Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

I find this text by famous American writer Bruce Sterling very important and interesting. The text was pablished on wired 20 May
1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.

13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.

17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

Albert Camus Quotes

Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne…Oh no! It’s a…long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.

The aim of art, the aim of a life, can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

Integrity has no need of rules.

Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.

Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.

How many crimes are permitted simply because their authors could not endure being wrong.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.

Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.

Roses Quotes

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple’s a rose
Robert Frost

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with elgantine.
Shakespeare

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Iris Murdoch

The red rose whispers of passion,
And the white rose breathes of love;
O, the red rose is a falcon,
And the white rose is a dove.
John Boyle O’Reilly

Which is loveliest in a rose? Its coy beauty when it’s budding, or its splendour when it blows?
George Barlow

I’d rather have roses on my table
than diamonds ’round my neck.
Emma Goldman

A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow rose was to him.
And it was nothing more.
William Wordsworth

But earthlier happy is the rose distill’d
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.
William Shakepeare

The world is a rose, smell it and pass it to your friends.
Persian Proverb

Tom Waits

Broken bicycles, old busted chains
With rusted handle bars, out in the rain
Somebody must have an orphanage for
All these things that nobody wants any more
September’s reminding July
It’s time to be saying goodbye
Summer is gone, but our love will remain
Like old broken bicycles out in the rain

Broken bicycles, don’t tell my folks
There’s all those playing cards pinned to the spokes
Laid down like skeletons out on the lawn
The wheels won’t turn when the other has gone
The seasons can turn on a dime
Somehow I forget every time
For all the things that you’ve given me will always stay
Broken, but I’ll never throw them away
«Broken Bicycles»

Time Quotes

A loafer always has the correct time.
- Kin Hubbard

A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
- Segal’s Law

All great achievements require time.
- Maya Angelou

But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
- Andrew Marvell

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of.
- Benjamin Franklin

I don’t mind going back to daylight saving time. With inflation, the hour will be the only thing I’ve saved all year.
- Victor Borge

I gotta work out. I keep saying it all the time. I keep saying I gotta start working out. It’s been about two months since I’ve worked out. And I just don’t have the time. Which uh..is odd. Because I have the time to go out to dinner. And uh..and watch tv. And get a bone density test. And uh.. try to figure out what my phone number spells in words.
- Ellen DeGeneres

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
- William Shakespeare

I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
- Bernard Berenson

I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.
- Marilyn Monroe

If you don’t have time to do it right you must have time to do it over.
- Anonymous

In reality, killing time is only the name for another of the multifarious ways by which Time kills us.
- Osbert Sitwell

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.
- Hofstadter’s Law

Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.
- Marcus Aurelius Antonius

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
- George Eliot

The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life. — (Sometimes a Little Brain Damage Can Help, 1984)
- George Carlin

The days of the digital watch are numbered.
- Tom Stoppard

The obscurest epoch is to-day.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
- Bertrand Russell

There’s time enough, but none to spare.
- Charles W. Chesnutt

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
- Jean-Paul Sartre

Time and Tide wait for no man, but time always stands still for a woman of thirty.
- Robert Frost

Time as he grows old teaches all things.
- Aeschylus

Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.
- Aristotle

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
- Groucho Marx

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
- Hector Berlioz

Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
- Douglas Adams

Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions.
- John Randolph

Time is bunk.
- Douglas Adams

Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.
- Woody Allen

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
- Carl Sandburg

Time is the only critic without ambition.
- John Steinbeck

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
- Peter F. Drucker

Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.
- John Archibald Wheeler

Time may be a great healer, but it’s also a lousy beautician.
- Anonymous

Time sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly.
- Ivan Turgenev

Time will explain it all. He is a talker, and needs no questioning before he speaks.
- Euripides

Time! Joyless emblem of the greed of millions, robber of the best which earth can give.
- Amy Lowell

Time’s fatal wings do ever forward fly; to every day we live, a day we die.
- Thomas Campion

Time’s fun when you’re having flies. (Kermit the Frog)
- Jim Henson

When I give a lecture, I accept that people look at their watches, but what I do not tolerate is when they look at it and raise it to their ear to find out if it stopped.
- Marcel Achard

