NYPL decided to create an ad for itself using recreations of my actual college/grad-school experience. Poring over books and manuscripts for research, doing work in the Irma and Paul Milstein Division (and listen, I know you all love the Rose Reading Room, but the Milstein Division is the best place to get. shit. done.), discovering odd and disturbing things one did not know about one’s family (possibly not actually research related), constantly hearing O Fortuna (probably just in your head, OR IS IT)… Even the hallucinations of weird people. Because drugs (and lack of sleep).
So this just happened. (Twitter channel.)
Well, this is alarming.
(via towerofsleep)
… I was saying boo-urns.
(via lukesimcoe)
So much worse than this quote indicates. Why? Because it was apparent at the #hlth meeting that the senior administrators did not have a damned clue as to what was even going on. They didn’t have answers to at least half of the questions and concerns that came from the library staff. Obviously it was a good idea for them to call that meeting then, right? So, I must ask, who deserves to have their jobs on the line, the librarians or the administrators being paid to not know anything?
(Source: katherinestasaph)
- Zone
This isn’t my favorite excerpt from the 517 page long sentence, but it’s perhaps the most quotable without having to run on for another 200 pages or so.
(Source: catalog.openletterbooks.org)
SAFE - 20 YEARS ON, video by Bob Weisz
Watch. The sublime melancholy of everything coming apart in flames.
From Nathan Shchneider’s great article, “The New Memory Theater” (h/t The Bronze Medal):
Picture a library, in flames, overlooking the city in ruins below… Books by the thousands audibly crinkle as they incinerate, disappearing for all time, never to be read again and, in a generation or two, never to be remembered… As bystanders, we’re consumed by horror. We imagine ourselves as the books, the books as ourselves….
Or, on the other hand, might we instead laugh and cheer? It wouldn’t be the first time at a book-burning. Why not? Isn’t there also comedy — a divine comedy — in what freedom would follow the immolation of civilization’s material memory? We have only ourselves again, ourselves and our God. Perhaps these flames might go by the name of progress.
From Martin Corless-Smith’s English Fragments:
When the library dissolves in flames the river’s indifference is a thrill.
Corless-Smith again:
Everything we experience is exact, but it does not mean, nor can it mean anything else exactly…the sky is very precise, a description which might itself be very precise, but the sky and the description are altogether different occurences. This will not stop us hoping for some vital link
and back to Schneider, here quoting Frances Yates (Art of Memory) quoting Plato (Phaedrus) putting words in the mouth of Socrates quoting the Egyptian king Thamus speaking to the god who invented writing, Theuth (all of this being an extraordinary act of “memory theater” stacking possible perhaps never before):
Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are not part of themselves will discourage the use of their memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
and as for myself? Despite being a defender of archives and libraries, a hound for data, and in fear of the next disaster, I also feel most comfortable with what inevitably goes on despite collapse and do not value our mountains of readable knowledge so much as what is intangible, even to computers. I know that the best part of what I know or the best part of what I have is sometimes born of or augmented by writing, more often instruction, but it is neither of those things. The best part of what I have is in that space between what I am and what I am conscience of being, its manifestation before my senses is too often incidental.
(Source: youtube.com)
“One philosophy graduate student collapsed into a pile of cards and began sobbing hysterically.”
so many gems in this small piece. All over a late New York Times! also this “I’m sure if you stumble around the stacks for a few days you’re bound to come across the book you want.”
(image via anarchivist)
Keith fucking Richards, of all people.
(thanks be to Helrond)
