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Tue May 23 2000 at 10:51:54 (24.4 years ago )
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A brief history of libraries
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What has been lost cannot be destroyed, or diminished.





"Our lives begin as a wondrous twilight, and all that will aide us from our later defeats collects unseen in our first, furtive steps." - Rene Char, "Suzerain" from Selected Poems

 

"...those that choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil."  - Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (2003)




Like someone who'd learned how best to cope with a chronic illness, he never allowed himself to think of his paranoia as an aspect of self. It was there, constantly and intimately, and he relied on it professionally, but he wouldn't allow it to spread ... paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.



 

Keeping step with progress, our emperors today have drawn conclusions from a simple truth - whatever does not exist on paper does not exist at all. - Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind



De exsilo reducti a mortuo: civitas data non solum singulus, sed etiam nationibus et provinciis universis.
(Cicero, "First Oration against M. Antony", XI, written just after the death of Caesar)


















"Each branch of knowledge will devise fictions to speed their investigations. Each of them, in a way, prides itself on its special figments," - John of Salisbury, Metalogicon (II, 20)

















 

 

"The best way to think about reality is to get as far away from it as possible." - Haruki Murakami, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" (1993)

 


Amor non tennet ordinam.





Threaten not the stars



 

The mythomaniac, the dreamer, even at their worst, has authority without knowing it.


"...accept blame from any quarter, just like praise." And so many thanks to anyone whose pointed out a typo, mixed metaphor, poor grammar, unclosed tag, sloppy construction, wanton verbosity, or out-and-out error of mine. Any and all editorial thoughts always appreciated. For real.








 

If you really care about a serious cause or a deep subject, you may have to be prepared to be boring about it.



work here, here, here, here and here





The jewel, the prize
looking into your eyes.



 

αμυαμουες δε βροτοι









I am soaked from toe to chin/
I will not let the water in.




 

The frantic desire to reach a conclusion is the most disastrous and sterile of manias.



"What hath the infinite?
How shall a man measure that which hath
neither bound nor bourn?"

~ Father Noel Taillepied, A Treatise on Ghosts (1588)







 

Tradition is the living faith of the dead,
traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.
And, I suppose I should add,
it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.
~Jaroslav Pelikan~









La tzigane savait d'avance nos deax vies barrees par les nuits.


I am not surprised
I got my head caught
underneath the ice.











Meglio fare pentirsi che store pentirsi







 

You can only ever become a writer, you can never be one. No sooner are you, than you are no longer.







 

We have few faults which are not more excusable than the means we take to conceal them. ~ Le Rochefoucauld











We often mistake forgetting for pleasure.












He who rejects his demons badgers us to death with his angels.











 

 

Do not ask what race a man belongs to; it is enough for me to know that he is a human being. Nobody can be anything worse.

 











By experience, we find out a short way, through a long wandering. ~Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570)










 

I've often regretted my words; never my silences.





Our stories aren't perfect. That's what makes them stories. Makes them ours.







"It is at once the justification and explanation of history that the past throws light on the future and the future throws light on the past." - E.H. Carr





Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram...





"Another world exists; and it is in this one." ~ Paul Eluard







To write of fashion is forgivable. To write fashionably is not.


 

 

History must be our deliverer not only from the undue influence of other times, but from the undue influence of our own, from the tyranny of environment and the pressure of the air we breathe.

 





 

 

So does Time ruthlessly destroy his own Romances.

 









Glorious it is, Polybius , said Scipio tearfully, Yet I have a dread feeling.

 








The devil might steady
We wax and wane.






 

"We don't travel for fun - we're foolish, but we're not that foolish."





 

"What is the self-complacent man, but slave to his own self-praise?" (De Civitate Dei, V, xx)









 

"We use the soul for sovereignty and the body for service." (Cataline, I)






 

 

Wyrd oft nered unfaegne eou, bonne his ellen deah.

 

What you have as heritage, now take as task /
For thus you will make it your own... ~Goethe, Faust.







"The Poet Tells of His Fame"

... the rim of the sky is the measure of my glory,
the libraries of the East fight to own my verses,
the rulers seek me out to fill my mouth with gold,
the angels already know my last couplet by heart.

The tools of my art are humiliation and anguish.
If only I had not been born ...

~ from the Diwan de Abulcasim el-Hadrami, Toledo, 12th c.







 

... the question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell ...




History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office, if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution. - Gibbon .
we dream of a ship that sails away

 

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.













 

Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.






 

What can be usefully postponed can be even more usefully abandoned








 

Went out for the weekend, it lasted for ever








In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world,
and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods. ~ Schopenhauer
Est non esse curae deis securitatem nostram, esse ultionem.

 

"Having learnt little from good examples, I make use of bad ones"




No man is rich enough to buy back his past yet the one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. ~ O.Wilde







 

Got to have fear in your Heart


 

~!~










 

 

A great step forward was made the day men understood that, in order to torment one another more effectively, they would have to gather together...

