Roman Fedortsov’s fantastic (and sometimes terrifying) photos of deep sea creatures on Instagram and on Twitter.
from The Sleepwalkers (Hermann Broch)
The unreal is the illogical. And this age seems to have a capacity for surpassing even the acme of illogicality, of anti-logicality: it is as if the monstrous reality of the war had blotted out the reality of the world. Fantasy has become logical reality, but reality evolves the most a-logical phantasmagoria. An age that is softer and more cowardly than any preceding age suffocates in waves of blood and poison-gas; nations of bank clerks and profiteers hurl themselves upon barbed wire; a well-organized humanitarianism avails to hinder nothing, but calls itself the Red Cross and prepares artificial limbs for the victims; towns starve and coin money out of their own hunger; spectacled school-teachers lead storm-troops; city dwellers live in caves; factory hands and other civilians crawl out on reconnoitring duty, and in the end, once they are back in safety, apply their artificial limbs once more to the making of profits. Amid a blurring of all forms, in a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly world, man like a lost child gropes his way by the help of a small frail thread of logic through a dream landscape that he calls reality and that is nothing but a nightmare to him.
The melodramatic revulsion which characterizes this age as insane, the melodramatic enthusiasm which calls it great, are both justified by the swollen incomprehensibility and illogicality of the events that apparently makeup its reality. Apparently! For insane or great are terms that can never be applied to an age, but only to an individual destiny. Our individual destinies, however, are as normal as they ever were. Our common destiny is the sum of our single lives, and each of these single lives is developing quite normally, in accordance, as it were, with its private logicality. We feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?
—Hermann Broch (translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)
—from The Sleepwalkers
farrago
farrago /fə-RAW-goh/. noun. A medley, a confused mess, a mixture, a miscellany. From Latin farrago (mixed fodder for cattle, also generally a mixture), from far (grain). See also: hodgepodge, hotchpotch, mélange, potpourri.
“What strange farrago of impossibilities have these holy dealers in occult divinity jumbled together?” (Thomas Holcroft)
Links: November 11, 2018
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Via Reader O. comes news that the Art Institute of Chicago has put more than 50,000 hi-res images online and into the public domain (“using CC0 licenses for copyright nerds in The Clamor”).
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In the latest “they’re coming for you” news, the ‘world’s first’ A.I. news anchor has gone live in China.
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The eternal readers’ debate about readability and literary value continues in Sam Leith’s “Pretentious, impenetrable, hard work … better?” I say: yes, and we need unpretentious, penetrable books too. And all kinds in between.
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“Once a television comfort for preschoolers, ‘Look for the helpers’ has become a consolation meme for tragedy.” I wanted to write off Ian Bogost’s article as typical backlash (no one is taking Mr. Rogers away from me) but…I couldn’t. → The Fetishization of Mr. Rogers’s ‘Look for the Helpers’
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A “snapshot of our time,” a “global selfie,” whatever you want to call it, the Memory of Mankind (MOM) project is a fascinating project creating a million-year time capsule. Learn more about the project and its founder.
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In celebration of my birthday (or something) on October 23, Starbucks opened up its first ASL store. So cool.
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Disease sniffing dogs could soon be an important part of the fight against malaria and more.
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Not that long ago, something like the GIPHY Animated Gif Film Fest would have existed only as Zoolander level parody. Confession: I spent too much time enjoying the results of the Fest’s prompt: “Can you compel an audience with an engaging story in under 18 seconds?”
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A fascinating story of (in)human endurance, human (in)sanity, a Camel-smoking contrarian, and Courtney Dauwalter winning and losing a kind of race I can’t even begin to understand. → Ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter Takes On The World’s Most Sadistic Endurance Race
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Today at the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918, an armistice is signed between the Allies and Germany at Compiègne, France, ending World War I. Described at the time as “the war to end all wars,” an estimated nine million combatants and seven million civilians would die as a direct result of the violence and up to 100 million deaths are attributed indirectly through various genocides and the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. Though the generals on the Western Front knew the armistice was coming, the fighting continued, with more than 11,000 casualties that morning: the last British soldier killed in action had survived four years in the trenches only to die 90 minutes before the Armistice took effect; the last American would die just one minute before hostilities ceased. Despite the scale and the sheer brutality of the combat, World War I is (amongst Americans, at least) arguably a forgotten war. See also: War Is Done! The sights and sounds of the final hours of World War I & In Photos Unpublished for 100 Years, the Joy of War’s End on Armistice Day & World War 1: Harrowing pictures show France still scarred by First World War trenches & Thomas Hardy’s poem “There Was a Great Calm” & listen to the Moment the Guns Fell Silent Ending World War I.
Thich Nhat Hanh on Compassionate Listening
“…deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of the other person. You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose: to help him or her to empty his heart. And if you remember that you are helping him or her to suffer less, then even if they say things full of wrong perception, full of bitterness, you are still capable of continuing to listen with compassion.” → Thich Nhat Hanh on Compassionate Listening.
Chongqing Metro Station
Abandoned? Post-apocalyptic? Or not…the Chongqing Metro Station in the Middle of Nowhere.
from Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier)
She marked her place with a yarrow stem and closed the book and set it in her lap. She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.
—Charles Frazier
—from Cold Mountain (1997)
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