HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ADAM SMITH: Born on June 16, 1723 (NS). “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”
Lorrie Moore has thought a lot about what it takes to become a writer. “Quit classes. Quit jobs. Cash in old savings bonds. Now you have time like warts on your hands”... Time
*At 99, the Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti Has a New Novel - The New York Times
Seems to me crime stories have been around since Cain and Abel. In the case, the gumshoe is God Dames, detectives and dope: why we still love hardboiled crime | Books | The Guardian
· Ten - 10 - X quotes from Nelson Poynter that hold up 40 years after his death. By
Kristen Hare.
Secrets of the Y Chromosome: Why men have shorter life spans
Written Deer
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?…………………………………………………………….. —Wisława Szymborska
My handwriting is all over these woods.
No, my handwriting is these woods,
each tree a half-print, half-cursive scrawl,
each loop a limb. My house is somewhere
here, & I have scribbled myself inside it.
What is home but a book we write, then
read again & again, each time dog-earing
different pages. In the morning I wake
in time to pencil the sun high. How
fragile it is, the world—I almost wrote
the word but caught myself. Either one
could be erased. In these written woods,
branches smudge around me whenever
I take a deep breath. Still, written fawns
lie in the written sunlight that dapples
their backs. What is home but a passage
I’m writing & underlining every time I read it.
by Maggie Smith
from the Academy of American Poets
I was fired from the CFPB’s Consumer Advisory Board last week… Medium
The Guardian: Demise of nine out of 13 of the ancient landmarks linked to climate change by researchers – “Some of Africa’s oldest and biggest baobab trees have abruptly died, wholly or in part, in the past decade, according to researchers.
Heritage activists’ preserve global landmarks ruined in war, threatened by time via Malchkeoun Microsoft/Transform: “Eight years ago, French architect Yves Ubelmann was working in Afghanistan when he took a seemingly minor picture of a village brimming with mud homes. It was a quick snapshot, separate from his archeological work. When he returned to the site two years later, the village was gone – destroyed – and one of its few remaining traces was an elderly man who remembered Ubelmann taking the photo. He wanted it. “’The picture is the only link I have to my personal history,’” the man said, prompting Ubelmann to share it. The small gesture crystallized for him the power of preserving history and helped inspire him to start Iconem, a Paris company that creates 3D digital models of historic landmarks threatened by war, conflict, time and nature. With drones that can capture thousands of images, Iconem has surveyed sites in 20 countries, including the 109-acre ruins of Pompeii, ancient Assyrian cities in northern Iraq and the mountainous remains of third-century Buddhist monasteries in Afghanistan.
The point where the meridians meet and where, consequently, it is every hour of the day at once.
Modern activities have the same subtle function as scavengers in the desert: by devouring dead time, they leave pure time at our disposal. By putting an end to free time, they deliver us from the anguish of full time.
[Ambiguity] in the line from the Bible: 'Without him nothing was created'. In the Cathar version, this became: 'And without him the Nothing was created', which, in quite contrary vein, sets forth the principle of Evil.
When one looks at the emptiness of current art, the only question is how such a machine can continue to function in the absence of any new energy, in an atmosphere of critical disillusionment and commercial frenzy, and with all the players totally indifferent? If it can continue, how long will this illusionism last? A hundred years, two hundred? This society is like a vessel whose edges move ever wider apart, and in which the water never comes to the boil.
Memory is a dangerous function. it retrospectively gives meaning to that which did not have any. It retrospecively cancels out the internal illusoriness of events, which was their originality. But if events retained their original, engimatic form, their ambiguous, terrifying form, there would doubtless no longer be any history.
Everything, before taking place, should have the chance not to take place. This suspense is essential, like the negative of a photo. It is this negative that enables the photo to have meaning; it is this negative which enables it to take place - never the first time, always the second. For things have meaning only the second time, like baptism in anabaptism, like form in anamorphosis. Hence the fantasy that there will always be a second meeting, another chance, in another world or in a previous life.
The beauty of the dead when they are laid out on their sides. Not with their faces upturned to the sky - a sign of annihilation and Last Judgement - but on their sides, their legs tucked up, as a mark of foetal coiling and of sleep.
Our feelings, which we delightfully term emotions in order to salvage the fiction of an emotional life, are not effects any more, merely a psychological affectiation, having lost all credence in our eyes.
