Lead Igloo | Stories, Philosophy, Opinion
Public Library 13.11
Borges on the Couch by David Foster Wallace. One of my favourite authors reviews the biography of my other favourite author – and nails it. From the NY Times.
In Retreat. Malcolm Knox on the future of gentlemen’s clubs, from The Monthly.
‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’. Umberto Eco interviewed in Spiegel Online.
T.S. [...]
Public Library 6.11
Kabul: city Number One – Part 4. Adam Curtis’s series on Afghanistan continues. You should be following it if you aren’t already.
Borges’s short story, ‘The Book of Sand’ as a hypertext and game.
Beckett with Lacan. Slavoj Zizek writes on Beckett’s ‘utter self-emptying of subjectivity’.
Dictionary of Sydney. Exciting project that will only continue to grow. Loads [...]
Scattered themes from the note-books of Nathaniel Hawthorne
A person, while awake and in the business of life, to think highly of another, and place perfect confidence in him, but to be troubled with dreams in which this seeming friend appears to act the part of a most deadly enemy. Finally it is discovered that the dream character is the true one. The [...]
Public Library 5.8
Additions to the library this time are strictly – strictly – literary.
Nixon’s obituary by Hunter S. Thompson from 1994. There were so many lead-ins from the article that I wanted to use, most of which included the word ’scum’. Here is the one I settled for: “You don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon [...]
The greater torment
The demons told me that there is a hell for the sentimental and the pedantic. There they are abandoned in an interminable palace, more empty than full, and windowless. The damned walk about, as if searching for something, and, as we might expect, they soon begin to say that tthe greater torment consists in not [...]
The face of death
A young Persian gardener said to his Prince:
“Save me! I met death this morning. He made a threatening face at me. Tonight, I would like, by some miracle, to be in Ispahan.”
The bountiful Prince lends him his horses. That afternoon, the Prince encounters Death, and asks:
“Why did you make a threatening face at our gardener [...]