 

 

One may derive art from life but not from art








Quirks become foibles,
idiosyncrasies symptoms.
One says little,
fearing scorn.
One says much,
unnerved in silence.






"There is no doubt that the masochist lives in the very depth of guilt ... guilt is turned completely upside down: it is both at its deepest and most absurd. It is an integral part of the masochist's triumph and ensures his liberation." - D. Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty (1991), 101.














A Parable About Us: "...in the Empire in question, the Cartographer's Art reached such a degree of Perfection that the map of a single Province took up an entire City, and the map of the Empire covered an entire Province. After a while the Outsized Maps were no longer sufficient, and the Schools of Cartography created a Map of the Empire that was the size of the Empire, matching it point by point. Later Generations, which were less Devoted to the Study of Cartography, found this Map Irrelevant, and with more than a little Irreverence left is exposed to the Inclemencies of the Sun and Winter."
~ Jorge Luis Borges, El hacedor (The Maker, 1960), trans. fragment from a 17th c, work entitled Voyages of Prudent Men (Book IV, ch. xiv) by Suez Miranda.



I think it was my father who made me decide
to become a bum,
I decided that if a man like that wants to be rich,
then I want to be poor. - C. Bukowski (1994)


test tones and failed clones and odd parts made you

 

legbagede-at-hotmail-dot-com

 

I C!hing goth Nodes So You Don't Have To





There is room for anything in the course of time




ignite our dreams of starry skies


A Brief apolitical Statement:

"We want the finest wines available to humanity. We want them here, and we want them now."








 

"...having consciousness is not enough; consciousness must be raised, higher and higher and higher and higher. At its giddiest height, consciousness sometimes lets you down. Supremely conscious, you find that what you are conscious of is the fact that everything is not too great." - D.B., "Monumental Folly"













 

"When you're an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings, to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option." - C.P., Choke















I refer all other questions to prepared statements below.










Good books can tell us the mind of one...bad books can tell us the mind of many

 












 

I have got to stop smiling
/ It gives the wrong impression….

 









Nah pop
no style,
a strictly roots







"What a Golden Age! What a time of Right & Reason!
The Consumer's King and Unhappiness is Treason..."
~Magnetic Fields, 'Strange Powers', Holiday LP

 

“I invariably discern a flaw in all those who are interested in the same things as myself. ”
~Emile Cioran




 

It is dark disaster that brings the light
~Maurice Blanchot

When everything you say is true, then I'll know what to do about you


 

still have a flame gun
for the cute ones
to burn out all your tricks.

 

Enough History Already! More Rawk!







 

/me does not ever tilt at windmills.




 

Whoever gives many reasons tells many lies





Thinking of nothing, and the shooting stars


 

If you are ignorant of the state of the ant
under your foot,
know that it resembles your own
under the foot of the elephant.

 

- Sadi of Shiraz, The Rose Garden (1290 C.E.).


 













out of road
out of car
out of everything at last.












"The genius meets with a group of students. The students tell the genius that the concept 'genius' is not currently a popular one. Group effort, they say, is more socially productive than the isolated efforts of one man, however gifted. Genius, by its very nature, sets itself over and against the needs of the many. In answering its own imperatives, genius tends towards, even embraces, totalitarian forms of social organization. Tyranny of the gifted over the group, while bringing some advances in the short run, inevitably produces a set of conditions which----
     The genius smokes thoughtfully."

~ Donald Barthelme, 40 Stories, "The Genius" (20)











All Music is Awful
http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/hate.html







 

Defiéndame Dios de mí.




blow the stars from the sky

 








 

Life And How To Live It

If vodka, tar and sauna don't help, the disease leads to death.   -   Having the courage to be an absolute nobody  -   When she was new, she rolled around the sky like a black umbrella blown by the wind  -   Some of our best friends are three minutes long  -   bury yourself in a job, a book, a website, love. the everyday mundane distracts you from the truth  -   Abolish the tyranny of fact!  -   Chocolate, caffeine, nicotine, repeat  -   There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so  -   Learning unsupported by grace may get into our ears; it never reaches the heart.  -   Take me drunk, I'm home.  -   You are not the literary genius you think you are  -   Paranoia just ain't cool anymore.  -   Possessions are only yours five nights a week  -   Bread is the staff of the proletariat. Toast is a decadent capitalist luxury.  -   Hear the worms applaud!  -   I left myself at the Airport  -   I take for granted that you just don't care

 

The Truth need not be Consistent

punk as shit like a motherfucker  -   Given enough time all that is meaningful is reduced to noise  -   History is the gossip of winners  -   Stratagem of the Empty City  -   Some virtues dig their own graves  -   There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism  -   Tell the truth or make your lies more interesting  -   for every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong  -   how to avoid tomorrow  -   You couldn't make me give it up to cheapening words for all the empathy and adulation in the world.  -   We told stories to each other backwards hoping it would make us grow younger.  -   Someday you will drive your sony to the sony to pick up some more sony  -   They'll teach you their language, then you'll use it to curse them.  -   19th Century Etiquette  -   It makes lots of sense to me. Unfortunately, that's what hurts the most.  -

