Notes + Links on art, design, and technology
by Casey A. Gollan

As with genetic engineering, writing is a seed from which entire bodies may grow, but there also exists the possibility of severe mutation, injury, and destruction, set off simply by the act of reading and writing, of bringing the text to light, of turning a body inside out to expose the inscription, a violence that accompanies the technologization of the body and the abeyance of sonic movement.

Instead of being addressed just to you, the second person, discourse is revealed as discourse in the universality of its address….It no longer has a visible auditor. An unknown, invisible reader has become the unprivileged addressee of the discourse.” Hermeneutics, one again is the art of literary correspondence where no reply is possible. Since the text’s intended audience is gone, it can be read only in conditions of eavesdropping. Hermeneutics involves the interpretation of stray texts. Though theorists of hermeneutics are rarely as explicit about the strangeness of the operation as we will find Kafka or even Emerson to be, the challenge is to stand in the place of those “invisible auditors”—in short, to “mate with the dead,” as Nietzsche put it.

John Durham Peters, Speaking Into The Air, p. 150

Oh, gross!

In the seventh century BC, King Ashurbanipal took control of Mesopotamia, establishing the great Assyrian empire. As one of his first acts, he commanded his scribe Shadunu to collect every available written artifact in the kingdom…He confiscated every single document from every temple and private home in the kingdom. Eventually, he returned with a vast collection of poems, proverbs, hymns, fables, omens, horoscopes, incantations, prayers, and more than 500 drug recipes. From this act of imperial confiscation the world’s first library emerged…Just as Ptolemy would later build his library at Alexandria by confiscating books from incoming ships, Ashurbanipal built his library through coercion.

In some ways we are all Montaignes today. We talk and write about ourselves a lot, and expect everyone to be interested in the details of our lives. We can be self-indulgent, and so can he. But I think he also appeals because he is not just inward-looking, and he doesn’t just navel-gaze. He had an intense interest in the world outside himself, and in what he read; he was stepped in classical history and literature, and inherited all the cultural energy of the Renaissance. He also loved to travel, and encounter new people and new ways of doing things. This makes him more than just a reflective philosopher, or someone who rambles on about whatever goes through his head. It also makes him an endlessly interesting guide to the whole humanist culture to which he was heir, and which he transmitted to generations of readers after him.

— Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs - but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesn’t come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle.
— But when we give up symbols and opinions, aren’t we left in the utter nothingness of being?
— Yes.

Like all blanks, associative leaps through space need to be created. We must understand what makes electricity arc through the air. A conscientious reader confronted with a string of unrelated passages separated by blanks will, for a while, dutifully attempt to form bridges from one passage to the next, to discover the writer’s logic or pattern, the work’s intended accumulation. If no such thing is discernible, however, the reader will eventually, understandably, move on to something else. Such is the risk of communicating through silence. The rewards include the powerful bolt of understanding a leap can create, an understanding that reaches the reader beyond words, beyond rational explanation, and so is more intensely felt.

It happens that I have strong feelings about the use of [sic]. Hackish writers deploy this routinely to make whoever they are quoting look stupid. It’s a very cheap move, and a sure sign, in my view, of third-tier writing. It’s acceptable to use [sic] if there’s no way around it, and it’s sometimes excusable to use it if you’re trying to underscore the sloppiness, or stupidity, or whatever, of some powerful figure — if the president of an Ivy League school made a glaring mistake in some official context, maybe that would get a pass. But in general, [sic] is a cheap move — we all make mistakes, typos, little glitches, that mean nothing. This web site is full of such errors — for all I know this post will contain such errors, because I’m writing it quickly, and I don’t have a proofreader, etc. In other words, I’m no different than the person I quoted making some workaday, meaningless error.

Rob Walker, My [sic] mistake

(via jenbee)