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?
- Woody Allen

Yes, time flies. And where did it leave you? Old too soon…smart too late.
- Mike Tyson

You can take of a man’s money, but when it’s all said and done, you’ve only taken his money. When you take of a man’s time, you’ve taken a part of his life. I’d like to thank you for giving me a part of your life tonight.
- Wayne Newton

You know, sometimes, when they say you are ahead of your time, it’s just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.
- George McGovern

You know, sometimes, when they say you’re ahead of your time, it’s just a polite way of saying you have a real bad sense of timing.
- George McGovern

Scottish Proverbs

Be happy while you’re living, For you’re a long time dead.

What may be done at any time will be done at no time.

Better bend than break.

Learn young, learn fair; learn old, learn more.

Get what you can and keep what you have; that’s the way to get rich.

Willful waste makes woeful want.

When the heart is full the tongue will speak.

Be slow in choosing a friend but slower in changing him.

Fools look to tomorrow. Wise men use tonight.

Confessed faults are half mended.

They that will not be counselled cannot be helped.

Never let your feet run faster than your shoes.

They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind.

Luck never gives; it only lends.

Better be ill spoken of by one before all than by all before one.

Take care of your pennies and your dollars will take care of themselves.

Rock and Roll is Alive

Even if it’s said that the Rock&Roll of 60s, when dope was cheap, sex – free, and the rock – great are gone and today videos destroyed the vitality of rock and roll, I might be agree and not agree with at the same time. They say: before that, music said, “Listen to me.” Now it says, “Look at me.” Our time is discrepant, that’s right but not more or less than it was before and one more tricking demonstration of Rock&Roll is alive is Reading Festival 2009, oldest and very popular place gathering yearly fans of rock, alternative, indie, punk, metal and other styles of music together. Besides that no doubt we have certain advantages over old kind times, I mean scientific and technical progress of course, that allowed us to get wide range things we could hardly ever dream. Today you can buy any tickets online though it were for concerts, theatre, sports, Tickets for Reading Festival or any other live event. Also using Seatwave, this fan-to-fan ticket exchange operating, you have chance to sell or exchange your tickets just for saving your money.

What I would like to do at the end is just to add just some quotes of my favorite musicians, which are really alive till now – Led Zeppelin

How can you consider flower power outdated? The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That’s all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated?
– Robert Plant, lead singer, Led Zeppelin
I’m not trying to be cosmic, it’s just that everything’s on a roll and that’s how it is. The songs within the album discuss that very condition.
– Robert Plant

My vocal style I haven’t tried to copy from anyone. It just developed until it became the girlish whine it is today.
– Robert Plant
My vocation is more in composition really than anything else — building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.– Jimmy Page, guitarist, Led Zeppelin

But to put out a greatest hits on one CD was totally impossible, I just couldn’t do it. The best compromise was to put out two CDs — Early Days — which is what it is — and Latter Days.
– Jimmy Page

I think it was that we were really seasoned musicians. We had serious roots that spanned different cultures, obviously the blues.
– Jimmy Page

I always believed in the music we did and that’s why it was uncompromising.
– Jimmy Page

I always thought the good thing about the guitar was that they didn’t teach it in school.
– Jimmy Page

Fools and Wise

Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.
Cato the Elder

Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish.
Charles Caleb Colton

The mistakes of the fool are known to the world, but not to himself. The mistakes of the wise man are known to himself, but not to the world.
Charles Caleb Colton

A fool despises good counsel, but a wise man takes it to heart.
Confucius

Who are a little wise the best fools be.
John Donne

It takes a wise man to handle a lie, a fool had better remain honest.
Norman Douglas

Love works a different way in different minds, the fool it enlightens and the wise it blinds.
John Dryden

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.
Epictetus

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.
Benjamin Franklin

Wise men don’t need advice. Fools won’t take it.
Benjamin Franklin

The fool wanders, a wise man travels.
Thomas Fuller

Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom.
Elizabeth Gaskell

A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
Balthasar Gracian

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men — and the fools know it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Even a fool may be wise after the event.
Homer

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
Thomas Huxley

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.
Karl Kraus

One fool can ask more questions in a minute than twelve wise men can answer in an hour.
Nikolai Lenin

