There are no words for this… Space Oddity (by Chris Hadfield)
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Eager to embrace populist trends, he set up shop in his glass house and waited for the Occupy movement to join him.
(Photo: João Canziani; Dwell)
Eh. Yeah I know we’re all tired of jokes about “hipsters”, tired of the word itself, of its lack of meaning by now etc. etc. but I couldn’t help laughing at the captions on this blog (only just now came across this). Take a look at this one too. Very nicely done!
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(via Harald Hauswald and the GDR | Lovely Artitude)
More photos and info on books by Harald Hauswald on his website. Have a look at this one, May Day on the Karl Marx Allee:
Wow.
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Choice is a double-edged sword. It can be both empowering and crushing. And in a world where it’s held up as the ultimate liberty, you only have yourself to blame if you choose wrong. So I didn’t. I drafted this essay by hand, sometime in the summer of 2011 with no intentions of ever publishing it. It freed me to focus on the essence of writing—expressing one’s thoughts. It was remarkably liberating.
I encourage you to do the same—write to improve your critical thinking, not to impress your audience. Be humble and expect your essays to be read by no one. Decouple writing from publishing and just write. You will be surprised how much easier it becomes. -
The translators’ bunker
So, a couple days ago I come across this tweet in Italian with a link to a video that looks like a trailer for a thriller movie, a movie about Dan Brown’s translators locked up in some infernal underground bunker - “the hell of literary translation revealed in all its horror”:
L’inferno della traduzione editoriale svelato in tutto il suo orrore fb.me/15eGpXDaP
— Stefano KaliFire (@trovareXcredere)At first I think it’s a joke, but no, I look up the story later when I have more time and indeed by then I do find some more references in English, in a blog and in the media:
- Dan Brown’s Translators in Berlusconi’s Bunker - love german books blog
- Dan Brown’s Inferno: Translators toil in bunker to decode his latest book in 11 languages - The Independent
- Dan Brown’s Inferno: the hellish conditions endured by those translating author’s new blockbuster - The Telegraph
- oh there’s also an article in the Daily Mail with CAPITAL LETTERS in the title and url no less (“translators confined for TWO MONTHS”) but it just recycles the same press-release style bits from the other media stories.
Notice something about all these stories? The emphasis on how awful it must have been for the translators, the easy wordplay on the hellish/inferno idea, and yeah, that scary reference to “Berlusconi’s Bunker” will make you wonder what the hell (eh) was going on.
Mondadori building by Oscar Niemeyer - Photo by Ferdinando Scianna for Magnum Photos -
It’s not about passion. Passion is something that we tend to overemphasize, that we certainly place too much importance on. Passion ebbs and flows. To me, it’s about desire. If you have constant, unwavering desire to be a cook, then you’ll be a great cook. If it’s only about passion, sometimes you’ll be good and sometimes you won’t. You’ve got to come in every day with a strong desire. With passion, if you see the first asparagus of the springtime and you become passionate about it, so much the better, but three weeks later, when you’ve seen that asparagus every day now, passions have subsided. What’s going to make you treat the asparagus the same? It’s the desire.
— Thomas Keller On Why Passion Shouldn’t Drive You | Co.Design: business innovation design
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hehehe only just saw this now. so süss. —> Troll high-fiving people in Pisa (by Darius Groza)
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Wild things happening during the Month of Performance Art.
You can check out the full programme full of crazy and inspiring events here.
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Blooming trees of Berlin, see you soon I hope... →
Ah dammit I won’t be back in Berlin for another week or two and it really bugs me that I am missing the first explosion of flowers in the city - please tell me the trees will stay in bloom throughout May! This moment of envy & heimweh was spurred by pics of gorgeous flowers by Berlin roof-gardener hannahsgarden:
The apple trees have exploded. It’s totally gorgeous out there.
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That habit of constantly trying for something just beyond you toughens you up, sets your mind into a permanently hungry and optimistic state, ready and willing to do the work to make things better—and able to cope when things get worse. A person who’s set and achieved goals in life is more likely to weather the storm of a layoff or illness or tragedy because they’ve trained themselves to be goals-oriented, to think positively and work toward something better. That’s their modus operandi—they don’t know how else to be. This is the part about goal-setting that just doesn’t get the press it deserves. People who work on goals put optimism into practice. Every attempt you make to get better (whether you fail or succeed) makes you a stronger, fitter, and more capable person, the person you want to be when all hell breaks loose. Goals prepare you to get better and for worse times.
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Why You Should Risk Dweebhood with Written Goals (from one of the embedded links from previously linked post) - this sounds a bit too optimistic and the skeptical part of me wishes the article linked a couple of studies proving this assumption but on the other hand, it does sound like common sense. When we were in school, when we had a structured life with clear goals - exams, essays, graduation - somehow life had a trajectory, a purpose, a clearly defined horizon that was potentially always in expansion. Then you find yourself later on in life wondering what to do with all the freedom of choice you have now that you don’t have to attend classes and (if you work freelance) you don’t even have to get your butt into an office every day. Taking classes and learning something new in a structured course setting - learning a new language or improving fluency in a foreign language - sounds even more appealing when you’re out of college, and it does help to reinstate some of that goal-oriented approach that may have gone a bit dormant after school. Maybe this is all a bunch of hopeful wishful thinking but it’s worth trying.
So, let’s go taking those notebooks and nice pens out for the morning pages and goal lists. (Let’s see how long this good proposition lasts…)