Boredom [ennui] is a subtle form of filterable virus, of fossilized tonality, which might be said to pass invisibly across the substance of time without altering it. fine particles of boredom striate time like neutrinos, leaving no trace. there is scarcely any living memory of boredom. This is why it can superimpose itself on all kinds of activities, even exciting ones, since it lives in the interstices.
One must free oneself from one's ideas in writing, not take charge of them. One must free language from its purpose, free concepts from their meaning, free the world from its reality - which is an even greater illusion.
Artificial Intelligence inevitably produces an Artificial Intelligentsia, a body of intellectually correct, genetically immunized experts, which re-forms around numerical intelligence data and the digital mastery of the code.
Neurotic and erotic abreaction in every place marked out for discourse or for writing: libraries, conferences, 'round tables', examinations. A desire to climb the curtains and swing from the chandeliers as soon as the discourse of culture makes its appearance.
Under the heading of everyday atrocities: the daughters of Moscow apparatchiks buying up on the black market from the Mafia the foreign travel scholarships granted to the irradiated children of Chernobyl.
The stupidity of all commercial or cultural anti-Americanism. As if Americanism did not run through every society, every nation, and every individual today, like modernity itself.
Even in the daytime, a part of us is perpetually asleep. When we are fast asleep, part of us is constantly awake. This is how, even when we are asleep, we can wish for sleep. How, even when we are fully alive, we can want to live.
At the heart of the Pyramids, there was a central space from which immortality radiated. At the heart of our civilization, there is now merely a hole into which the dustbins of history are emptied.
That male beetle which dies without being born, since it is doomed solely to fertilize the other females in the womb which conceived them, after which it perishes without seeing the light of day.
The revolution of 'lived experience' is without doubt the worst, the revolution which swept away the secrecy with which everyone surrounded their own life and has transformed tat life into a huge 'reality show'. What has been liberated by all the revolutions of desire, expression, fantasy and analysis is not the dramaturgy of the unconscious or the theatre of cruelty, but the theatre of banality. It is not the taboo on the drives that has been removed, but that on triviality, naivety, idiosyncrasy and idiosyncretism. What has been liberated is not each person's singularity, but their specific stupidity - that is to say, the stupidity they share with everyone else.
Cards, that virtual money , protect us from the vulgarity of cash. but money itself, that artifact of value, protects us from the vulgarity of the commodity. and the commodity, that artifact of desire, protects us from the vulgarity of human relations. In this way, we are marvellously protected.
Those toadying intellectual curs, always wondering how it is possible to be both a genius and politically despicable (Celine, Leni Reifensthal ...), it being understood that the essential thing is not to be a genius, but one of the right-thinking. This is where the whole ambiguity of contemporary art resides: laying claim to worthlessness, insignificance, non-meaning and banality; staining for worthlessness, when it is in fact already worthless. Aim for non-meaning when it is in fact already insignificant. Aspiring to superficiality in superficial terms.
Gut reaction against yobbery, the masses and solid Frenchness. But an equally visceral distaste for the elite, for castes, culture and the nomenklatura. Do we have to choose between the moronic masses and the arrogant privileged classes (particularly when they have an odour of demogogic humility about them)? No solution.
The advantage of being happy is that one is rid of the question of happiness. The advantage of being free is that one is rid of the question of freedom.
Baudrillard, Cool Memories III
Have I actually wiped away all the traces, all the possible consequences of this book? Did I reach a point where nothing can be made of it; did I abolish every last desire to give it a meaning? have I achieved that continuity of the Nothing? In that case, I have succeeded. I have done to the book what the system has done to reality: turned it into something no one knows what to do with any moire. but something they don't know how to get rid of either.
Svit of anthrax - Seawater yields first grams of yellowcake: Yarn-like material collects largest amount of uranium to date PhysOrg. Chuck L: “Just what the world needs. An inexpensive method for obtaining uranium by anyone within hailing distance of sea water. Then all we need is for someone to come up with a similarly easy way to separate the isotopes.
Svit of anthrax - Seawater yields first grams of yellowcake: Yarn-like material collects largest amount of uranium to date PhysOrg. Chuck L: “Just what the world needs. An inexpensive method for obtaining uranium by anyone within hailing distance of sea water. Then all we need is for someone to come up with a similarly easy way to separate the isotopes.
