Anything that degrades culture shortens the path to servitude.

Albert Camus

Otiose (adj) - Lazy or indolent; pointless or superfluous; ineffective or futile.

This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced: you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of your being there to see them.

Alice Munro

Today I learned that the Orinoco River, which flows north into the Caribbean, is naturally connected to the Amazon River, which flows east into the Atlantic, via the Casiquiare, defying my understanding of watersheds.

Advertising…sell advertising mail the magazine free to a guaranteed audience…they’ll all line up like dominoes target your ads in on your guaranteed audience you’ll see boat magazines free to boat owners sex mags free to kids and singles photo mags free to camera buffs just get the lists knock out this five percent return on direct mail and your ad boys will pay the difference to know who they’re reaching…targeting in on every one of them drugstores selling us customer lists through wholesalers handling (our) prescription line.

J R, William Gaddis, 1975

In the beginning, there’s no sudden cut, no catastrophe or collapse, only a slight sense of repetition.

Carlos Fonseca in Natural History

Nugatory (adj) - Of no value or importance. From the Latin nugatorius, from nugari “to trifle,” nugae “jests”

Uxorious (adj) - Having or showing a great or excessive fondness for one’s wife. From the Latin uxor, ‘wife’.

The night closed like a trapdoor, and the ensuing peace made me wish I had been sleeping.

• Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 284

On this day (August 3) in 1527, the first English-language letter known to be sent from North America was dispatched by John Rut while at St. John’s, Newfoundland.

[This] third day of August we entered into a good harbour called St. John and there we found Eleuen Saile of Normans and one Brittaine and two Portugal barks all a fishing and so we are ready to depart towards Cap de Bras that is 25 leagues as shortly as we have fished and so along the Coast until we may meete with our fellowe

A Magician Explains Why We See What’s Not There

Our visual system is continuously predicting the future, and the world that you are now perceiving is the world that your visual system has predicted to be the present in the past.

So we are indeed living in a simulation: our own

”Literature…allows us to recall from oblivion all that which the contemporary eye, more immoral every day, endeavors to pass over with absolute indifference.”

Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartelby & Co.

Today I learned that Gram Parsons is buried in the Garden of Memories Cemetery, Metairie, Louisiana, and that Nudie suits are named after Nuta Kotlyarenko (Nudie Cohn), who was Ukrainian.

“The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong. But he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.”

• Hugh of Saint-Victor

Oblomovism (n) - The inability to bring oneself to act; apathy; indolent, lazy inertia. After the main character in an 1859 book by the same name (Oblomov, by Ivan Gocharov).

agnotology (n) - the study of deliberate, culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, typically to sell a product or win favour, particularly through the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.

On this day in 1930, Elm Farm Ollie became the first cow to fly in an airplane.

On this day in 1972, the deadliest blizzard in history began in Iran, dropping up to 9 meters of snow over the next seven days and burying more than 4,000 people alive.

“True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics.”

• Yevgeny Zamyatin, in a 1921 essay titled “I Am Afraid” (via this article)

“Whenever I went someplace, I liked to present myself with such problems that gave me—someone who could find no particular reason to stay there otherwise—a reason to stay.”

Jung Young Moon, Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River

Today I learned that Persian identity once transcended the boundaries of political empires, ethnicities, and religions. A glimpse of a road abandoned in favor simple nationality.

Aporetic (adj) - characterized by an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction.

“I think we have lost a very important science: ethics. People admire lying. They admire cheating. They admire a man being a millionaire. The things that are important, really important, are the books a man reads, his feelings, his actions, while opinions are not. They come and go. I’ve been a nationalist, I’ve been a communist, a quiet anarchist.”

• Jorge Luis Borges, in this 1984 interview

On this day in 1856, the Last Island Hurricane made landfall in Lousiana as a Category 4 storm, splitting Last Island (Isle Derniere) in two, wiping out every structure and killing 200+. The land that remains today is maintained by dredging and serves as a wildlife refuge.

The question is not ‘Where is the truth?’ It is: ‘Who is being truthful?’

On the epistemological crisis of the modern (and from my perspective, particularly the American) world:

Our epistemic crisis is essentially ethical and so are its solutions