January 2009
63 posts
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“I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another...”
– Roland Barthes, Camera Obscura
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Browser Lockout
Check it out: this application, Freedom, OS X Networking Freedom Software, disables Apple’s networking for up to 8 hours at a time—“freeing you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create.”
It’s sad that my internet addiction has gotten so bad (thanks tumblr!) that I am excited about this. Now I might actually do some...
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Amazing Interactive Graphic of Fold-Ins From Mad... →
(via tedroden)
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Blood Meridian: Open Yale Lectures
To further understand the novel Blood Meridian, I watched the first of two lectures on it from Yale’s History of the Novel Since 1945.
Yale’s Amy Hungerford shows how Blood Meridian references Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, and Wordsworth. Apparently the second video (which I haven’t watched yet) wraps it all up, but in this first video she makes an insightful observation about a...
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Hobo Lingo
A Continuous Lean provides a much-needed list of hobo slang & code. My favorites: sky pilot, bone polisher & honey dipping.
Hobo lingo in use up to the 1940s (from Wikipedia)
* Accommodation car - The caboose of a train * Angellina - young inexperienced kid * Bad Road - A train line rendered useless by some hobo’s bad action * Banjo - (1) A small portable frying pan. (2) A short, “D”...
this is a working library →
A minimalist blog about books/literary matters.
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“There is a fashion today among many of my contemporaries to treat the events of...”
– Graham Greene, in the forward to his 1971 memoir A Sort of Life (via mills:Tyler Coates)
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Narrative and Other Nonsense
Suderman ponders Obama’s narrative:
Bush always seemed to think of leadership as akin to sports — focus, endure, keep your energy up, and will away any potential obstacles. Obama, I would guess, will treat it as a complex, perhaps philosophical, piece of fiction, and he will likely want to shape it into something he finds both elegant and true. Of course, I suspect that most every American...
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“…if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else...”
– Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room. (via rach)
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The New Atlantis " People of the Screen →
“On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.”
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Idea Lab - Becoming Screen Literate - NYTimes.com →
“Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.”
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“I very much like photography because its aesthetic values are always mingling...”
– Robin Kelsey, From Daguerreotype to Photoshop | Harvard Magazine
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“But over the long run, a world in which journalism is no longer weighed down by...”
– Michael Hirschon sees a bright side to the end of print journalism. End Times - The Atlantic (January/February 2009)
“We have to do it in the Facebook, with the Twittering.”
– RNC Chairman Mike Duncan, about how to reach out to young Republicans (via Washington Post, via Harper’s Weekly Review) (via piquant)
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Now Reading: Kierkegaard's Either/Or Pt. 1
I’m taking a Philosophy course in Existentialism (what’s college without a course in existentialism) and we will be reading a ton of Kierkegaard, including Either/Or, Concluding Unscientific Postscript…, The Sickness Unto Death, and Philosophical Fragments.
I was surprised that we won’t be reading Fear and Trembling, but am glad to tackle some of his longer/harder stuff....
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“Once again, as the general public tries to share music and construct miniature...”
– Sasha Frere-Jones (via aprilini:artistspaid:catbird)
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“In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to...”
– Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
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“All big Internet successes—e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life,...”
– The Charms of Wikipedia - The New York Review of Books (via shmobal) I would add Tumblr to this list.
The Hype Machine / Top 50 Albums of 2008 →
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One simple site makes every other site on the... →
(via fat: Just add http://bacolicio.us/ before any url. Try: http://bacolicio.us/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism
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Blood Meridian: Final Thoughts
I write about books I am reading for my own benefit and enjoyment, but I will be posting my book notes here in hopes that I might start a discussion.
Naturally, McCarthy leaves me with more questions than answers, which is a good thing. Here are a few half-baked thoughts about Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian:
The Judge • He is not simply insane, but seems to be operating under a...
Kottke's The Best Links of 2008 →
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“The great misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good...”
– Tom Teodorczuk, the Guardian (via: The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (January 07, 2009) - Quote For The Day)