cheap thrills

A Picture of New York in 1846

Very cool Google Books scan A Picture of New York in 1846

[How can it be situated “northeast of Brooklyn” and just “opposite the northeast part of New York” though?]

Party Time!

Are Books Overrated?

Rick Gekoski of the Guardian asks is reading overrated? I’ll let the piece speak for itself with only a modicum of commentary here, but he makes a few reasonable points, most of which can be chalked up to the simple hyperbole of the quotee (one being quoted).

Reading may not be “everything” but there’s something to be said for the simple act of reading words in a book opposed to thousands of other ‘trivial’ acts one performs in a day. On a cognitive level, I suspect that books can be set apart from almost all other human artifacts based on their sheer ‘representational density’. To unpack, a book qua physical object is rather small and unobtrusive (physically) but during the (cognitive) act of reading it becomes representationally quasi-infinite (or as large of a thing as the human brain can deal with). Baseball, chess, horticulture, tv shows, etc. while rich and complex in their own right, are literally bounded in one or several ways. Books seem (even if it’s just a cognitive trick) boundless. 

Paintings of Theorists and Bears

Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco, Edward Said, Simone de Beauvoir, Naomi Klein, Stephen Greenblatt, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, Judith Butler, Eduardo Galeano, and Jean Paul Sartre + Simone de Beauvoir…..

….ALL GET WHATS COMING TO THEM!!!!

e.g.

[Homi about to get eaten by bear.]

Predictably, Jean Baudrillard is all “the bear did not take place” so he’s safe. I would have liked to see Deleuze get the rhizomes knocked out of him though.

Monkeying Around for a Very Long Time (Leads to Nothing)

Planet of the Planck Apes!!

If every Friday could start out like this! Using a version of Borges ‘total library concept’ we are treated to a re-conceptualizing of what is ultimately Russell’s Paradox (the set of all sets does/does not include itself causing a contradiction thus destroying any attempt of providing a logical foundation of mathematics) - the ‘Catalog of all catalogs that don’t list themselves’:

the librarian cannot include it in its own listing, because then it would belong in the other catalog, that of catalogs that do include themselves. However, if the librarian leaves it out, the catalog is incomplete. Either way, it can never be a true catalog of catalogs that do not list themselves

From here it’s just a hop-skip-and-a-jump to agonizing over the concept of ‘everything’: that is the complete contents of the volumes of the Borges Total Library (cf. his 1939 essay “The Total Library” (“La biblioteca total”)) on the one hand, and problematizing (literally, not polemically) this ‘everything’ notion on the the other hand by the ultimate re-statement of the classic ‘immortal-ish monkeys on typewriters typing away for eternity’ and the ridiculous time scale involved. Basically, very little sense can be made of the time scale involved for the little guys to actually come up with anything sensible, let alone an entire Shakespearean sonnet, Aeschylus’ The Egyptians or the entire contents of the British Museum (not to mention more fanciful imaginary volumes, e.g. “my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934”).

There’s a tinge of sadness to the thought that even give the rate of one keystroke per Planck time (approx. 5.39 * 10^-44 seconds for each keystroke - read the post!) the hardworking tiny little Plank monkey’s still couldn’t come up with much more than the first four lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 within the age of the universe (and there’s only a one in three chance this would happen anyway). But cheer up because at least we are comforted by the fact that out brains (the outcome of only a few billion years of evolutionary banging out of genetic keystrokes themselves) can’t be outdone by rote Plancking. 

[Planck Hair]

 Monkey’s of the Cosmos, you fail us and we thank you.