josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

newest | archives | search | about | wishlist | flickr | email | rss

28 Aug '13 05:08:17 PM

Horn overdubs.

24 Aug '13 12:27:13 AM

'There are no good songs or bad songs here'

24 Aug '13 12:00:33 AM

'Nempe dubitans, intelligens, affirmans, negans, volens, nolens, imaginans quoque, & sentiens.'

21 Aug '13 12:46:19 AM

'… a willingness to share, a willingness to fail.'

20 Aug '13 03:17:11 AM

'Remember that Socrates had so completely put aside ostentation that people actually went to him when they wanted to be introduced to philosophers, and he took them.'

19 Aug '13 07:01:53 PM

'… continually watching the moods of his mind…'

19 Aug '13 02:55:32 AM

Katherine St. Asaph on Kate Bush

18 Aug '13 09:53:30 PM

'Our own conception of simultaneity has been a long time in the making, and its emergence is certainly connected, in ways that have yet to be well studied, with the development of the secular sciences. But it is a misconception of such fundamental importance that, without taking it fully into account, we will find it difficult to probe the obscure genesis of nationalism. What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of 'homogeneous, empty time,' in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.

Why this transformation should be so important for the birth of the imagined community of the nation can best be seen if we consider the basic structure of two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper. For these forms provided the technical means for 're-presenting' the kind of imagined community that is the nation.'

17 Aug '13 06:48:03 PM

'… a vibrant intellectual culture needs both specialists willing to entertain the questions of amateurs, and amateurs willing to question specialists'