Who has not sometimes wondered:  suppose I had been born somewhere else, in another country, in another time, what would my life have been?  The question contains within it one of mankind's most widespread illusions, the illusion that brings us to consider our life situation a mere stage set, a contingent, interchangeable circumstance through which ( Read more... )

92% Barack Obama
90% Bill Richardson
88% Hillary Clinton
88% John Edwards
85% Chris Dodd
76% Joe Biden
67% Dennis Kucinich
66% Mike Gravel
50% Rudy Giuliani
46% John McCain
39% Mitt Romney
38% Mike Huckabee
32% Tom Tancredo
26% Fred Thompson
15% Ron Paul

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

In 1902, Stalin was arrested, charged with organizing the disturbances in Batumi where seven thousand workers had clashed with mounted Cossacks, and imprisoned while he awaited sentencing. He soon became the boss of the whole city jail, "dominating his friends, terrorizing the intellectuals, suborning the guards and befriending the criminals ( Read more... )

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music - and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody - which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way ( Read more... )

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I have found another remark by Kafka on the mission of literature: What we need, he wrote, are books which strike us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, books which would make us feel that we've been driven out into the forest far from another human being, like suicide. A book must be an axe ( Read more... )

Crying only a little bit ( Read more... )

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The law, stiff with formality, is a cry for creativity; a call for nobility concealed in the form of commandments. It is not designed to be a yoke, a curb, a strait-jacket for human action. Above all, the Torah asks for love: Thou shalt love thy God: thou shalt love thy neighbor. All observance is training in the art of love.

-- Abraham Joshua ( Read more... )

[U]nder Daisy's direction, Henry has read the whole of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, two acknowledged masterpieces. At the cost of slowing his mental processes and many hours of his valuable time, he committed himself to the shifting intricacies of these sophisticated fairy stories. What did he grasp, after all? That adultery is ( Read more... )