The Rise and Fall of Libraries
Legend has it that when the conqueror Amr ibn al-As entered Alexandria in 642, he ordered Caliph Umar I to set fire to the library's books. The story has been discredited, but Umar's apocryphal response deserves to be quoted because it echoes the curious logic of every book burner then and now. Umar acquiesced by saying, "If the content of these books agrees with the Holy Book, then they are redundant. If it disagrees, then they are undesirable. In either case, they should be consigned to the flames." Umar was addressing, somewhat stridently it is true, the essential fluidity of literature. Because of it, no library is what it is set up to be. Even within the strictest circumscriptions, any choice of books will be vaster than its label, and an inquiring reader will find danger (salutary or reprehensible) in the safest, most invigilated places.
[via wood s lot]
Images as the Text: Pictographs and Pictographic Logic: Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann propose a logical system for pictographic languages. A true pictograph functions as an image whose meaning is communicated through its visual form as a picture of something, whether the communication is effected through substitution or translation into language or not. Historically speaking, we know of very few fully developed pictographic systems. Ancient writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, Babylonian pictographic precursors to cuneiform, Hittite hieroglyphics, and other scripts in the ancient near east, used pictorial forms but usually in what are known as "mixed" systems. The pictographic representation of an animal, object, or person functioned as a sign in a system that also used ideographic, logographic, syllabic, and phonetic principles to represent concepts, words, or sounds. Mixed systems are also characteristic of the new world languages and writing systems from mesoamerica, such as Mayan and Aztec glyphs. Many of these systems used the sign in multiple ways (so that, for instance, the rebus of an eye would be readable as "I", as the concept "to see", and so forth).
[via wood s lot]
In the nine months since Sept. 11, George W. Bush has put the United States on a course that is so bleak that few analysts have – as the saying goes – connected the dots. If they had, they would see an outline of a future that mixes constant war overseas with abridgment of constitutional freedoms at home, a picture drawn by a politician who once joked, "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier – so long as I'm the dictator."
[via also not found in nature]
Official Secrets: an excerpt from Greg Guma's Liar's Guns, and Money.
The trouble is that systems of authority are widely known to abuse their powers. As long ago as 1690 John Locke took note of the danger, as did Alexander Hamilton in his defense of John Peter Zenger. Abuse of official power has traditionally been viewed as an especially serious evil indeed. As a result, the US social system generally embraces the presumption of transparency, that in general the people have a "right to know," and that a basic function of the press is to check abuses of power. In fact, this "checking function" is built into the First Amendment; and, except in times of war, it has held sway for over a century. Nevertheless, much important information never reaches the general public. Compounding the problem, US leaders frequently work with a compliant legislative branch to tighten access and negate the appropriate role of journalists.
[via abuddhas memes, in a roundabout way]
