9/21: happy birthday, bill murray.

today is the first day of fall and the birthday of bill. i love you, bill. thank you for everything.

the good fight

"It's terrible sometimes, inside," he said, "that's what's the trouble. You walk these streets, black and funky and cold, and there's not really a living ass to talk to, and there's nothing shaking, and there's no way of getting it out- that storm inside. You can't talk it and you can't make love with it, and when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize nobody's listening. So you've got to listen. You got to find a way to listen."

 

-from "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin

we move among meanings

"In Ballymenone, at home, in place, they move among meanings, using details of the landscape to locate themselves in time. That grassy bump, the site of a kiln, rouses memories of wet clay slapped into a wooden mold, of the sound of a fiddle on the night air. Then past and present lock into contrastive relation- today there is no work so festive, no labor so cruel- and memories become general, cultural, when they register in an account that balances loss against gain. Deftly meshing knowledge of the place where they live with knowledge of the work they must do, people come to understanding. They understand the drift of history, the surge and seethe of time- the ebb of sociability and the flow of ease- and aware of their course, protected from the delusions of nostalgia or progress, they are thrust into life, knowing, as Hugh Nolan put it, that the two things happen at the one time:

"Things get better.

"and they get worse.""

-from The Stars of Ballymenone by Henry Glassie

library life

The Librarian by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1566

"Ranganathan expected librarians to have a spiritual bent, using their intuition to categorize books. With intuition, he wrote, a person 'sees beyond the phenomenal occurrences. He transcends space and time. He sees from the seminal level, the perfect harmony of everything."


"In the third order of order, knowledge doesn't have a shape. There are just too many useful, powerful, and beautiful ways to make sense of the world."

-from Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, David Weinberger