Showing posts with label Evelyn Waugh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Evelyn Waugh. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

I sleep, therefore I am...

From: Bizrice














"If I put my literary specs on and do a little free-association, what I see in these two figures is a Proustian thing, characters in search of time, freezing time, preserving it. Time, and everything else, everything that can be associated with a human experience captured and recaptured, recirculated, resuscitated, replayed, re-envisioned, remembered, recognized, over and over again. Kind of like a memory hell, in a way, only in Proust's hands it all sounds and tastes so beautiful.
     Another peek without those wicked nega-specs and I see two robots from a pulsing Disney film, actions in search of characters--the possibilities are endless, particularly if you develop a little narrative. The real story of what is happening here is complex version of a simpler solution.
     And the key to it all: hypoxia."
Ptak Science Books
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"But no matter what maybe the cause, there is no insomnia that modern alternative medicine like hyperbaric oxygen treatment can not cure. Hyperbaric oxygen treatment with its pressurized 100% oxygen has already been proven to cure insomnia. And what’s more better about it is that you can buy or rent your own hyperbaric chamber so there would be no need to go to a hospital to get the treatment."
Sleep Apnea Facts
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"A lot of famous people are recorded as having suffered from insomnia. Sir Isaac Newton suffered from depression and had difficulty sleeping. Winston Churchill had two beds because if he couldn’t sleep in one, he would try the other. Thomas Edison, like my father, was a cat-napper, because he couldn’t sleep at night. Some insomniacs turned to drugs. Marcel Proust and Marilyn Monroe took barbiturates to help them sleep. English writer, Evelyn Waugh, took bromides to induce sleep. As we know, Michael Jackson died because of a lethal cocktail of medications to help him sleep, including propofal, used for sedation before surgeries, lorazepam, used for anxiety, and a host of other meds, including midazolam, diazepam, lidocaine and ephedrine. He was obviously so desperate to sleep that he was willing to try them all."
Mindy's Muses
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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

cover me


"Getting to design your own book cover is the sort of ultimately maddening power that probably shouldn’t be entrusted to vain mortals. It’s a little like getting to choose your own face. What kind of face would best express your inner self? Maybe more important, what kind of face will make other people like or respect or want to sleep with you?
     … publishing houses hire professional designers for books’ covers and allow their authors very little say over them. Most writers are given what’s called 'consultation' on their covers, which means that when they’re shown their cover designs they try not to cry right in front of their editors. But, because I’m a cartoonist as well as an essayist, and also have a savvy and implacable agent whose will is not to be opposed, I had 'approval' over the cover of my book, which meant that I got to make a tiresome and nit-picky pest of myself.
     I had what we’ll call a constructive dialogue with my publisher’s editorial, design, and marketing teams, finding a balance between my personal vision and something people might possibly want to buy. For months we went back and forth: I’d send them several illustration options and they’d pick whichever one I liked least; they’d send me some design options, I’d pick the one that made me least unhappy, and they’d veto it. Book covers are an important sales tool, and the marketing department felt, quite reasonably, that the cover was very much their business. I also had a paranoid sense of shadowy, Olympian forces weighing in from farther above; I’ve been told that the most powerful figures in the current literary world, the buyers for the major national bookstore chains, have been known to offer to increase their orders for a book if its cover is changed."
— Tim Kreider, The New Yorker
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