could use a li'l more snarky neon signs, not a lot, just a li'l. notepad++ turns 20 on version 8.6 while this blog hit fifteen arguably still in beta test
nighttime rocks are the best rocks
luck favors the prepared
read the nyrb of collected non-fictions
only a very few of the pieces in any of the books exceed six or seven pages
"like all men of babylon, i have been proconsul; like all, i have been a slave. i have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment"
perhaps this "one person" is the "someone else" borges claimed he wanted to be
an aesthetic appreciation of a metaphysical position, or a whole philosophy, without regard to, but never unaware of, its probable truth or falseness. so angels are attractive ("i always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot...with their backs to the sunset") while the trinity is "an intellectual horror, a strangled, specious infinity like facing mirrors"
read selected non-fictions by jorge luis borges, edited by eliot weinberger
the chiming of unanimous clocks punctuates my duration in time
the alphabetical organization (disorganization) of dictionaries
the perfect page, the page in which no word can be altered without harm, is the most precarious of all. changes in language erase shades of meaning, and the "perfect" page is the one that consists of those delicate fringes that are so easily worn away. on the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fire of typographical errors
to assume that every recombination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draft nine is necessarily inferior to draft h - for there can be only drafts. the concept of the "definitive text" corresponds only to religion or exhaustion
throughout time, the sirens have changed form. their first chronicler, the bard of the twelfth book of the odyssey, does not tell us how they were; for ovid they are reddish-plumed birds with virginal faces; for apollonius of rhodes, women from the waist up, the rest, a bird; for the playwright tirso de molina (and for heraldry), "half women, half-fish." no less disputable is their species; the classical dictionary of lempriere considers them nymphs, in quicherat's they are monsters and in grimal's they are demons
to the superstitious, there is a necessary link not only between a gunshot and a corpse but between a corpse and a tortured wax image or the prophetic smashing of a mirror or spilled salt or thirteen ominous people around a table
let me add a certain virile reply recorded by de quincey (writings xi, 226). someone flung a glass of wine in the face of a gentleman during a theological or literary debate. the victim did not show any emotion and said to the offender: "this, sir, is a digression: now, if you please, for the argument." (the author of that reply, a certain dr. henderson, died in oxford around 1787, without leaving us any memory other than those just words: a sufficient and beautiful immortality)
in the stoic cosmogony, "zeus feeds on the world": the universe is cyclically consumed by the fire that engendered it, and resurges from annihilation to repeat an identical history..once again every sword and every hero, once again every minutious night of insomnia
the conservation of the world is a perpetual creation and that the verbs conserve and create, so antagonistic here below, are synonyms in heaven
the methodical labyrinths of philosophy
thirty-three years old, the age, the kabbalists say, of the first man when he was formed out of mud
a sect or corporation of hereditary stranglers who for eight centuries brought horror (with bare feet and fatal scarves) to the streets and shadows of india. hired assassination was, for them, a religious duty. they were devotees of bhawani..i would have liked to know if the thugs were bandits who sanctified their work with the cult of the goddess bhawani, or if the cult of bhawani made them bandits
a, in the international language he proposed, stood for animal, ab for mammal, abo for carnivore, aboj for feline, aboje for cat, abod for canine, abode for dog, abi for herbivore, abiv for equine, abive for horse, abivu for donkey
not even a mention of schopenhauer
strictly speaking, one immortal monkey would be sufficient
hebrew days, from sunset to sunset
transparent beehives
the stellar infinity of the prime numbers
such a work is among the few a second noah should rescue from a second deluge
catholics (read: argentine catholics) believe in an ultraterrestrial world, but i have noticed that they are not interested in it. with me the opposite occurs: i am interested but i do not believe
dies aliter visum [the gods ruled otherwise]
from sphere to concentric sphere
they ascend to empyrean; in this infinite region (as on the canvases of the pre-raphaelites) distant forms are as sharply distinct as those close by
time is the substance of which i am made
the idea of a god who creates the universe in order to create his own gallows
all the arts aspire to resemble music, which is nothing but form
jesus, the greatest of the oral teachers, who only once wrote a few words on the ground, and no man read what he had written (john 8:6)
every man who has some music in his soul can write poetry ten or twelve times in the natural course of his life
everything in the world exists to end up in a book
the bucolic tribes of arabia who obscurely idolized wells and stars until a red-bearded man awoke them with the tremendous news that there is no god but god and drove them into a battle that has not yet ended and whose limits were the pyrenees and the ganges. what, carlyle wondered, would have become of the arabs if mohammed had not existed?
ballot urns
the case of swift, who while writing gulliver's travels wanted to raise an indictment against mankind and instead left behind a children's book. plato said that poets are the amanuenses of a god who moves them against their will
we must believe that the universe is our birthright
there is a curious papal doctrine that defends the sale of indulgences. it was said and believed, in luther's time, that christ and the martyrs had accumulated an infinite number of merits, and that those merits were greater than the ones required to save themselves. it was imagined that those superfluous merits from the life of christ, the virgin mary, and the martyrs had accumulated in heaven and had formed there the thesaurus meritorum, the "treasury of merits"
the word cubist was a joke by a hostile critic, when he saw a number of cubes on a painting: "qu'est-ce que cela? c'est du cubisme?" the word cubist was then adopted by the injured party
each in his own way imagines paradise; since childhood i have envisioned it as a library
"lasciate ogni speranza, vol ch'entrate" [all hope abandon, ye who enter here]
we do not know we are dead until we realize that we have no reflection in the mirror
strip yourselves of sanctity and clothe yourselves in intelligence
lycanthropy
all the people who have existed in the universe are in shakespeare..to think of shakespeare is to think of a crowd..the apothecary, for example, who sells poison to romeo and says, "my poverty, but not my will consents," has already defined himself as a man by this single phrase
oneiric
who can know himself more than the blind man?
others brag of the books they've managed to write; i brag of the books i've managed to read
12/7