A library the internet can’t get enough of!

Every year or so, the library in the photograph above — with stacks of books piled high and buttery lamplight aglow — resurfaces on the internet. It is often (erroneously) attributed to the author Umberto Eco, or said to be in Italy or Prague.

In fact, Kate Dwyer reports for The Times, the library is not in Europe. It doesn’t even exist anymore. But when it did, it was the home library of the Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Richard Macksey — a book collector, polyglot and scholar of comparative literature. His book collection clocked in at 51,000 titles, some 35,000 of which eventually made their way into the university’s libraries.

Why do people love this image so much? Don Winslow, the author and political activist, who recently posted a photograph of the library on Twitter, said it was “as stunning as a sunset.” Ingrid Fetell Lee, the author of the blog the Aesthetics of Joy, pointed at the photo’s sense of plenitude: “There’s something about the sensorial abundance of seeing lots of something that gives us a little thrill,” she said.

And what would Dr. Macksey think, if he knew his library had taken on a life of its own? “My dad liked nothing better than sharing his love of books and literature with others,” his son, Alan Macksey, said. “He’d be delighted that his library lives on through this photo.”

I'm back!

 Ok Happy and Healthy 2022.  May your dreams fall like feathers of glory around you as they come to beautiful fruition!

I've been away.  Spiritually, intellectually emotionally.  UNPRESENT.  I'll write about it over the coming months.

For now I have just seen the comments that have been made and been awaiting moderation for over a year for which I am truly sorry.  I will answer every one over the next few weeks.

I will try to post weekly from here in -and from the bottom of my heart thank you for reading my little blog! 

First Edition of 'The House at Pooh Corner' with charming Shepard illustration of Winnie playing a balalaika

 

From my Poem 'The Twenty One insights'.

Now he cast his nets at my request,

and all he said reeked of naked truth.

‘First, wake up!  And sniff the guiding wind,

the teaching that is written in the sky,

written in the clouds for all to see.

Men were stretched to look up at the stars,

not to snuffle in the clotted mud,

or labour for some crook in factories

Like icebergs calving in a frozen sea,

his words touched me like sea-dreams deep within.

Touched that yearning that I know is in me.

‘You cannot walk through life with eyes tight shut!

And neither is this role a waking dream.

Sleep or wake-each must have it’s place,

and don’t forget to actually breathe!

To breathe is to inhale the dust of stars.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ACTUAL CREATIVE MOMENT-TIM ROUGHGARDEN

Sometimes we walk in the moments history is born and made.  As Tim Roughgarden states below introducing his new lecture series-now is such a moment.  This is from Tyler Cowen's Blog, Marginal Revolution.

It’s worth recognizing that we’re currently in a particular moment in time, witnessing a new area of computer science blossom before our eyes in real time. It draws on well-established parts of computer science (e.g., cryptography and distributed systems) and other fields (e.g., game theory and finance), but is developing into a fundamental and interdisciplinary area of science and engineering its own right. Future generations of computer scientists will be jealous of your opportunity to get in on the ground floor of this new area–analogous to getting into the Internet and the Web in the early 1990s. I cannot overstate the opportunities available to someone who masters the material covered in this course–current demand is much, much bigger than supply.

And perhaps this course will also serve as a partial corrective to the misguided coverage and discussion of blockchains in a typical mainstream media article or water cooler conversation, which seems bizarrely stuck in 2013 (focused almost entirely on Bitcoin, its environmental impact, the use case of payments, Silk Road, etc.). An enormous number of people, including a majority of computer science researchers and academics, have yet to grok the modern vision of blockchains: a new computing paradigm that will enable the next incarnation of the Internet and the Web, along with an entirely new generation of applications.

Response to a piece in the Sunday Times by Matthew Syed

 Matthew Syed seems one of the more insightful journalists working for the Murdochs though I continue to have obvious problems with Journalists musing on the erosion of ‘liberal democracy’ (whatever that is) whilst taking the filthy lucre of one who is a prime eroder of said democracy.

Here we have a continuation of a genre of journalism, realpolitik, personal anecdote, frankly expressed insight, tell it all-warts and all, which seems to be exploding.  It’s breast beating but disguised as insight.  It bemoans the loss of what, in reality, never existed, because specific interests with paws on the levers of power cannot in what might be laughingly referred to as ‘their view’ allow IT to happen.  What that IT is, is a functional, widespread, engaging and engaged, honest and transparent political system that responds to a series of checks and balances that are beyond the control of individuals or interest groups and to which all subscribe on pain of political disgrace and annihilation.

What we have instead is a philosophical hotch-potch of self interested think tanks, lobbyists, millionaires and billionaires, Corporate interests, Big Pharma, the Military Industrial Complex, Control of media, a militarised Police Force, State Erosion and Public Services nullified with their replacement by inefficient and unqualified private providers seeking profit from said Services.

The family silver has, of course, been sold.  The grounds also hived off for luxury flats and crowded estates.  The owners are all absentee landlords yet members of all the right clubs.  Navigation through the replacement forests of think tanks and special interest groups requires a Privately Educated School System to groom the next wave of Alpha’s in the codes and signals required for flourishing.

