Here are a trio of pieces for you to pass along at work today in order to seem quirky, cutting edge, thoughtful… or just like you spend too much time online. Wired’s rundown of The 10 Most Absurd Science Paper Titles… A new Edgar Allen Poe collection by Eric Mongeon… and Geist’s Artist and Writer Fund. Happy forwarding.
It has been known for a long time, since the famous experiments of Alice Isen (e.g. Isen & Levin, 1972), that feeling happy facilitates the helping of others. In the second experiment of the current study, Schnall et al. included a control group in which participants became happy at watching a television episode that was funny. The results were that participants who watched the elevation clip had more subjective feelings of elevation and also did substantially and significantly more actual helping than those who watched the funny clip.
Photo by Roger Burrows whose new book Birding in New Brunswick is due soon from Goose Lane.
Here are a few links for a slow Friday at work: The New Yorker has a few fun flash puzzles of their covers to shuffle. The Poetry Ark is a multi-part contest that involves round by round voting with prizes and an anthology at the end. McSweeneys presents the 24th Existential Olympics, because life is… you know.
With Tim Burton’s surely zany and eye-popping Alice in Wonderland opening this weekend you may want to refresh your Lewis Carroll battery packs. One way to do so is subscribe to Daily Lit’s free installment service that sends you, via either e-mail or RSS feed, Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland so you can take a short reading break every day. Alice’s adventures come in 37 installments… check inside how to get started.
In a TVO “Flying Solo” clip, the University of Toronto literary theorist Nick Mount was asked to talk on what art can and cannot do (click here). He says that although art might inspire, the Holocaust contradicts the idea that literary art can make us better, and he cites George Steiner’s assertion: “We know that [...]
In an open letter posted on its website, the financially troubled Toronto Women’s Bookstore has thanked supporters for their donations, and announced they have made enough money to keep the store operating. Unfortunately, all the media attention their fundraising garnered has caused suppliers to either cancel their accounts or put them on prepaid terms. The letter explains that the store has been unable to reestablish credit with suppliers as a result and won’t be able to fulfill course orders for textbooks, which make up to 75% of the store’s annual revenue. From the letter:
Zoe Whittall/Quill & Quire blog
Paul Silvia says aesthetics are usually about taking pleasure in things, for instance because they are beautiful. He offers what he calls a tour of unusual emotions that can’t be grouped with pleasure. He describes three families of such emotions: knowledge emotions (interest, confusion, and surprise), hostile emotions (anger disgust and contempt), and self conscious emotions (pride, shame and embarrassment) which occur in fiction.