Wise people are foolish if they cannot adapt to foolish people.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say something.
Plato
Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish.
John Ray

The fool thinks himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
William Shakespeare

A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top.
Unknown

Only a fool knows everything. A wise man knows how little he knows.
Unknown

Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.
Oscar Hammerstein II

A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
William Blake

Wise men learn by other men’s mistakes, fools by their own.
H. G. Bohn

A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times.
John Dalberg Acton

Canada and Canadian

To be complex does not mean to be fragmented. This is the paradox and the genius of our Canadian civilization. Adrienne Clarkson
We only need to look at what we are really doing in the world and at home and we’ll know what it is to be Canadian. Adrienne Clarkson

Stumbling through darkness and racing through light, we have persisted in the creation of a Canadian civilization. Adrienne Clarkson
Patriotism is not dying for one’s country, it is living for one’s contry. And for humanity. Perhaps that is not as romantic, but it’s better. Agnes Macphail
I’m no lady. I’m an MP. Agnes Macphail
Canadians can be radical, but they must be radical in their own peculiar way, and that way must be in harmony with our national traditions and ideals. Agnes MacPhail
Canada? I don’t even know what street it’s on. Al ‘Scarface’ Capone
Until I came to Canada I never knew ’snow’ was a four letter word. Alberto Manguel
When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us. Alexander Graham Bell
Leave the beaten track behind occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do you will be certain to find something you have never seen before. Alexander Graham Bell
The term “eh?”- pronounced like a long A – is usually affixed to every sentence out of a Canadian’s mouth, from the sublime (”I love you, eh?”) to the ridiculous (Let’s get married, eh?”) and everything in between (”Gimme a pack of Export, eh?”) Allan Gould
It’s going to be a great country when they finish unpacking it. Andrew H. Malcom
We’ll explain the appeal of curling to you if you explain the appeal of the National Rifle Association to us. Andy Barrie
The crisis of Canada today is the combination of economic problems facing us and the increasing impotency of governments that lack either the will or the resources to do much about it. The tragedy of Canada today is that just when we need a country that’s pulling together in common cause, we have one that keeps finding new ways to pull itself apart. Angus Reid
God Bless America, but God help Canada to put up with them! Anonymous
What is a Canadian? A Canadian is a fellow wearing English tweeds, a Hong Kong shirt and Spanish shoes, who sips Brazilian coffee sweetened with Philippine sugar from a Bavarian cup while nibbling Swiss cheese, sitting at a Danish desk over a Persian rug, after coming home in a German car from an Italian movie… and then writes his Member of Parliament with a Japanese ballpoint pen on French paper, demanding that he do something about foreigners taking away our Canadian jobs. Anonymous
Canada is like your attic, you forget that it’s up there, but when you go, it’s like “Oh man, look at all this great stuff!” Anonymous
Canada is like a bird, it likes to soar freely Anonymous
Give me a good canoe, a pair of Jibway snowshoes, my beaver, my family and ten thousand square miles of wilderness and I am happy. Archie Belaney (Grey Owl)
Canada has never been a melting-pot; more like a tossed salad. Arnold Edinborough

New Year Is Here

Another fresh new year is here . . .
Another year to live!
To banish worry, doubt, and fear,
To love and laugh and give!

This bright new year is given me
To live each day with zest . . .
To daily grow and try to be
My highest and my best!

I have the opportunity
Once more to right some wrongs,
To pray for peace, to plant a tree,
And sing more joyful songs!”

New Year Resolutions Quotes
Many people look forward to the new year for a new start on old habits.
Author Unknown

A New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other.
Author Unknown

Never tell your resolution beforehand, or it’s twice as onerous a duty.
John Selden

The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows.
George William Curtis

New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
Mark Twain

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
Oscar Wilde

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.
Andre Gide

One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things.
John Burroughs

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.
Joey Adams

He who breaks a resolution is a weakling;
He who makes one is a fool.
F.M. Knowles

I think in terms of the day’s resolutions, not the year’s.
Henry Moore

I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.
Anaïs Nin

New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
James Agate

New year, same goal.
Joe King