November 2010
22 posts
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listening to Coltrane →
♫ John Coltrane Quartet - I Wish I Knew
(1962)
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“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy.
If it were merely...”
– E.B.White
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Plagiarism, Bricolage and Tristram Shandy
One of the most eloquent denunciations of plagiarism is delivered by Tristram Shandy. ‘Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?’ he asks. ‘Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?’ It was not noticed until some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from...
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“it’s estimated that approximately twenty million books existed in the world by...”
– - Chris Morgan: “Is the Physical Book in Danger?”
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Peter Hacker:
“The Greeks and Romans didn’t have a term for consciousness, although they raised problems akin to some of the problems Descartes and his successors raised. Descartes introduced the word into his Latin writing in 1641 using ‘conscius’ in a sense different from the mediaeval use. For the mediaevals ‘conscius’ simply meant shared knowledge, being privy to information. When...
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Haruki Murakami on Contemporary Fiction and the...
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task. In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it’s the real thing. But I don’t. I’m not pretending it’s the real thing. We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find...
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“ On September 11, Derrida observes, something happened and as yet we don’t know...”
– via TPM: G.Lloyd: “9/11″ as “event”
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My brief, tragic life and the renewal of Spring
Tolstoy was asked in a letter by a pacifist group if he could give them a definition of religion and, if he could do that, to explain to them the relation between religion, that is, what a person believes, and morality, that is, the way he acts in accord with some notion of how he ought to act.
Tolstoy worried about this letter, and then as I recall it, he said:
“I can only go back to ...
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The Global Brain as a New Utopia
Francis Heylighen:
Utopias seem to be out of fashion these days. The old ideologies, such as communism, have shown their inadequacies, and the “laissez-faire” liberalism that has replaced them is coming under more and more criticism. Instead, the intellectual climate has turned to either gloom and doom, or an “anything goes” postmodernist relativism. This general pessimism and apathy is fed by...
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listening to "Curtis Mayfield - Right On For The... →
♫ Curtis Mayfield – Right On For The Darkness
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"Children need to learn how to be bored" →
Clipped from the99percent.comJames Victore: Don’t Be A Design ZombieYou have this quotation on your book cover from Williams James, “Distraction is the most corrosive disease of the 20th century.” Why’d you choose that?Distraction today is this [points to my iPhone, which is recording our conversation]. I believe that these things are killing our discipline, killing our ability for solitude,...
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listening to "The Road" →
♫ Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – The Road
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listening to "The Dark Side of the Moog" →
♫ The Dark Side Of The Moog (Pete Namlook & Klaus Schulze ) - Wish You Were There
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Ram Tzu: No Way
Your New Age Is neither new Nor will it last an age. You ride a pendulum On a clock wound To run for eternity. Your despair has Today turned to hope. Tomorrow it will Turn back again. The walls of oppression You tear down here Will be rebuilt There. The meek shall Inherit the earth Then the clever ones Will take it back from them. The torture chamber Will empty And...
