Burn these books | LitBash 44

If books entertain you - burn them! Start with authors who were...

Born this week:

Simon Vestdijk, Netherlands
"If it were to be claimed that intentional verse is not yet poetry, then I would equally have the right to claim that the most consummate, most differentiated sound poems are no longer poetry but a singular imitation of another art: music or declamation."

Arthur Miller, USA
"I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things, because you can go up a dead end and discover that it's beyond your capacity to discover some organism underneath your feeling, and you're left simply with a formless feeling which is not itself art. It's inexpressible and one must leave it until it is hardened and becomes something that has form and has some possibility of being communicated. It might take a year or two or three or four to emerge."

Pierre de Laclos, France
"I was astonished at the pleasure to be derived from doing good."

Ernst Didring, Sweden

Mikhail Kuzmin, Russia

Tibor Dery, Hungary

Kir Bulychev, Russia

Niels Albert Dam, Denmark

Miguel Angel Asturias, Guatemala
"If you write novels merely to entertain - then burn them! This might be the message delivered with evangelical fervour since if you do not burn them they will anyway be erased from the memory of the people where a poet or novelist should aspire to remain. Just consider how many writers there have been who - down the ages - have written novels to entertain! And who remembers them now?"

Elfriede Jelinek, Austria
"Very few women wait for Mr. Right. Most women take the first and worst Mr. Wrong."

Ursula K. Le Guin, USA
"To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible."

Gianni Rodari, Italy

Died this week:

Karl Kautsky, Germany
"The capitalist class rules but does not govern: it contents itself with ruling the government."

Jean Amery, Austria

Jonathan Swift, UK / Ireland
"Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style."

Jack Reed, USA
"War means an ugly mob-madness, crucifying the truth tellers, choking the artists, sidetracking reforms, revolutions, and the working of social forces."

Jack Kerouac, USA
"All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land."

Charles Bertin, Belgium

Jose Andrade, Brasil

The Future, according to Arthur Conan Doyle

"What is to be the end of it all? Since first a man scratched hieroglyphics on an ostracon, or scribbled with sepia upon a fragment of papyrus, the human race has been puzzling itself over that question... We may safely suppose that man will win fresh victories over mechanical and natural difficulties. That he will navigate the air with the same ease and certainty with which he now does the water, and that his ships will travel under the waves as well as over them. That life will be rendered more refined and more pleasant by countless inventions, and that preventative medicine and sanitary science will work such wonders that accident and old age will be the only causes of death. That the common sense of nations will abolish war, and the education and improved social condition of communities will effect a marvellous diminution in crime. That the forms of religion will be abandoned but the essence maintained, so that one universal creed will embrace the whole earth, which shall preach reverence to the great Creator and the pursuit of virtue, not from any hope of reward or fear of punishment, but from a high and noble love of the right and hatred of the wrong.

These are some of the changes which may be looked for. And then? Why, by that time, perhaps the solar system will be ripe for picking."

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/sherlock-holmess-origins-revealed-2360513.html

How do you discover ebooks?

Survey from: http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/how-ebook-buyers-discover-ebooks/

Cyber espionage, made in USA

"Members of the Berlin-based Chaos Computer Club, however, examined the so-called R2D2 keylogging Trojan after getting hold of a copy of it, and discovered that it was doing much more than it was legally supposed to do. In addition to monitoring Skype calls and recording keystrokes to capture e-mail and instant messaging communications, the Trojan had the ability to take screenshots and activate a computer’s microphone and webcam to allow someone to remotely spy on activities in a room. Furthermore, the program includes a backdoor that would allow authorities to remotely update the program with additional functionality.

The backdoor, CCC found, also contains several security vulnerabilities that makes any system on which the spyware is installed potentially vulnerable to takeover by other parties who could commandeer the spyware for their own purposes. Commands sent to the Trojan are not encrypted, and the spyware requires no authentication between the Trojan and the system communicating with it, meaning that anyone could take remote control of the spyware to spy on a user, plant evidence on his machine or even impersonate a law enforcement Trojan to communicate with law enforcement systems."

This spyware does not come from China, it's proudly made in the USA.

More: http://m.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/10/germany-fbi-spy-tool/

Public bookshelves

"COLOGNE, Germany — Take a book, leave a book. In the birthplace of the printing press, public bookshelves are popping up across the nation on street corners, city squares and suburban supermarkets.

In these free-for-all libraries, people can grab whatever they want to read, and leave behind anything they want for others. There’s no need to register, no due date, and you can take or give as many as you want."

More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/public-bookshelves-spread-across-germany-allowing-free-access-to-literature/2011/10/14/gIQA4niBjL_story.html

UFO and psychological warfare

"Recent information has surfaced that both the U.S. and Soviet governments fancied an interest in faking an alien invasion as a means to induce mass-hysteria in the enemy à la Orson Welles' chaotic War of the Worlds broadcast from 1938.

At least one inter-agency communication from the early 1950s acknowledges the potential disruptive power of a faked alien invasion in both "offensive and defensive" contexts (keeping in mind, the Roswell UFO incident occurred only a few years prior and was followed by a flurry of "flying saucer" sightings around the world).

The following memo was sent from then-director of the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith to the unnamed director of the "Psychological Strategy Board."

I am today transmitting to the National Security Council a proposal… in which it is concluded that the problems connected with unidentified flying objects appear to have implications for psychological warfare as well as for intelligence and operations…

I suggest that we discuss at an early board meeting the possible offensive or defensive utilization of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes."

More: http://dvice.com/archives/2011/09/investigating-t-1.php

Good, or bad, they're sacred | LitBash 43

Books from writers who were...

Born this week:

Claude Simon, France
"To begin with, our perception of the world is deformed, incomplete. Then our memory is selective. Finally, writing transforms."

Harold Pinter, UK
"There can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."

Gertrud von Le Fort, Germany

Francois Mauriac, France
"Most men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed off wings where he never ventures."

Takiji Kobayashi, Japan

Mikhail Lermontov, Russia
"Happy people are ignoramuses and glory is nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning."

Alfred Neumann, Germany

Bernard von Brentano, Germany

Manuel de Fonseca, Portugal

Italo Calvino, Italy
"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language."

Oscar Wilde, UK
"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."

Dino Buzzati Traverso, Italy

Jose Saramago, Portugal
"Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed."

Gunter Grass, Germany
"Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred."

Died this week:

Alexy K. Tolstoy, Russia

Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Denmark

Anatole France, France
"Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue."

Ernst Didring, Sweden

Hjalmar Soderberg, Sweden

Marcel Ayme, France

Louis Guilloux, France

Danilo Kis, Serbia
"Do not get involved with anyone, a writer is alone."