Today, for some reason, the tides of the Internet granted me with the not so glorious return of an old challenge: Grab the book that is nearest to you, go to page 18, line 4. The thing is, there was nothing after that. See for yourself:
So what should I do with this, Internet? Should I post it in the comments? Should I just read it? What if it is half a sentence? And more importantly, what does “nearest to you” mean? Nearest in the physical space, in the digital space, or nearest to my heart? I am confused.
It happens that there are many books in proximity - of any form - so this gave me the idea to collect full sentences from page 18 - that contain line 4 - of these many books and try to create a something out of it. The rules: If there are more than one sentences in line 4, I picked the one I liked, I changed some of the punctuation, and I had fun.
Let’s see:
Here [some there may be] who have listened much [to religious instructions] yet not recognised; and [some] who, though recognising, are, nevertheless, weak in familiarity.
*
There was something of an English feel to the bright and beautiful February morning in Southern California - a blustery breezy sent huge clouds skidding across the sky, their tufty whiteness shot through with piecring sunlight, creating that somehow crazed quality I associate with partly-cloudy summer days in the UK. In South Asia, meanwhile, a study of the late 1980s showed that up to 90 percent of urban household growth took place in slums.
Petticoats swished at his head; trousers brushed his flanks; sometimes a wheel whizzed an inch from his nose; the wind of destruction roared in his ears and fanned the feathers of his paws as a van passed.
In the late spring, Miles had played third trumpet on a record session under Mingus’s leadership, but the two tracks they made were never released. For a New Jersey kid, Little Richard and Elvis were great, but their Southern sound was almost as exotic for us as it was for the Brits; doo-wop, on the other hand, was our music, a distillation of the air we breathed.
Each question was a small experiment, and we carried out many experiments in a single day. In the morning we raced from our beds back into the streets, sometimes still in pyjamas, to collect the used gas canisters and take them as prized souvenirs to show our friends at school.
Whatever went right was because our parents had decided that was the way it was going to be. Such children learn early on to question the meaning of love, to yearn for love even as they doubt it exists.
Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next. There is no science to slip, so there isn’t any right or wrong to the method. Magic, so powerful in the world before and after Greece, is almost nonexistent.
Experience of the total social fact is doubly concrete (and doubly complete): experience of a society precisely located in time and space, but also experience of some individual belonging to that society. Its ungovernable appearance helps to make it governable in reality. Reality, in other words, is the sphere of human interaction and communication secreted by language and refined by poetry.
As the writer William Gass observed, ‘sometimes accidents happen and beauty is born’.
**
For a long time I was a reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as it is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains.
One day in a corridor I joined a group discussing some aspect of Ovid’s poetry; the poet Bonifaz Nuño was there, I think, Monterroso too, perhaps, and two or three young poets. It is the space of the rōnin of old, the masterless samurai freelancers fittingly called wave men and women: floaters in a fleeting world of images, interns in dark net soap lands.
That brief and baleful fad in the late eighties - the infection - was called “bum fighting”:
BF: "Controlling sexual behavior didn’t seem to be that important outside the propertied classes until the Industrial Revolution, which launched a whole new era of sex-negativity, perhaps because of the rising middle class and the limited space for children in urban cultures."
M: "In terms both of social structure and of political institutions the changes since 1750 have been profound, and at certain moments both rapid and spectacular."
BF: "The Crown also authorized the encomieda system, which, instead of being a grant of land, was a grant of a type of slave labor."
M: "All change constitutes ‘reform’ (a word with no negative connotations); all reform is motivated by benevolence, altruism, philanthropy and humanitarianism, and the eventual record of successive reforms must be read as an incremental story of progress."
***
The great humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow and his little son shared their love of strawberries. The French ambassador, Paul Claudel, had declared to an Italian newspaper that Surrealism, just like Dadaism, had “one meaning only - a pederastic one”: Against the nude in painting, as nauseous and as tedious as adultery in literature.
He had quite a cloud of them about him already, and in the dim light it made him look strange and sorcerous.
-"Your workshop should be divided into roughly two areas - your cutting station and your printing station."
-“Excuse me, Miss. Are you going to the city?”
-"Any other country is beautiful as long as I don’t know about it."
-“Is that right?" Paul D turned to Sethe.
Sighing, she placed her hand inside the recessed cipher box and entered her five-digit PIN. Then he assured her that no one had given him a bomb to take on a plane, and she, in return, gave him a printed boarding pass.
Amma wanted her on sight, followed her into the main room where women sat on sofas, chairs, cushions, cross-legged on the floor, drinking cups of coffee and cider. He bowed and smiled—a total change from his usual attitude of indifference—picked up my handkerchief that had fallen on the floor, and hoped “mademoiselle had enjoyed her lunch.”
-"But if you’re tired we’ll get the amenities over with as soon as possible."
****
The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting - fleeting indeed. Or, to put it another way, the camera showed that the notion of time passing was inseparable from the experience of the visual (except in paintings).
If someone now asked of us the truth of Dostoevki’s statement that flatly defines man as a being who can get used to anything, we would reply, “Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how”. That is why human beings have survived and prospered in different parts of the globe in very different climates and conditions.
