factor (due to hunger-inducing famines) to the outbreak six years later of the French Revolution. Volcanoes are generators of unintended planetary consequences to a far greater deg...

But I'll  always miss Jean Rochefort Good news! We bumped into the great Terry Gilliam last night at a party in Cannes for the Doha Film Institute, and he revealed to us exclusively that Ewan McGregor has joined the cast of his long-delayed film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote . McGregor will take on the role that Johnny Depp had been set to play in the original, aborted version back in 2000. Depp had still been attached to the role for this version, but with Pirates Of The Caribbean 4 eating into his schedule, and a September start date looming for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote , Gilliam has clearly decided to go with McGregor instead. McGregor will play, if the current version remains faithful to the original attempt, a 21st century advertising executive who travels back in time to 17th century Spain, where he meets Don Quixote and becomes involved in adventures with him. Robert Duvall has been on board the revamped film, as Quixote, for s...

Robert Towne on the Plight of Screenwriters No one can really say what makes an effective screenplay, because no one really knows what makes a screenplay effective. Certainly part of the problem stems from the fact that screenplays can’t be judged by reading them. They may read well or badly, but that often says more about the reader than the screenplay. The only way a screenplay can be evaluated, almost by definition, is not on the page, but by viewing the movie it caused to be made. It certainly can be read and even enjoyed, but you’re stuck with the inescapable fact that it was written to be seen. “Causing the movie to be made,” incidentally, is no small thing. From it stems the historic hatred Hollywood has always displayed for the screenwriter. No matter what is said about how a movie gets made, one fact is inescapable: until the screenwriter does his job, nobody else, like actors, can do theirs. Until the screenwriter does his job, nobody else has a job. In oth...

Sept idées plus ou moins reçues sur Internet Internet a toujours œuvré pour le bien FAUX. Internet a élargi le champ des possibles, et nous y avions placé tous nos espoirs. Comme pour toute histoire d'amour naissante, nous croyions que le nouvel objet de notre affection -ou plutôt, de notre fascination- était capable de changer la face du monde. On nous présentait alors Internet comme l'outil ultime de promotion de la tolérance, la solution miracle qui allait mettre fin à tous les nationalismes, et transformer la planète en «village global» super-connecté. En 1994, un groupe d'aficionados mené par Esther Dyson et Alvin Toffler publièrent un manifeste modestement sous-titré «Une Magna Carta pour l'ère du savoir» et qui promettait l'essor de «“quartiers électroniques” reliés entre eux non pas géographiquement, mais par des intérêts communs». Nicholas Negroponte, alors à la tête du MediaLab du MIT, prédisait en 1997 qu'Internet allait faire tomber les frontières e...

The Sojourner, already aged likea fine wine The Scrabble keyboard From DataMancer ;)

And more at National Geographic Azores, Portugal Caretta caretta; Naucrates ductor Trailed by pilotfish, a young loggerhead cruises Atlantic waters around the Azores, where all sea turtles are protected by the EU. Juveniles typically reside within 15 feet of the surface, where waters are warm. Madeira Islands, Portugal Monachus monachus Once common in the Mediterranean, the monk seal is now the world's most endangered seal species. In the protected waters of the Madeira Islands, its population has increased from six to 35 individuals since the late 1980s.

“Unclean, unclean!” Mina Harker screams, gathering her bloodied nightgown around her. In Chapter 21 of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” Mina’s friend John Seward, a psychiatrist in Purfleet, near London, tells how he and a colleague, warned that Mina might be in danger, broke into her bedroom one night and found her kneeling on the edge of her bed. Bending over her was a tall figure, dressed in black. “His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.” Mina’s husband, Jonathan, hypnotized by the intruder, lay on the bed, unconscious, a few inches from the scene of his wife’s violation. Later, between sobs, Mina relates what happened. She was in bed with Jonathan when a strange...