Join the Facebook Committee to Support Liao Yiwu

For the 13th time, Chi­nese author­i­ties arrest­ed the well-known Chi­nese writer Liao Yiwu (The Corpse Walk­er) as he board­ed a plane to attend a lit­er­ary fes­ti­val in Cologne, Ger­many. He has now been placed under house arrest. You can learn more about it here. (Also read Philip Goure­vitch’s blog post for The New York­er.) Please join this new­ly cre­at­ed Face­book Group ded­i­cat­ed to pub­li­ciz­ing this sto­ry and win­ning his release. Be among the first to join. Make a dif­fer­ence here.

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John Battelle Doesn’t Like the iPad Because…

In short, it’s hard­ly open …

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World War II Relived through Sand Painting

How did the artist Kseniya Simono­va win the Ukrain­ian ver­sion of Britain’s Got Tal­ent? By using the art of sand paint­ing to recount the sto­ry of Ger­many’s inva­sion of Ukraine in 1941. Life was some­what ordi­nary, then it all fell apart. And, by the war’s end, an esti­mat­ed 10 mil­lion Ukraini­ans were left dead. It’s a dif­fi­cult sto­ry to tell. And I’m refer­ring not just to the sto­ry’s con­tent, but to the actu­al medi­um too. Thanks Steve for the heads up on this one.

For more sand paint­ing, check out the work of Ilana Yahav.

Chilean Quake Shortens the Day

An inter­est­ing fac­toid relat­ing to the dev­as­tat­ing earth­quake in Chile this week­end. A NASA sci­en­tist sur­mis­es that the quake prob­a­bly shift­ed the Earth’s axis and short­ened the day. As this piece in Busi­ness Week goes on to explain:

Earth­quakes can involve shift­ing hun­dreds of kilo­me­ters of rock by sev­er­al meters, chang­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion of mass on the plan­et. This affects the Earth’s rota­tion, said Richard Gross, a geo­physi­cist at NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­to­ry in Pasade­na, Cal­i­for­nia, who uses a com­put­er mod­el to cal­cu­late the effects.

“The length of the day should have got­ten short­er by 1.26 microsec­onds (mil­lionths of a sec­ond)… The axis about which the Earth’s mass is bal­anced should have moved by 2.7 mil­liarc­sec­onds (about 8 cen­time­ters or 3 inch­es).”

For more, read the com­plete Busi­ness Week arti­cle. And, con­sid­er donat­ing to a Chile relief fund. Mash­able tells you how…

via @slate

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Henry Miller on New York

(NOTE: some strong lan­guage here...)

Back in 1975, film­mak­er Tom Schiller (only 20 years old at the time) made a short doc­u­men­tary on the nov­el­ist Hen­ry Miller (Trop­ic of Can­cer, Trop­ic of Capri­corn). In the scene above, Miller, then 81 years old, rem­i­nisces about his dif­fi­cult ear­ly life in New York, and it all takes place on the set used to shoot the movie Hel­lo, Dol­ly!. Schiller’s com­plete film, Hen­ry Miller Asleep and Awake, can be watched for free on Snag­films. (It’s also avail­able at Ama­zon on DVD here.) The run time is 34 min­utes. Excel­lent find by Mike.

Note: We’ve added Hen­ry Miller Asleep and Awake to our grow­ing film col­lec­tion: Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Film Noir, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Ten Rules for Writing Fiction

The Guardian asked twen­ty nine writ­ers to give their 10 Rules for Writ­ing Fic­tion. Those giv­en by Jonathan Franzen (The Cor­rec­tions) were arguably the pithi­est, and we list them below. The full line­up of writ­ers (includ­ing Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, and Richard Ford) can be found here. (The New York­er has since fol­lowed up with some com­men­tary on the Guardian list.)

  • The read­er is a friend, not an adver­sary, not a spec­ta­tor.
  • Fic­tion that isn’t an author’s per­son­al adven­ture into the fright­en­ing or the unknown isn’t worth writ­ing for any­thing but mon­ey.
  • Nev­er use the word “then” as a con­junc­tion – we have “and” for this pur­pose. Sub­sti­tut­ing “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solu­tion to the prob­lem of too many “ands” on the page.
  • Write in the third per­son unless a real­ly dis­tinc­tive first-per­son voice ­offers itself irre­sistibly.
  • When infor­ma­tion becomes free and uni­ver­sal­ly acces­si­ble, volu­mi­nous research for a nov­el is deval­ued along with it.
  • The most pure­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal fic­tion requires pure inven­tion. Nobody ever wrote a more auto bio­graph­i­cal sto­ry than “The Meta­morphosis”.
  • You see more sit­ting still than chas­ing after.
  • It’s doubt­ful that any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion at his work­place is writ­ing good fic­tion.
  • Inter­est­ing verbs are sel­dom very inter­est­ing.
  • You have to love before you can be relent­less.

via @kirstinbutler

Lawrence Lessig Speech Streamed Live Today

A quick heads up…

Flu­mo­tion and the Open Video Alliance will be stream­ing a live event on Thurs­day, Feb­ru­ary 25th fea­tur­ing Lawrence Lessig, the foun­da­tion­al voice of the free cul­ture move­ment. The 45-minute speech will be deliv­ered live from Har­vard Law School via Flumotion’s Stream­ing Plat­form, and will explore the rela­tion­ship between copy­right, fair use, pol­i­tics and online video. The speech takes place at 6:00 PM local time (23:00 GMT) and [can be watched live here.]

Get more details from Flu­mo­tion here.

PS On a relat­ed note, TEDxNYED will stream talks live on March 6th.  Speak­ers will include Lawrence Lessig, Hen­ry Jenk­ins, Jeff Jarvis, Michael Wesch and oth­ers. Looks like a great event. Get more details here.

Blowin’ in the Wind

The BBC brings you Folk Amer­i­ca, a three-part doc­u­men­tary series on Amer­i­can folk music, “trac­ing its his­to­ry from the record­ing boom of the 1920s to the folk revival of the 1960s.” We fea­ture above the third seg­ment, Blowin’ in the Wind, which takes you straight to the 1960s, when Bob Dylan and Joan Baez hit the stage. The oth­er two seg­ments that make up Folk Amer­i­ca include Birth of a Nation and This Land is Your Land.

via Metafil­ter

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