Recommended: Samuel Beckett. The Unnameable. 1953. Translated from the French by the author. Grove Press, 1958.“The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.”
Marriage is increasingly the big sociological divide in American life. Getting and staying married makes you part of a privileged elite.As Charles Murray documents in his 2012 book “Coming Apart,” that divide tracks the income divide, with low-income whites much less likely to be married than their high-income counterparts. (I criticized a different aspect of Murray’s book in this column.) The causality is debatable. Maybe poorer people have a harder time getting married. Maybe being married makes it easier to earn more. Maybe some third factor causes both phenomena. But what is clear is that you’re most likely to have a better life if you’re married – even if, it turns out, you get cancer.
Miniature Monday!This tiny shelf includes books from Borrower’s Press, Black Cat Press, Dawson’s Bookshop and Jack Levien. Each book is an inch tall AT MOST—some are even illustrated!
Charlotte Smith Uncataloged Miniatures, Borrower’s Press.
Furthermore, you say, science will teach men (although in my opinion this is a superfluity) that they have not, in fact, and never have had, either will or fancy, and are no more than a sort of piano keyboard or barrel-organ cylinder; and that the laws of nature still exist on the earth, so that whatever man does he does not of his own volition but, as really goes without saying, by the laws of nature. Consequently, these laws of nature have only to be discovered, and man will no longer be responsible for his actions, and it will become extremely easy for him to live his life. All human actions, of course, will then have to be worked out by those laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, and entered in the almanac; or better still, there will appear orthodox publications, something like our encyclopaedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so accurately calculated and plotted that there will no longer be any individual deeds or adventures left in the world. ‘Then,’ (this is all of you speaking), ‘a new political economy will come into existence, all complete, and also calculated with mathematical accuracy, so that all problems will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because all possible answers to them will have been supplied. Then the Palace of Crystal will arise. Then….’ Well, in short, the golden age will come again.
maninthebottle:From archives of Prague castle, photo by M.Peterka (Source: Lost and Found in Prague)I love images from the past that show readers interacting with old books. They present a little piece of book history captured inside a piece of art, usually a photograph or a painting (I blogged about it here, if you are interested). This is the best I have seen in while. What’s so appealing is the size of the books and how tiny the librarian seems. She is so into the book that she does not even seem the notice us. Awesome!
german-expressionists:Wassily Kandinsky Drawing, 1926This is awesome.
Doc was in the toilet pissing during a commercial break when he heard Sauncho screaming at the television set. He got back to find his attorney just withdrawing his nose from the screen. “Everything cool?”“Ahh …” collapsing on the couch, “Charlie the fucking Tuna, man.”
“What?”
“It’s all supposed to be so innocent, upwardly mobile snob, designer shades, beret, so desperate to show he’s got good taste, except he’s also dyslexic so he gets ‘good taste’ mixed up with ‘taste good,’ but it’s worse than that! Far, far worse! Charlie really has this, like, obsessive death wish! Yes! he, he wants to be caught, processed, put in a can, not just any can, you dig, it has to be StarKist! suicidal brand loyalty, man, deep parable of consumer capitalism, they won’t be happy with anything less than drift-netting us all, chopping us up and stacking us on the shelves of Supermarket Amerika, and subconsciously the horrible thing is, is we want them to do it… .”
Medieval pop-up bookThis book was printed in 1482, when printing was just invented - by Johannes Gutenberg, c. 1455. It is remarkable what printers were able to do after two decades of experimenting with the new medium. As this image shows, they were able to produce a book that showed the movement of the moon with the help of cut-out “paper wheels”, which hovered in front of the page. You can just imagine how the printer who designed and produced this 3D page must have felt, over 550 years ago. What a thrill it must have been to produce one of the first pop-up books in the western world.
Glasgow, University Library, Sp.Coll. BD7-f.13 (incunabulum printed in Venice, 1482), taken from the library’s Flickr page.
boundaries
One must not, however, imagine the realm of culture as some sort of spatial whole, having boundaries but also having internal territory. The realm of culture has no internal territory: it is entirely distributed along the boundaries, boundaries pass everywhere, through its every aspect…. Every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries: in this is its seriousness and significance; abstracted from boundaries it loses its soil, it becomes empty, arrogant, it degenerates and dies.