 

Slings & Arrows

Your favorite band sucks.  -   I barely like you sober  -   Hurry up please. It's time.  -   You are here. We are not.  -   Spoilt Victorian Child  -   Thou art not lovelier than lilacs,   -     -   no,  -   Congratulations: you are living a life devoid of any serious problems  -   It is all generally going to shit  -   You, Me, a Shovel, and a Bag of Lime.  -   The First Against the Wall When the Revolution Comes  -   This is a pleasant fiction, isn't it?  -   Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.  -   I don't like you enough to lie to you.  -   you're gone. you're off.  -   If You Don't Have Anything To Say, Don't Say Anything  -   You dropped that name, let me help you pick it up  -   Everyone is just trying to be farther meta  -   Your life is already too easy  -

 

Proper Dollops of Self  -   loathing

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied  -   I think of Man and see only shadows; I think of shadows and see only myself  -   That's it. I quit team sanity.  -   Grim Victorian agnosticism  -   Deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book  -   Where are we going, and why am i in this handbasket?  -   Other people's lives are not your playground  -   I will not, for anything, repeat the past  -   credibility is the only real currency  -   why oh why did the black crayon always die first?  -   the beautiful words I threw away  -  



Taking my own medicine:

What is your favourite album?     If this all time: Loveless, Heaven or Las Vegas and It'll End In Tears.
What does your favourite room look like?    There's a bed in it, if that's any clue.
What's your favourite CD to listen to under the influence?    The Eternal Sing-along Debate: Unknown Pleasures vs. Psychocandy
What's your excuse?    Let's see – family lunacy, then death, then booze, then more trauma. Later on, I fell out of a lilac tree, was taught math by nuns, hit by a boulder, administered a lot of tetracycline and was finally just arrested. For a time, I got better. Three years in the crowded lonesome West though - I got worse. It's still no excuse.
What's your favourite American city?     Portland, OR
What's your favourite European city?     Edinburgh ca. 1993?
What's your favourite imaginary city?     Happy Valley, Amhara, Abyssinia
What do you hate about your job?    clack – clack – clack – clack .
Who is your favourite obscure historical character?     Another toughie: Cassiodorus, Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Rahman ibn al-Hakam or Saint Brigit of Kildare.
What is in your cd player? Savages, Boards of Canada, Grimes, the xx, the Pack AD, M83
What else is in your cd player?    Well, in no particular order, Dead Can Dance, Avro Part, Flying Saucer Attack, The Clientele, Cynthia Dall, Stars of the Lid, M83, Ulrich Shnauss, The Books, Architecture In Helsinki, Magnetic Fields, AMP, Georg Philipp Telemann, Tindersticks, The Pilot Ships, Cocteau Twins, Electrelane, Windy & Carl, Trash Can Sinatras, Low, Bedhead, Cluster, Harmonia, Set Fire to Flame, Manitoba, Cranes, Attrition, Th Faith Healers, Husker Du, Robert Johnson, Mono, Explosions in the Sky, Azure Ray, Christopher Tye, Movietone, Mouse on Mars, Talking Heads, The Faint, His Name is Alive, Beth Orton, Pixies, Yo La Tengo, Looper, Nick Drake, Edith Frost, Mogwai, Tricky, Arab Strap, FSOL, Kepler, Franz Ferdinand, John Lee Hooker, Sigur Ros, Grandaddy, Sinead O'Connor, The Beautiful South, Explosions in the Sky, Scout Niblett, Curve, Chemical Brothers, Manual, The Arcade Fire, The Organ, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Remote Viewer, Anonymous 4, Echo and the Bunnymen, Portishead, Kate Bush, The Glove, Lush, Curve, Lightning Hopkins, The Hope Blister, The Cure, Cat Power, Autechre, Lowfish, The Books, Solvent, Mary Timony, Aix Ex Klemm, Underworld, Oval, Microstoria, labradford, Henryk Gorecki, White Stripes, P.J. Harvey, The Sundays, Belly, Liz Phair, Cowboy Junkies, Slowdive, The The, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Medicine, Mum, Tarnation, Throwing Muses, Modest Mouse, Black Box Recorder, Belle and Sebastian, Monster Movie, Mazzy Star, House of Love, The Velvet Underground, Bjork, godspeedyoublackemperor!, Manic Street Preachers, Japan, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, Stina Nordenstam, Spiritualized, Gus Gus, Helium, Bowery Electric, Suede, Joy Division, Sisters Of Mercy, Tori Amos, Love spirals downwards, Massive Attack, Plaid, The Earlies, M83, The New Year, Broadcast, Bardo Pond, A Silver Mt. Zion, Elliott Smith, The Flaming Lips, Pavement, Interpol ...
What are you reading?: Saint-Exupery, Ursula Franklin, Ian Leigh, Daniel Solove, Sisela Bok, Christopher Dandeker ...
What's your kryptonite?     Acidic paper, weak coffee & crowded rooms.
What does your hometown smell like?     When I left it, fog, salt water, fish, in roughly that order.