Bokelskere.no

There are countless definitions of the word “hipster”. In the title of this book, I'm using it to refer to artists whose origins lie outside the mainstream or creatively exploit material from the margin or who, merely because they live in a freaky space, have enough distance to see some truth.

The Internet, which at first seemed so fascinating, appears to be evolving into something worse than TV, but we'll see.

'I like heroin, cocaine, nice houses, good furniture, and pretty girls,' said Alexander, 'and I've had all of them in large quantities. But you know, they never made me happy.'
'My word, you're hard to please, aren't you?'

Fergus took me to the coast and forced me to go snorkeling. All I can say is that the Great Barrier Reef is the most vulgar thing I've ever seen. It's one's worst nightmare, full of frightful loud colours, peacock blues, and impossible oranges all higgledy-piggledy while one's mask floods.

The Vicar (looking down soothingly from the pulpit): 'Some of us remember David Melrose as a paedophile, an alcoholic, a liar, a rapist, a sadist, and a "thoroughly nasty piece of work". But, you know, in a situation like that, what Christ asks us to say, and what he would have said himself in his own words is' (pausing) '"But that's not the whole story, is it?"'

Honest John: 'Yes, it is.'

I may be a frightful reactionary, but I think that all you have to do for children is hire a reasonable nanny and put them down for Eton.

During lunch David felt that he had perhaps pushed his disdain for middle-class prudery a little too far. Even at the bar of the Cavalry and Guards Club one couldn't boast about homosexual, paedophiliac incest with any confidence of a favourable reception.

Had Vijay's character been more attractive his appearance might have elicited pity or even indifference, but spending just a few days with him convinced Anne that each hideous feature had been moulded by internal malevolence. His wide, grinning mouth was at once crude and cruel. When he tried to smile, his purplish lips could only curl and twist like a rotting leaf thrown onto a fire.

There had been a time when she admired the way that David became a doctor. When he had told his father of his intention, General Melrose had immediately cut of his annuity, preferring to use the money to rear pheasants. Shooting men and animals were the occupations of a gentleman, tending their wounds the business of middle-class quacks.

It was never quite clear to Eleanor why the English thought it was distinguished to have done nothing for a long time in the same place, but David left her in no doubt that they did. He also descended from Charles II through a prostitute.

Absolutt aldri multitask - multitasking er å redusere hjernekapasiteten din samtidig som du aukar stressnivået.

Prokrastinering er truleg den mest utstrekte, og mest fortvilande, forma for sjølvdisiplinsvikt. Alle menneske prokrastinerer (bortsett frå kanskje slike som Hadia Tajik, som tar tre mastergradar og lærer kinesisk mens dei er statsråd), men i sterkt varierande grad.

I dag er det heilt feil folk som har sjølvkontroll. Ein av Noregs fremste sjølvdisiplinistar heiter til dømes Fotballfrue. Mens forskarkarrierane til dei lysaste hovuda i landet går til grunne i twitterdiskusjonar, har Fotballfrue ikkje rørt kveitemjøl eller sukker på eit tiår. Me kunne gitt henne ein leikedokterkoffert, og ho ville ha løyst kreftgåta innan halvtanna år.

What's more, the record collections of the revolutionaries don't stand up to scrutiny. When investigators came to clear out Andreas Baader's prison cell, they found no LPs by Kraftwerk, Can, Neu!, Ash Ra Tempel or Cluster. They did, however, find on his record player an abum by Eric Clapton, his nondescript 1975 blues-rock effort There's One in Every Crowd. If Baader was evil, then, pace Hannah Arendt, here was a banal detail.

There are of course at least two such chasms, one between the postmodernist investigator and the informant, and the other between the writer and his audience. Facing each of these chasms, our postmodernist will prove his trans-positivist sophistication and sensitivity by being overwhelmed by both of them, and displaying his real depth, his awareness of the hermeneutic problem, by demonstratively failing to cross either, dissolving into chaos, impenetrable prose, and speaking in tongues. Strictly speaking, the rest should (logically) be silence.

If you were forced to name your favourite group of all time, then the Beatles would be a hard one to argue with, but so would the KLF. Their catalogue is patchy, deeply flawed, and they never made a consistently strong album. But they showered the crowd at an Oxfordshire rave with £1,000-worth of Scottish pound notes bearing the legend 'Children we love you'. They played at the 1992 Brit Awards with vegan punks Extreme Noise Terror, before picking up guns and firing blanks at the audience. They were independent, euphoric, iconoclastic, and they were enormously successful in 1991.

Some may see more worth in the catalogues of the Doors or the Grateful Dead, but the Turtles encompassed the American sixties - hip, square and freak - and they split, on cue, in 1969 with a baroque ballad called "Lady-O", written by their one-time groupie Judee Sill. In their own grown-up fanboy way, they were as perfect as the Beatles. Their photos just needed a little more touching up.

Gene Pitney wrote upbeat hits for others - Bobby Vee's "Rubber Ball" (UK no. 4, US no. 6 '61), Ricky Nelson's "Hello Mary Lou" (UK no. 2, US no. 9 '61), the Crystals' "He's a Rebel" (UK no. 19, US no. 1 '62) - but picked other writers' songs for himself that tended to see his composure gradually crumble inside three minutes, whether through love's intensity ("Twenty-four Hours from Tulsa", UK no. 2, US no. 17 '63) or through despair ("I'm Gonna Be Strong", UK no. 2, US no. 9 '64); most extreme of all was 1968's "Billy You're My Friend", a traumatic love triangle that sounded like it was being sung with Gene inside a straitjacket.