“Avis d’orage en fin de journée”
“Il faut que je vous fasse un aveu: je suis absolument en faveur du plagiat. Je crois que si on veut arriver à une nouvelle renaissance des arts et des lettres, le gouvernement devrait encourager le plagiat (…) Je ne plaisante pas car les très grands auters n’ont pas fait autre chose que d’être des plagiaires et ça leur a très bien réussi: Shakespeare, Molière… Cette habitude d’utiliser une histoire inventée par un autre vous libère de ce qui n’est pas important. L’histoire n’a pas d’importance, ce qui est important c’est la façon dont on la raconte. Ce qui est important c’est l’attention porté aux détails.”
[I have to confess to you: I am absolutely in favor of plagiarism. I believe that if we are to arrive at a new renaissance of the arts and letters, the government must encourage plagiarism (…) I’m not joking. The greatest authors, Shakespeare, Moliere, haven’t been anything other than plagiarists, to their great success… The custom of using a story created by someone else frees you from the unimportant. The story isn’t important, what is important is the way the story is told. What is important is the attention brought to the details.]
Learning from Lombardi
“…In Lombardi’s case, even his early scribbles on a project are more informative, because they show a fundamentally human thought process, of trying to draw the story out of the mass of data he had collected. This is the opposite of many computational approaches that begin with a mass of data, followed by an often failed attempt to simplify it.
As part of the research for his drawings, Lombardi assembled some 14,000 index cards, which are now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Each 3 by 5 inch card referenced a person or other entity. In the computational pieces that I just showed, it’s as if we’re looking at all 14,000 index cards at once. Having completed the research and data collection process, Mark knew that he must first synthesize that information into something useful. Too often, we try to make the machines synthesize for us, but in fact, synthesis—from the Greek and then Latin meaning “to place together”—is a fundamentally human task. It’s what separates us from Google…”
— Ben Fry
selection by ekstasis
Ten mathematical habits of mind
- Pattern Sniff
- Experiment, Guess and Conjecture
- Organize and Simplify
- Describe
- Tinker and Invent
- Visualize
- Strategize, Reason and Prove
- Connect
- Listen and Collaborate
- Contextualize, Reflect and Persevere
C&C
“The thing I have come to love about Tumblr is that it’s not just writing in community. It’s reading and thinking and inspiring discipline and teaching in community. Some of the best things I’ve read anywhere have been on Tumblr by people I can email later that night. And correspondingly, I think some of the better things I’ve written this year were fleshed out and finished and offered up publicly because I know that would mean something to a community of not just friends but writers. I knew I would receive thoughtful feedback (when the writing warranted it) and might even prime the pump for someone else—returning the favor they’d done me with their piece I couldn’t stop reading the month before. And if my writing is flat—contrived or lazy or some flimsy imitation—well, I’ll know that through them too.
Writing in this community is life-giving and adds a fuel and urgency I haven’t felt in more static, one-dimensional platforms.
The book itself is a community of a different sort. Sometimes I envision it as a lit up apartment building, and I am standing across the street at night. I live across the hall from these people, quite literally, our stories are housed together but I don’t know most of these people yet. There’s a bundle of kinetic excitement I drag into each new story I read. A bundle of anticipation of new stories I’ll hear from writers I already love and all the moments I’ll meet from people I am related to but not in relation with.”
–
Erica, Coming & Crying: C&C Contributors, part 12
via meaghano
“Gigantic” by Pixies (1988)
“Ammæli” by The Sugarcubes (1987)
Top of Mt. Vesuvius – (Campi Phlegraei)
“Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), perhaps best-known today as the husband of Emma Hamilton, mistress of Admiral Lord Nelson, was in his own right a skilled diplomatist, a celebrated connoisseur and collector, and a respected natural historian. In his own time he was honoured in particular for his contributions to the study of volcanoes, acquiring the title ‘the modern Pliny’ for his studies of Vesuvius.”
vi BibliOdyssey
Gustav Klimt. Philosophy (1899).
“Philosophy was the first of the three pictures presented to the Austrian Government at the seventh Vienna Secession exhibition in March 1900. It had been awarded a gold medal at the World Exhibition in Paris, but was attacked by those in his own country. Klimt described the painting as follows: “On the left a group of figures, the beginning of life, fruition, decay. On the right, the globe as mystery. Emerging below, a figure of light: knowledge.” Critics were disturbed by its depiction of men and women drifting in an aimless trance. The original proposal for the theme of the painting was “The Victory of Light over Darkness”, but what Klimt presented instead was a dreamlike mass of humanity, referring neither to optimism nor rationalism, but to a “viscous void””
“Klimt came under attack for ‘pornography’ and ‘perverted excess’ in the paintings. None of the paintings would go on display in the university.
In May 1945, it is contended that all three paintings were destroyed by retreating SS forces.”
Paul Greer 