Jag fantiserar att det ligger ett hemskt brott bakom de här röda fläckarna på ett exemplar av Juvenalis och Persius Satirer, kolla i synnerhet baksidan.

(Boken finns tillgänglig i ett bibliotek bestående av 1500-tals-böcker vid Northwestern University som nu har digitaliserats färdigt).

I somras skrev Aaron Swartz en serie artiklar under rubriken “Raw Nerve“, där han formulerade en slags egen livsfilosofi. Det är naturligtvis sorgligt att läsa med tanke på att han gick bort innan han hann praktisera den, och omformulera den, under en längre livsperiod. Tillräckligt mycket har skrivits och sagts om Swartz, så jag vill egentligen bara lyfta fram den här passagen från artikeln “Lean into the pain“:

I’d learned not to shrink from hard truths, so I’d literally have this conversation with myself: “Yes, I know: if I got better at selling things to people [or whatever it was], I’d be much better off. But look at how painful I find selling: just thinking about it makes me want to run and hide! Sure, it’d be great if I could do it, but is it really worth all that pain?”

Now I realize this is a bogus argument: it’s not that the pain is so bad that it makes me flee, it’s that the importance of the topic triggers a fight-or-flight reaction deep in my reptile brain. If instead of thinking of it as a scary subject to avoid, I think of it as an exciting opportunity to get better, then it’s no longer a cost-benefit tradeoff at all: both sides are a benefit — I get the benefits of being good at selling and the fun of getting better at something.

Do this enough times and your whole outlook on life begins to change. It’s no longer a scary world, hemming you in, but an exciting one full of exciting adventures to pursue.

Benjamin Breen (nämnd här tidigare, då om webben som kuriosakabinett) tar oss med på en resa från Rio de Janeiro (där vattensvinet, eller kapybaren, ovan en dag i slutet på 1600-talet satt och käkade en banan när upptäcktsresanden François Froger gick förbi), över Nationalbiblioteket i Lissabon och en inscannad version i Google Books, till spridandet av en Tumblr-mem och en telefonsocka på Amazon.

Det här är foder för tanken:

When we look into the knowing eye of Froger’s capybara, it is interesting to reflect on how many layers of perception and reproduction that single event in time has passed through to reach us today — and to meditate on how many aeons into the future this record of a chance encounter in Brazil will endure, preserved in amber, as it were, by the seemingly immortal medium of the internet.

(Som Breen nämner får den här bilden jackpot på ZCI-skalan (nämnd här tidigare), då den är både Zany, Cute och Interesting).

Ej läst, men jag blir lite nyfiken efter att ha läst en recension (som förvisso tar upp dess brister):

In a series of vignettes, he shows what he calls “the psychic life of paperwork” or how paperwork became central to human consciousness after the French Revolution. Kafka’s point is that the upheaval of 1789—which began with rare parchment and ended in easy access print—brought about a new, more democratic form of paperwork.

[via: Library Test Kitchen]

Från en artikel om Googles personalpolitik, som man justerade för några år när man märkte att nya mödrar slutade i högre grad än andra:

New mothers would now get five months off at full pay and full benefits, and they were allowed to split up that time however they wished, including taking some of that time off just before their due date. If she likes, a new mother can take a couple months off after birth, return part time for a while, and then take the balance of her time off when her baby is older. Plus, Google began offering the seven weeks of new-parent leave to all its workers around the world.

Google’s lavish maternity and paternity leave plans probably don’t surprise you.

Nä, det gör nog inte det.

The Appendix – med undertiteln “A new journal of narrative & experimental history” – är något att utforska, och något som jag nog får återkomma till. Det här väckte mitt intresse, från en intervju med grundarna Christopher Heaney och Brian Jones hos Contents Magazine:

The Appendix grew out of our collective frustration with the ways that academic publishing forces historians and other academics to elide many of the most interesting aspects of their research. […] So the original idea that motivated us when we were formulating The Appendix was to create a forum for the sort of stuff that gets cut from academic history writing, but at the same time to push back against the notion that “popular” history has to be dumbed down. We were also looking to engage with people who weren’t historians, but who were still interested in archives and stories about the past, like non-fiction and creative writers, visual artists, and journalists.

Jag hörde det här citatet på en konferens häromveckan, från Franco Moretti:

[Reading] individual works is as irrelevant as describing the architecture of a building from a single brick, or the layout of a city from a single church. What is needed is a “cultural geography” or a “cultural botany” of literary criticism…

…och så visar det sig, efter lite rotande i arkivet, att jag redan har citerat det!

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