*****
Late that evening, while I was watching the late news, she slapped her thighs a couple of times, soundlessly, I admit, but I was certain it was leftover laughter:
-"The CPM model encourages us to build larger, more costly, less efficient audiences, while digital technology allows us to build an ever more targeted, economical, buyer-positioned audience. The usage, in turn, will depend on a number of factors such as the time of day, whether it is a weekend, or if you have a marketing campaign running."
The regime, in the depths of self-delusion, expects an easy victory.
The lines of the diagram do not describe a three-dimensional object but, together with other lines, they aim to convey relationships and show connections in a system. It does many things well but can’t resist indulging in unnecessary complexity:
The position of the fiber in urban and rural areas or the character of the new enclaves and roads are all spatial factors with the power to either amplify or diminish the access to information.
There also functioned (to a considerably greater degree than in other societies) instrumental values such as orderliness, obedience, economy, frugality, accuracy, and thoroughness.
Here is an authoritarian causation, in the form of a first principle, outside of labor, the everyday, or scientific investigation, not to be further questioned, a principle of which now philosopher rather than priests have some special knowledge:
-“We were explorers walking without weapons into man-eating animals’ territory.”
-"I really don’t want to kill an animal if I can help it."
-"The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy."
I am starting to believe the unbelievable and comprehend the incomprehensible.
Is it a form of belief or religion, let alone the very foundation of all the religions themselves, the bedrock of fanaticism which is somehow to be avoided at all costs, even though it holds everything else together?
This answer lies not in what we say or think, but in what we are, how we act, where we are moving.
These “basic” emotional expressions are thought to be evolved responses to universal predicaments: a disgusted grimace ejects poisons from our mouths when we stick out our tongues; the rush of energy that comes when we are enraged may help us fight off a rival. The Rorschach provides us with a unique way to observe how people construct a mental image from what is basically a meaningless stimulus: a blot of ink.
However, this kind of singularity can become a key, activating a complex refrain, which will not only modify the immediate behaviour of the patient, but open up new fields of virtuality for him: the renewal of contact with long lost acquaintances, revisiting old haunts, regaining self confidence…
******
In the end she escaped, leaving only a handful of hair and a tiny piece of scalp in my hand.
The books in order of appearance:
“The Tibetan Book of the Dead”
Mark Fisher, “K-Punk”
Mike Davis, “Planet of Slums”
Virginia Woolf, “Flush”
Ian Carr, “Miles Davis”
Rebecca Solnit, Joshua Jelly - Shapiro, “Nonstop Metropolis, A New York City Atlas”
Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”
Martin McGartland, “Five Dead Men Walking”
Audre Lorde, “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name”
bell hooks, “All About Love, New Visions”
Walter Benjamin, “THE WRITER’S TECHNIQUE IN THIRTEEN THESES”, included in the collection “Νο 13” (In Greek)
John Maeda, “Laws of Simplicity”
Edith Hamilton, “Mythology”
Marc Augé, “Non-places”
The Invisible Committee, “To Our Friends”
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Breathing, Chaos and Poetry”
Erik Kessels, “Failed It!”
Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”
Roberto Bolaño, “Amulet”
e-flux journal, “The Internet Does Not Exist”
Steven King, “Mr Mercedes”
Janet W. Hardy, Dossie Easton, “The Ethical Slut”
E. J. Hobsbawm, “Industry and Empire”
Kathleen Sears, “U.S. History 101”
Stanley Cohen, “Visions of Social Control”
Zygmunt Bauman, “Art of Life”
Raoul Vaneigem, “A Cavalier History of Surrealism”
Alex Danched (ed.), “100 Artists’ Manifestos”
J.R.R. Tolkien, “The hobbit, or, There and back again”
Susan Yeates, “Beginner’s Guide to Linocut”
James Baldwin, “If Beale Street Could Talk”
Kathy Acker, “Great Expectations”
Toni Morrison, “Beloved”
Dan Brown, “Digital Fortress”
Neil Gaiman, “American Gods”
Bernardine Evaristo, “Girl, Woman, Other”
Daphne Du Maurier, “Rebecca”
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Dispossessed”
Bill Bryson, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”
John Berger, “Ways of Seeing”
Viktor E. Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning”
Ethem Alpaydin, “Machine Learning”
David Albahari, “Learning Cyrillic”
Michael Wolff, “Burn Rate”
Nayan B. Ruparelia, “Cloud Computing”
China Miéville, “October”
Richard Hollis, “Graphic Design, A Concise History”
Katrina Owen, Sandi Metz, “99 Bottles of OOP”
Keller Easterling, “Extrastatecraft”
Anna Pawełczyńska, “Values and Violence in Auschwitz”
McKenzie Wark, “Molecular Red”
Maya Angelou, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”
Haruki Murakami, “Sputnik Sweetheart”
Maggie Nelson, “The Argonauts”
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, “Venus in Furs”
Fredric Jameson, “An American Utopia”
Erich Fromm, “The Revolution of Hope”
Tiffany Watt Smith, “The Book of Human Emotions”
Bessel van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score”
Felix Guattari, “Chaosmosis”
Miljenko Jergović, “Sarajevo Marlboro”