The point is that all of this, all of it, was clearly signalled in 1979 with the election of Research Chemist, Margaret Thatcher in the UK and with the installing of the actor Ronald Reagan in the US and the resulting onslaught of neo-liberalist ideology that led to the systematic dismantling of effective democratic state structures and the mass sell-off of public goods at bargain-basement prices to chronically liberalised international financial markets.

Along with privatised utilities of life-essentials like water, coal, gas, transport and public housing came the neo-liberal wraith coming up the rear with the inevitable consequences arising of endless war, privatised military and the hijacking of the military industrial complex by gangs with political masks.  The encouragement of massive corruption in the absence of state controls.  The exploitation of Africa and Asia for her mineral wealth made inevitable by TIFF and TIPP trade liberalisation as with the continued ravaging of Earth’s resources for short term profit.

The World stares obliterative disaster in it’s ugly face, not only for the humans but for all the extraordinary critters and vegetable and arborial life forms. Shrouded now in our winding sheets, stitched together in sweat shops by children, using micro-plastics dredged from the oceans, we await the inevitable. Mostly with the percolated anxiety of cattle milling outside the slaughterhouse, sometimes with an oddly triumphant and wilful ignorance that seems to celebrate itself.  Sometimes we wait frozen with despair or rage. 

But mostly we carry on.  Fighting, fucking, crapping, littering, music making, despoiling, loving, hating, boredoming, maniacal thoughting, opiated, close reading, not reading, mobile phoning texting, bullshitting, group thinking, micro exploiting, ageing, Being, transcending, being born.  Hope, hopeless.

To be alive is to be Cassandra, the doom-caller.  There are worse things, but I just can’t think what they are.

Epistemological Standpoints (Mark Fisher Project)

Georg Lukacs

History & Class Consciousness

III: The Standpoint of the Proletariat

5

Thus man has become the measure of all (societal) things. The conceptual and historical foundation for this has been laid by the methodological problems of economics: by dissolving the fetishistic objects into processes that take place among men and are objectified in concrete relations between them; by deriving the indissoluble fetishistic forms from the primary forms of human relations. At the conceptual level the structure of the world of men stands revealed as a system of dynamically changing relations in which the conflicts between man and nature, man and man (in the class struggle, etc.) are fought out. The structure and the hierarchy of the categories are the index of the degree of clarity to which man has attained concerning the foundations of his existence in these relations, i.e. the degree of consciousness of himself.

WTF!!!  How dare you create a paragraph like this Georg!  A spanking on the bare bottom is in order!!!  I do not mean to be disrespectful but...really!

So the name of this mental foundation of thought processes is the wonderful STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLOGY.  What a great descriptive!  But what does it mean?  

Essay4th! H P Lovecraft and the Art of Supernatural horror-Lovecraft's great Essay: Supernatural horror in Literature.

 A mere 46 years old at the time of his death in 1937, Lovecraft is the father of what came to be known as Weird Fiction.  

Lovecraft's extraordinary essay on supernatural literature and tales begins thus:

'The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.'

That's a lot of fear!

ENDNOTES FOR 2020

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.”

— Charlie Munger

DECEMBER NOTES

MONTAIGNE:  Given the subject matter, “Of Experience” has about it a remarkably buoyant magnitude. Take, for instance, the following passage, as translated by Donald Frame in The Complete Essays of Montaigne:

It takes management to enjoy life. I enjoy it twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it. Especially at this moment, when I perceive that mine is so brief in time, I try to increase it in weight; I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it, and to compensate for the haste of its ebb by my vigor in using it. The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.

Propelled by verbs—perceive, arrest, grasp, make, try, try—the sentences wheel and wrestle across the page, resisting stasis at every turn, refusing to wait around. They achieve that mimetic, nearly miraculous work of performing the very action they describe. Here and elsewhere, Montaigne’s musings on mortality, his gripes about illness and aging, his love-hate relationship with the natural order, not to mention his fervent epistemological stocktaking, make for a stubborn blueprint for life in the red zone, an operative action plan for how to wring futility’s neck.

The ubiquity of suffering heightened Montaigne’s attentiveness to the complexity of human experience. Pleasure, he contends, flows not from free rein but structure. The brevity of existence, he goes on, gives it a certain heft. Exertion, truth be told, is the best form of compensation. Time is slippery, the more reason to grab hold.

In each of these apothegms, we find evidence of what Keats would later call, in a letter to his brothers, “negative capability,” a notion that F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his essay “The Crack-Up,” summarized as the capacity to embrace two contradictory ideas at the same time and go on functioning. “Of Experience” is one of Montaigne’s gravest works—“We must learn to endure,” he writes, “what we cannot avoid”—but the writing is so vigorous, so uninterested in despair. In the end, we get the sense from the writing that the writing was Montaigne’s method of magnifying enjoyment. Reading him might be as good a way as any to suspend life’s flight.

 Drew Bratcher 

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George Giacinto Giarchi graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1981 with a PhD in Sociology, and subsequently became Professor of Social Care studies at the University of Plymouth from 1977 to 2016. He is remembered in Scotland for his innovative social inscape study of the Argyll town of Dunoon in the 1970s - ‘Between McAlpine and Polaris.’

I am astonished to see how our lives intersected and terribly disappointed we never met.  I lived in Dunoon in the early 60's and have some searing memories of that time that I will write about one day.

Also would love to read his study of the impact of the military industrial complex on a small Scottish town.  But it's hard to get hold of.