Books and Death

I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.

“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”

~ Marcel Proust,Albertine disparue

Booksellers are, in fact, as dependent on death as much as undertakers for their livelihood ...

True rightful and final owner

“Books were the original social media dragons.”

Chicago Tribune

Twenty years ago, in Evangelium Vitae, St. John Paul II warned of the emergence of a “Culture of Death” in western society, which warred against the principles of human dignity upheld in a “Culture of Life.” At that time and ever since, critics have argued that St. John Paul II was imprudent in painting the distinction so starkly, was mistakenly leading the Church into the so-called in the “Culture Wars,” and had wrongly denigrated those who support access to abortion as participating in the “Culture of Death.”

Secrets of the species that thrive in the big city BBC

First wolf pack found in California in nearly a century Los Angeles Times (Chuck L)

Dozens of Dead Whales Are Washing Ashore in Alaska Wired (furzy mouse) :-(

NOAA: July warmest month in historyMacroBusiness

President Jimmy Carter’s amazing last wishVox

Welcome to Dismaland: A First Look at Banksy’s New Art Exhibition Housed Inside a Dystopian Theme Park Colossal. Resilc: “i want to see the Fed ride.”

Banksy Dismaland show revealed at Weston’s Tropicana BBC (furzy mouse)

Humans aren’t normal animals—we are unnaturally destructive super-predatorsQuartz. Resilc: “Especially those inside the Beltway.”

Orin Kerr has this post at The Volokh Conspiracy. In part:

Computer searches usually happen in two stages. Agents take the computer, make a mirror image copy of its hard drive on a government storage device, and then search the image. Officers do this to ensure the integrity of the original data. Searching can alter the contents on the computer, so working from a copy preserves the original.

“Across the entire sample, there were 1.72 times as many unique words in picture books than in conversations. Part of picture books’ greater diversity, the authors note, stems from the fact that each one tells a different story about a different topic.” Pacific Standard

Evan Lavender-Smith doesn’t imitate Markson in the quartet of stories he contributes, including this one:

... Was David Markson “merely” ahead of his time?

By which ahead I mean the last four (anti-)novels, the so-called Notecard Quartet.

I’m reminded of some lines from Evan Lavender-Smith’s Marksonesque novel From Old Notebooks.

I count David Markson’s literary-anecdote books among the few things I want to read over and over again, yet I have no idea whether they are actually any good. They’re like porn for English majors.

Berlin has said it expects to receive a record 800,000 asylum seekers this year, more than the entire EU combined in 2014, laying bare the scale of the biggest refugee crisis to face the continent since the second world war.

Thomas Wuil Joo, University of California, Davis, Law School, has published Corporate Speech and the Rights of Others at 30 Constitutional Commentary 335 (2015). Here is the abstract.

The Supreme Court is often erroneously criticized for giving business corporations the constitutional rights of human persons. In fact, constitutional decisions protecting corporations tend to be based not on the rights of corporate “persons,” but on the rights of other persons: human individuals such as shareholders or persons who listen to the content of corporate speech. Shareholders’ property and privacy interests have been invoked to protect corporations from regulatory takings and from unreasonable searches ...