et cetera

See Salon.

“We each of us operate on an entirely immoral basis, acting in spite of our own principles, by a set of rules we conform to spontaneously. Only incidentally do those rules coincide with the moral law; they take the form, rather, of subtle rituals which are entirely our own affair”

(Jean Baudrillard, “Weep, Citizens!”, in Libération, [...]

Cara Nissman, “Live fast, die of melanoma and leave a well-tanned corpse”, in Salon, 28 July 2004.

As the man in space with his single gaze watches the sun emerge from behind the whole earth, he wonders if it is to be properly called a sunrise. Four hundred kilometres below, a young boy bends over his notebook, drawing a picture of the earth, with circling astronaut, into in an area slightly [...]

Just brought to my attention: the existence of Revol , a free online magazine not dissimilar to the sublime Re-Magazine. The latest issue of Revol has amongst other things some beautiful photographs of the mallscape of suburban America courtesy Brian Ulrich.

From Emma Brockes, “Master of few words”, The Guardian, 26 July 2004:

[...] in 1960, news reached [Jasper] Johns that de Kooning had criticised Leo Castelli, his art dealer, by saying, “That son-of-a-bitch, you could give him two beer cans and he could sell them.” Johns promptly did a sculpture of two beer cans, and Castelli [...]

My taxi driver, on the way to Coetzee delivering the PEN lecture last night (which was just his Nobel Lecture, boringly enough, or interestingly, depending on your tastes), spoke Arabic, French and English, and told me he had a “flat memory”—he had read a lot in his life but couldn’t remember much of it. [...]

Apropos my earlier post, an example spam comment:

they bend/ to the ground.” And if direct tv some of Carson’s devotees seek just insurance such cryptic moments, others will want, directv and get, more direct shows of emotion: loan “Proust/ used to weep over days gone job by,” she asks the reader, “do you?” credit card [...]

Now this is a brilliant idea—the folks at Cyclic Defrost are putting together a record listening club. Like a book club but for record nerds. You could do far, far worse than have Cyclic Defrost be in charge of your record collection, so why don’t you join up; the details are all layed [...]

Or near enough; one very savvy fan caught, stuffed under his shirt, and then smuggled out of the stadium the ball David Beckham scuffed England out of Euro2004 with—and then posted it on eBay and saw it go (and there’s still a week of bidding) to over ‚Ǩ2,800,800 (well, maybe not) .

Learned how to watch people, but don’t want to write novels? Why not become an entertainer instead…

Come on Kafka, you can’t have felt altogether that bad, claims yet one more Kafka biography. To add to the literary trivia, seems Kafka met Musil, even though the only biography of Kafka I have—Ernst Pawel’s The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka—only mentions reviews by Musil of his work. I haven’t [...]

Tell us why.

(See Slate and Tired).

“That is why it is so hard to say what truth is. There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas”

(Samuel Butler, in Henry Festing Jones (Ed.), The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, EP Dutton, New York, 1917, p. 298)

Ignacio Ramonet, writing in Le Monde diplomatique, explodes the popular myth that domestic violence is a lower-class problem:

A report from the Council of Europe [3] says that “it is even proved that the incidence of domestic violence seems to increase with income and level of education”. It stresses that in the Netherlands “almost half of [...]

Some songs for Desert Landscapes.

Timothy Williamson – A is to B as B is to C (Boards of Canada)
Descartes – One Very Important Thought (Boards of Canada)
Ned Block – Roygbiv (Boards of Canada)
Fred Dretske – Of Information and Belief (June of ‘44)
John Leslie – Doomsday (June of ‘44)
Jean Baudrillard – Fatal Strategies (Karate)
John McTaggart – [...]

“Indeed, at the current rate of loss [...] literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century.”

(Scott McLemee, “Literary Reading Is Declining Faster Than Before, Arts Endowment’s New Report Says”, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 July 2004).

2.2 Where do you find the time to read so much?
I don’t watch TV, I have no social life, and I read about a page a minute, if there isn’t any math to slow me down.

(Cosma Shalizi)

Just to make sure nothing passes beneath my bibliophilic gaze, I subscribe to my university library new titles email list, which is sent out once a month and contains roughly 400 new books each time (for the Dewey numbers I’m interested in, at least). The following, for all I’m concerned, may as well consist entirely [...]

Not sure what moral to draw from the fact that the first (attempted) comment on the new location of this weblog is a weblog spam trying to sell something or other. I’ve not seen this form of spam before; the interesting thing about it is that the comment itself tries to be a regular text [...]