Month: February 2024
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sing swan song / remembering Damo Suzuki
Word came over the wire yesterday that Damo Suzuki, best known as the frontman of krautrockers Can at their creative peak, had passed away. (Ten years after a colon cancer diagnosis, apparently, which puts the guy into the Wilko Johnson league of unexpected and defiant longevity.) It reminded me that I had the fortune to…
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09FEB24 / accessions
The accessions department notes with some discontent that the following were ordered a full calendar month previously. Such are the hazards of buying titles from outside of the current top fifty English-language non-fiction bestsellers list in Sweden: it is presumed that such must be obtained from suppliers overseas before the local supplier (Adlibris) can fulfill…
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a general atmosphere in which a particular conclusion seems undeniable
Building on yesterday’s post about writing yourself into (or out of) beliefs and opinions, I want to return to a piece from late last year which I keep rereading, and which I think has important lessons for us all in this year of many elections of consequence. The title is plain and forthright—“You Can’t Fact…
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you trick yourself into thinking that it’s true
John Higgs, in his most recent newsletter, begins by mentioning a piece he wrote for The Big Issue proposing that the super-rich be put in prison, and comparing it to the political notion now known as limitarianism (which is pretty much the same idea, just without the prison bit). Typically modest, Higgs discounts any possibility…
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05FEB24 / accessions
The department notes, without judgement, that the institution is reviving old habits with regard to acquiring texts more quickly than it reads them. Zindell’s The Remembrancer’s Tale: the Requiem for Homo Sapiens sequence had a profound and formative effect on the institution, despite its being discovered almost a decade after its initial publication. (Indeed, with…