Got my new Harper’s subscription and read Richard Rodriguez’s “Final edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper” on the train tonight. Rodriguez is saying what lots of others are saying, but he also calls on this great frontierism trope to back it up, arguing that the local newspaper used to define the city, back when the city was still a physical space:
In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers that circumstance had placed proximate to them.
He also evokes San Francisco beautifully, in all its weird gold-rush/queer/rocknroll glory, in a way that is at once crotchety and totally new. But I mostly just love this rant against “online-ists” who still fetishize objects, because it’s kind of about Google execs, but it’s kind of about me, too, (and you and everyone we know):
Something funny I have noticed, perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? They want exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You can click your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the pages of their New York Times all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a café table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the “New Establishment” issue of Vanity Fair; they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in London, they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want five-star bricks and mortar and do not disturb signs and views of the park.
I guess it’s that time of the year/decade when people get all list-y about music, movies, species, etc. I love lists as much as the next guy, but sometimes enough is enough! How do people (esp. people not getting paid) have the time to consume all this culture? Shit just makes me feel inadequate! I prefer preposterous lists devoid of any temporal relevance/reference, like the 50 Most Interesting Articles on Wikipedia (via), or writers in Japan listing Japanese songs that are significant to them (via), because I can read them without that nagging feeling that I should have already seen or heard everything on them.
tumbledore:
Mokattam Ridge (Garbage City)
Cairo, Egypt, 2009
Bas Princen
This is a real picture of a slum settlement on the outskirts of the city of Cairo whose economy revolves around the collection and recycling of the city’s garbage, mostly through the use of pigs by the city’s minority Coptic Christian population.
(via)
Umberto Eco is going to curate an exhibition in the Louvre about the list in art and literature. In Spiegel:
Umberto Eco: The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.
And this:
SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?
Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.
Pages from a glossy new book on a purported Frida Kahlo personal archive. Both the book and the archive have come under heavy criticism from Kahlo scholars and relatives, who say (fairly convincingly) that the archie is a phony. How does one fabricate an archive? Where does one draw from to create and curate the objects that could have constituted a life?
NYTimes photos of the objects.
Via: Le Divan Fumoir Bohemien.
squaredoor:
kateoplis:
Thesaurus Rex | 44-years in the making and at almost 4,000 pages and about 800,000 meanings, this reference work is the biggest thesaurus ever and the world’s first historical thesaurus: It takes the enormity of the OED and arranges it thematically and chronologically, and further throughout three broad headings—the external world, the mental world, and the social world—which are subdivided into 236,400 categories and 797,120 meanings. A glance at any page is a look at language evolution from Old English to the present, and it’s no less startling and amazing than watching sea slime slowly morph into monkeys and Neanderthals.
fictitious entry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is missing citations or needs footnotes. Please help add inline citations to guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies.
This article may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details.
Fictitious entries, also known as fake entries, Mountweazels, and Nihilartikels, are deliberately incorrect entries or articles in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps and directories. Entries in reference works normally originate from a reliable external source, but no such source exists for a fictitious entry.
The neologism Mountweazel was coined by the The New Yorker magazine based on a fictitious entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. Another term, Nihilartikel, is of uncertain origin, combining the Latin word nihil, “nothing” with German Artikel, “article”. There is also the specific term trap street.
Via: Harper’s Links.
squaredoor:perfectdefect-input:
GRANT WALLACE
Must find out about this dude. Also on that visionary tip: gonna go to the Blake exhibit at the Morgan, if it is still up. Soon and soon and soon.
Martin d’Orgeval’s photographs of the charred remains of the Parisian store Deyrolle, in The Drawbridge:
On 1 February 2008 at 5 am a fire ripped through Deyrolle, the famous old entomology and taxidermy store in the heart of Paris. Its historic collections of thousands of butterflies and rare insects, stuffed animals and minerals, built up since it opened in 1831, went up in smoke, and with them the memories of generations of schoolchildren, dreamers and enthusiasts fascinated by their motionless beauty.
Oooh, I also love Antonio Tabucchi. What is this glorious British themed publication? Am I the last to know about it?
Via:It’s Nice That.
Eduardo Recife, The Map of the Interior World.
