Pocket watchThis is the 17th-century equivalent of our watch. Made out of ivory, most of these so-called diptych dials were produced in the German city of Nuremberg. This one is signed by its maker, the instrument maker Hans Truschel, who made it in 1603. The top image shows the instrument closed, in the lower image it is opened up. A small pin would be placed in the horizontal half of the instrument and from it a little string would lead to the vertical half (note the tiny red string in the lower image). When placed in the correct orientation the instrument would tell time, quite accurately, just like its better known bigger brother did, the sun dial found in gardens and attached to houses. Imagine taking this gadget out of your pocket in the 17th-century street to check what time it was. Cool.
Pic: Columbia, University Library, Smith Instrument 27-225. More on this instrument here.
What else? Oh yes: the swearing. Why do I swear so much, in what you are about to read? To make a tonal point: to suggest that religious sensibilities are not made of glass, do not need to hide themselves nervously from whole dimensions of human experience. To express a serious and appropriate judgement on human destructiveness, in the natural language of that destructiveness. But most of all, in order to help me nerve myself up for the foolishness, in my own setting, of what I am doing. To relieve my feelings as I inflict on myself an undignified self-ejection from the protections of irony. I am an Englishman writing about religion. Naturally I’m fucking embarrassed.
In the closing pages of Bleeding Edge, perspectives alter; all that had been in the forefront of the readerly consciousness moves strangely to the background, and ideas and experiences hitherto shift to the forefront. And all this happens in a way that few of us associate with Pynchon. It is customary to say of him that his characters are not “real,” that his intellectual pyrotechnics and metafictional games are arid, emotionally empty. This is a misreading, I think, though perhaps an understandable one: those pyrotechnics, that ceaseless jokiness, the ridiculous names (of which there are fewer in Bleeding Edge than any other Pynchon book), do tend to create a smokescreen. But from Oedipa Maas’s late intuition of a world either saturated with or utterly evacuated of meaning, to the desperate wartime love-making of Roger and Jessica in Gravity’s Rainbow, to the love of Zoyd Wheeler for his daughter Prairie in Vineland, to the warmth and resilience of the friendship between Mason and Dixon in the novel that bears their names, there is more genuine depth of feeling in Pynchon’s fiction than is often acknowledged. But in Bleeding Edge he confronts more openly and directly than he ever has the power of ordinary human love.
John 1:1-5 Illuminated by Makoto FujimuraIn the Beginning by Makoto Fujimura
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,…
All the Valley’s talk about transhumanism, human potential, life extension, and generally “changing the world” is a bunch of hooey. It’s a myth — in the pejorative sense of that term. It’s a fluffy religion meant to snooker young professionals into giving their employers everything they have and working their brains down to the myelin until they become too old to be relevant anymore.No, it’s worse than that.
They don’t get too old to be relevant. They get too old to be cheap.
Age-ism, Transhumanism, and Silicon Valley’s Cognitive Dissonance (via iamdanw)
Also love the quote that starts this off, where Zuckerberg implies that young people not having families allows them to “focus on what’s important.”
(via buzz)
I was a gardener. Well, I am a gardener, but a sadly reduced one, in every sense. I have a small paved rectangle of London garden, full of pots, with a cherished 20-year-old corokia, and two pittosporums, and various fuchsias, and Convolvulus cneorum and hakonechloa grass and euphorbia and heuchera and a Hydrangea petiolaris all over the back wall. It gives me much pleasure, but is a far cry from what I once gardened – a half acre or so that included a serious vegetable garden. All I can do now is potter with the hose in summer, and do a bit of snipping here and there, thanks to the arthritis; forget travel, what I really do miss is intensive gardening. Digging, raking, hoeing. Pruning a shaggy rose: shaping for future splendour. Dividing fat clumps of snowdrops: out of many shall come more still. And that was – is – the miraculous power of gardening: it evokes tomorrow, it is eternally forward-looking, it invites plans and ambitions, creativity, expectation. Next year I will try celeriac. And that new pale blue sweet pea. Would Iris stylosa do just here? Gardening defies time; you labour today in the interests of tomorrow; you think in seasons to come, cutting down the border this autumn but with next spring in your mind’s eye.