Attributed to Confucius
By three ways do we learn: first by reflection, which is noblest; second by imitation, which is the easiest; third by experience, which is the bitterest.
And so for day 3062
30.04.2015
Food making as life practice:
As I see it, making something nice to eat should not be an obsession, it should simply be part and parcel of everyday living.
Nigel Slater
A Cook’s Book
And so for day 3061
29.04.2015
To understand is to practice:
Understanding is necessarily practical; its significance is only realised when it is put into practice or performed (like a play or a game).
Morad Farhadpour
Thought/translation
Rendered by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould
https://hcommons-staging.org/deposits/objects/hc:32722/datastreams/CONTENT/content
And so for day 3060
28.04.2015
The companion …
In the course of a walk, we usually find out something about our companion, and this is true even when we travel alone.
The season …
Daily walking, in all weathers, in every season, becomes a sort of ground or continuum upon which the least emphatic occurrences are registered clearly.
Thomas A. Clark
In Praise of Walking
And so for day 3059
27.04.2015
I like how the cumulation of words shifts the sense ever so slightly with each addition: to make, to make sense, to make sense clear.
The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.
London Review of Books
Vol. 17 No. 17 · 7 September 1995
The Promise of Words
Laura (Riding) Jackson
And so for day 3058
26.04.2015
John Ota
The Kitchen: A journey through history in search of the perfect design
“Georgia O’Keeffe Kitchen”
I realize that O’Keeffe’s pantry is like her paintbox. Instead of paints and brushes organized into little compartments, her pantry shelves offer a palette of spices, herbs, flavours, cooking ingredients and cookware.
And so for day 3057
25.04.2015
Bessel Van der Kolk
The Body Keeps the Score
Being in tune with other members of our species […] is enormously rewarding. What begins as the attuned play of mother an child continues with the rhythmicity of a good basketball game, the synchrony of tango dancing, and the harmony of choral singing or playing a piece of jazz or chamber music — all of which foster a deep sense of pleasure and connection.
When I read this aloud with the commas giving way to conjunctions, I find myself slowing down readying to meet the conclusion of pleasure and connection.
And so for day 3056
24.04.2015
Aislinn Hunter
The Certainties
This was back when I was fooling myself into thinking Narcissus was a small part of my work on the Metamorphoses and not, somehow, the central thing. Bernard listened politely, which was typical of his disposition, though I don’t think he understood me. Perhaps it’s because he’s a painter. In his work, transformation is a given: the one who sits for their portrait becomes the one who looks out through the paint. But I’m starting to think that this notion of transformation is too simple. Too simple because transformation requires a then and a now; a linear understanding.
Note that it doesn’t take a before and an after: it’s a then and a now.
And so for day 3055
23.04.2015
Transcribed from Susan Buck-Morss in One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin (1993)
https://ubu.com/film/benjamin_fragments.html
at 53:30
The border police in Spain would not let them pass. And it was that night that Benjamin took an overdose of morphine and committed suicide. Now, the briefcase was then given to the authorities. And no heavy manuscript was ever found. And some people, Scholem in particular, thought that was the missing completed Passagenwerk.
My position on this is that there would never have been a completed Passagenwerk, that he never had intended to write a magnum opus. That wasn’t the point of the project. It was open ended. He constantly stole material for shorter pieces from the larger fund of notes and he constantly reorganized them. There was no one right way to put it all together.
And he once said that when you write a book you are taking things from one notecard which is the books you are reading and putting them in your own box of notecards. So it is just a kind of reassembly, a rearrangement. And that kind of process is never complete.
So it smacks of a kind of cult of genius, hero worship, to think that ah there was this perfect Passagenwerk and we have lost it. Because if he taught us anything by his method of working and by his life, it was certainly not to look for the great works and to codify them as untouchable masterpieces that should just be revered.
To this I set this:
Nicole Brossard
“Lorem Ipsum”
Avant Desire
In the hallways of Casa de Velázquez that week there was an exhibition titled Las maletas de Walter Benjamin. The suitcase is us, inside-outside, content which is fragile or not, a heavy weight to carry; manuscripts, a survival instinct, or an urge to be elsewhere or for travel with dawns fragrant of lilies and lilac.
And so for day 3054
22.04.2015
Lev Manovich
Software Takes Command
p. 98
Manovich leads the reader from Jean Piaget and the stages of child development (kinaesthetic, visual, symbolic) through Jerome Bruner to different mentalities (enactive, iconic, symbolic) that “do not replace each other but are added” through to Alan Kay’s interpretation of this theory as a user interface.
This provided additional motivation for the idea that if computers were to function as a dynamic medium for learning and creativity they should allow their users to think not only through symbols but also through actions and images.
And so for day 3053
21.04.2015
