or rather, some of the books i've acquired over the years and which have somehow survived the great culls, for example wagga wagga, 2011 and the books i lost when i split up with k. in 1994.
there is a rather dull but very famous essay by walter benjamin called unpacking my library in which he says that ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have with objects i.e. books but 'not because they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them'.
of course, there is great value in being able to make use of things and having them to hand, which ownership can afford, but for me there is no intimacy in ownership of books or anything else. i am no bibliophile — maybe a bibliotheekofiel 🙂 — but what makes a bunch of books in twenty or so boxes a library?
viewdear arnon
before you and i knew each other i used to read your blog and sometimes wonder about those mysterious friends you have who send you articles. now that i seem to have become one of them, what i love is finding out what you think about an article by sending it to you and then reading your response to it on your blog.
Read more...
after i stopped making art fifteen years ago i became interested in whether there was a space between making art and being an artist as such. i found i was still having lots of ideas for artworks but no interest in executing them. (in this way being an artist is very different to being a baker for example since what is the point of a baker who never actually bakes any bread but only has ideas about bread?) i had an idea for a work which i offered to the unsound festival, actually a series of works called TrueArt. this particular piece was a live video/sound feed of a 1960s plastic clock (made in japan) on my mantlepiece at home in wagga wagga that they could project on screens and/or the sound of which could be incorporated by other artists in their performances.
i am noticing dutch grammar creeping into my sentences and it is somehow more pleasing to me than what i know to be the more correct english grammar. for example i wrote, not 'i am going to the forest for a few days', but 'i am going for a few days to the forest'.
what is happening to me?
this page should only be visible when i am logged in because if a reader clicks on the link it is intercepted by a javascript and forwards to https://pinboard.in/u:johannesk/t:micro.blog/
right?
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From The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge
In “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Jose Luis Borges describes 'a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,' the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:
those that belong to the Emperor,
embalmed ones,
those that are trained,
suckling pigs,
mermaids,
fabulous ones,
stray dogs,
those included in the present classification,
those that tremble as if they were mad,
innumerable ones,
those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
others,
those that have just broken a flower vase,
those that from a long way off look like flies.
Michel Foucault wrote that it “shattered all the familiar landmarks of his thought” — see the introduction to Words and Things. (Thanks Eva Meijer/Trouw).
the dutch translation is a little different, and, at least to my mind for some reason, funnier : a) toebehorend aan de Keizer, b) gebalsemd, c) getemd, d) speenvarkens, e) zeemeerminnen, f) fabeldieren, g) zwerfhonden, h) die welke in deze classificatie zijn opgenomen, i) die welke te keer gaan als dwazen, j) ontelbare, k) die welke zijn getekend met een heel fijn kameelharen penseel, l) enz., m) die welke net een vaas hebben gebroken, en n) die welke in de verte op vliegen lijken.
in old age, just as my ears became very sensitive to sound (i developed first tinnitus and then hyperacusis — and then realised i had suffered for many years from misophonia which recently graduated from being a negative character trait to an actual recognised condition :) my eyes became very sensitive to light so although i am usually reluctant to update software because of the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it principle there is one reason why i eventually moved to mojave (which is by now a fairly ancient version of the macintosh operating system) and that is dark mode.