http://www.vanishingdays.com Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:20:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In the eyes of the enlightened, plot in fiction typically marks a work as “genre” and therefore neither “literary” nor intelligent. DG Myers thinks not: The most intelligent novels, I am almost tempted to claim, are those that are the most brilliantly plotted, in which every piece locks into place with an ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/03/08/lost-but-not-forgotten/ Humans don’t have a very good understanding of what constitutes “rights”. From Wired: Four in five adults believe access to the Internet is a fundamental right — with those feelings particularly strong in South Korea and China — and half believe it should never be regulated, according to a global survey. Governments ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/03/08/ain%e2%80%99t-no-right/ Seth Godin asks: I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don’t have a prize for yet. Yes yes yes yes yes. http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/03/06/race-for-the-prize/ I couldn’t agree more: . . . [W]henever writing gets too painful, when each word and idea seems to be dragged from the mind like the limb of an aborted camel, reading offers a writer a lovely escape into a fantasy world where stories are revealed with simple ease and order ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/03/04/access-to-data/ French philosopher André Glucksmann in City Journal on “The Velvet Philosophical Revolution”: As Western intellectuals watched Berlin in November 1989, they reconsidered their long belief that the world was fated to be Communist—but retained their belief in fate. Providence had at last spoken, chance was abolished, the terrible parenthesis of the ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/03/01/freedom-part-three/ There’s only way to get through this life and that’s to have as little human contact as possible. You show me someone committing a good act and I’ll show you a million humans committing a million acts of evil . . . every second of every day. http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/03/01/fanfare-for-the-common-man-redux/ The Times asks why we relish celeb break-ups, but the more important question to ask is why humans relish “celebrity” at all? I assume that those who follow the lives of others (that is, those whom they don’t personally know, in particular “celebrities,” the vacuous idols and contemptible gods of ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/02/28/fixing-a-hole/ Has any man wanted to be The Messiah more than Al Gore? It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it. . . ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/02/27/the-life-of-al/ Booker prize-winner Hilary Mantel writes in The Observer on living in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia: I had been thoroughly frightened by life in Jeddah, and my conversations with Muslim women, my neighbours in the city, had alerted me to the cavernous gap of understanding between the west and the Islamic ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/02/24/freedom-redux/ Thanks to the Kevin Smith – Southwest Airlines imbroglio, I can sum up everything that is wrong with the world by invoking the name of one “civil rights organisation”: National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Here’s a deal: I’ll “accept your fatness”—whatever that means—when you accept that being double-wide means you ... http://www.vanishingdays.com/2010/02/24/too-fat-to-fly-part-three/