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The Secret

The Secret
don't worry, nobody has the beautiful lady, not really, and nobody has the strange and hidden power, nobody is exceptional or wonderful or magic, they only seem to be it's all a trick, an in, a con, don't buy it, don't believe it. the world is packed with billions of people whose lives and deaths are useless and when one of these jumps up and the light of history shines upon them, forget it, it's not what it seems, it's just another act to fool the fools again. there are no strong men, there are no beautiful women. at least, you can die knowing this and you will have the only possible victory.

Japanese Folktales selected and edited by D. L. Contents Return to D. The Two Frogs Once upon a time in the country of Japan there lived two frogs, one of whom made his home in a ditch near the town of Osaka, on the sea coast, while the other dwelt in a clear little stream which ran through the city of Kyoto. So one fine morning in the spring they both set out along the road that led from Kyoto to Osaka, one from one end and the other from the other. They looked at each other for a moment without speaking, and then fell into conversation, explaining the cause of their meeting so far from their homes. "What a pity we are not bigger," said the Osaka frog; "for then we could see both towns from here, and tell if it is worth our while going on." "Oh, that is easily managed," returned the Kyoto frog. This idea pleased the Osaka frog so much that he at once jumped up and put his front paws on the shoulder of his friend, who had risen also. "Dear me!" The Mirror of Matsuyama "What have you hidden in your sleeve?"

Literature Project - Free eBooks Online Great Books Index - List of Titles An Index to Online Great Books in English Translation To obtain an index of an author's works, including any known online editions of each work, and online articles about that author, select the author's name. To obtain an index of online editions of a particular work, select the name of that work. Then you will be able to scroll up and down to see other works by that author and articles about the author. Authors are listed here in order of their birthdates (insofar as known). To obtain an alphabetical listing of authors, go to the Author Index . The Bible -- Homer -- Aeschylus -- Sophocles -- Euripides -- Herodotus -- Thucydides -- Hippocrates -- Aristophanes -- Plato -- Aristotle -- Euclid -- Archimedes -- Apollonius -- Lucretius -- Virgil -- Tacitus -- Epictetus -- Nicomachus -- Plutarch -- Ptolemy -- Marcus Aurelius -- Galen -- Plotinus -- St Augustine -- The Quran -- St Thomas Aquinas -- Dante -- Chaucer -- Erasmus -- Machiavelli -- Copernicus -- Rabelais -- John Calvin -- Montaigne -- William Gilbert -- Cervantes -- F.

Comics masters Not very long ago, a dedicated comics library might have looked less like a rare books room and more like a semi-coherent junk store, containing a three-dimensional scrapbook of out-of-print books, half-completed reprint series, miscellaneous small press magazines, bound photocopies and endless clippings. But the rise of the graphic novel category over the past decade has yielded a rich vein of previously rare or inaccessible archival material in well-designed, library-ready formats: complete comic strip collections, surveys of mid-century comic book genres, art books dedicated to historical and contemporary artists, and other rare pleasures. Today, a dedicated reader could fill several bookshelves with volumes compiled from this thoroughgoing history of comics, and a more casual reader or researcher can easily find the same at a well-stocked library. Rory Hayes was among the most visionary artists to emerge from the underground comix milieu of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Consider the Lobster: 2000s Archive For 56 years, the Maine Lobster Festival has been drawing crowds with the promise of sun, fun, and fine food. One visitor would argue that the celebration involves a whole lot more. The enormous, pungent, and extremely well marketed Maine Lobster Festival is held every late July in the state’s midcoast region, meaning the western side of Penobscot Bay, the nerve stem of Maine’s lobster industry. What’s called the midcoast runs from Owl’s Head and Thomaston in the south to Belfast in the north. (Actually, it might extend all the way up to Bucksport, but we were never able to get farther north than Belfast on Route 1, whose summer traffic is, as you can imagine, unimaginable.) Tourism and lobster are the midcoast region’s two main industries, and they’re both warm-weather enterprises, and the Maine Lobster Festival represents less an intersection of the industries than a deliberate collision, joyful and lucrative and loud. For practical purposes, everyone knows what a lobster is.

The real Black Dahlia - Imprint And then the lights go out. After the movie, I do a little gumshoe work on this Renner. She works out of a site she calls the Vintage Powder Room, devoted to “history, women and art.” She lectures around town regularly, and has even been on the small screen, in a film noir segment for the Turner Classic Movies series “Film Fanatics” and in an episode of the ID Discovery Channel’s “Deadly Women” series. On weekends she’s a tour guide for Estotouric, and her most popular tour is “The Real Black Dahlia.” Renner also helped put together an exhibit about the investigation that just opened at the Los Angeles Police Museum over in Highland Park. So I decide to get Renner on the horn for the full lowdown. Clara Phillips a.k.a. Joan Renner: I’m a social historian with an interest in the rich crime history of Los Angeles, circa 1910-1960, so I poke around in libraries and tomb-like government buildings to uncover Los Angeles’ criminal past. Robert James. LAPD Chief James Edgar "Two Gun" Davis. .

Q&A: Matt Taibbi on the 40th Anniversary of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, Hunter S. Thompson's influence, and Why Barack Obama Isn't a Great Shark - Page 1 - Books Matt Taibbi, like many journalists, grew up idolizing Hunter S. Thompson. But Taibbi, unlike many journalists, got Hunter S. The similarities between the two Rolling Stone scribes do not stop there, even though Taibbi himself argues he's nothing like Thompson. In his introduction, Taibbi highlights the importance of Thompson's writing, calling him the "most instantly trustworthy" American narrator since Mark Twain, and argues that the book still continues to define the way we think about the dramas of politics. Rolling Stone Contributing Editor Matt Taibbi Related Stories More About When did you first read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72? Did you ever meet him? You wrote in the introduction that Campaign Trail has become the bible for political reporting. None of them start with a guy driving down a highway with a gun. In the intro, you say Thompson is the most trustworthy American narrator since Mark Twain. In your own writing, what's more important to you?

On Snobbery and Books for Grown-Ups Joel Stein is being roundly booed as a snob for opining in a recent Times roundtable that “Adults Should Read Adult Books” and steer clear of young adult fare. Maybe out of pure contrariness, I’m inclined to offer a qualified defense. It has to be qualified because, let’s face it, I’m a 33-year-old man with an extensive comic book library. I even read all the Harry Potter and Hunger Games books, and I can’t see why that’s any worse a light entertainment than watching an action movie—which takes about as long. All that said, while there’s often a surprising amount of thematic sophistication to mine in literature aimed at kids and teens, let’s not kid ourselves that it’s equivalent to what you’ll find in the best literary fiction. Most of us, let’s admit, are fundamentally lazy: After working hard all day, who wants to work in their spare time? So I’ll go ahead and say I think we’d probably be worse off in a world completely bereft of this kind of cultural snobbery.

Books that will induce a mindfuck Here is the list of books that will officially induce mindfucks, sorted alphabetically by author. Those authors in bold have been recommended by one or more people as being generally mindfucking - any books listed under their names are particularly odd. You're welcome to /msg me to make an addition to this list. And finally, although he's way down at the bottom, my personal recommendation is definitely Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, as it turns the ultimate mindfuck: inverting the world-view of our entire culture, and it is non-fiction.

'How Creativity Works': It's All In Your Imagination iStockphoto.com What makes people creative? What gives some of us the ability to create work that captivates the eyes, minds and hearts of others? Jonah Lehrer, a writer specializing in neuroscience, addresses that question in his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. Lehrer defines creativity broadly, considering everything from the invention of masking tape to breakthroughs in mathematics; from memorable ad campaigns to Shakespearean tragedies. He finds that the conditions that favor creativity — our brains, our times, our buildings, our cities — are equally broad. Lehrer joins NPR's Robert Siegel to talk about the creative process — where great ideas come from, how to foster them, and what to do when you inevitably get stuck. Interview Highlights On comparing Shakespeare with the inventor of masking tape "I think we absolutely can lump them all together. "... On how Steve Jobs redesigned Pixar studios to maximize collaboration and creativity " ... "It's near midnight.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - StumbleUpon Chapter One A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. "And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing Room." Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. "Just to give you a general idea," he would explain to them. "To-morrow," he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality, "you'll be settling down to serious work. Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. "Bokanovsky's Process," repeated the Director, and the students underlined the words in their little notebooks. Mr.

Kenneth Fearing Kenneth Fearing, a well-known proletarian poet of the 1930s, a pulp-magazine writer with several pseudonyms, and a Chicago and New York publicity and editorial writer, turned to writing “psycho-thrillers” in the 1940s and 1950s. His fourth novel The Big Clock (1946) achieved much popularity and was released as a film by Paramount in 1947. Although some scholars now consider Fearing’s main contribution to be in the genre of poetry, the 1980 paperback republication of The Big Clockrepresents mystery buffs’ recognition of the novel as a classic. The son of a Chicago attorney, Kenneth Flexner Fearing was born and brought up in Oak Park, Illinois, where he attended public schools. Fearing considered Sandburg and Whitman the main models for his poetry; his poems also resemble those of E. Reviewers charged that Fearing included too many narrators for readers to care for any of them, a criticism that would plague most of Fearing’s novels.

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