If not for coming across an indirect quotation, I would have gone on believing that the saying “Hell is other people” was a lyric from a rock-song (I’m confusing “Hell is for children” I think) and a rather throw-away sentiment and not a line, in translation, from Jean-Paul Sartre’s one-act play No Exit. Just as words might serve us better if the title of the play Huis Clos weren’t rendered as Closed Door—or rather in chambers in the legal sense of private counsel that the phrase carries in French, it would have been truer to the original if Hell was understood as the Other.
Friday 19 June 2015
mauvaise foi
5x5
straฮฒenverkkehrsordnung: a unique roadway configuration and the technicalities of traffic regulations means that one stop light has been red for three decades in Dresden
four thousand holes in blackburn, lancashire: internet giant is checking computer reading-comprehension with conservative, sensational tabloids
electric babysitter: artist captures images of her children in listless, powerful moments of watching TV
raptor squat: honest-to-goodness zookeepers re-enacting pose from new Jurassic World
catagories: ๐ฌ, ๐ณ️๐, ๐ก, ๐บ, ๐️, ๐ง , ๐, myth and monsters, Saxony
Thursday 18 June 2015
von und zu oder king under the mountain
currently reading: hocus pocus, or what’s the hurry, son?
in which Kurt Vonnegut, JR appears as a benignly unreliable narrator, the namesake of reformer and labour rights champion Eugene Debs, to blithely contemplate the End Times in the early twenty-first century—having written the book in the final decade of the twentieth, knowing that God is not big into numerology. The phrase hocus pocus, according to some sources, is a parody of the priest’s seeming magic trick of transubstantiation during mass. Hoc est corpus meum. The first English language work to address sleight of hand and prestidigitation, incidentally, was an anonymous publication in the early seventeenth century titled Hocus Pocus Junior—which might have been the stage-name of the author.
5x5
rook to queen’s gherkin: the skyline of London in chess pieces
consider yourself part of the furniture: aspirational lamp aims to earns its keep, like a character in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse
border-control: colourful gallery of world’s passports
nictotine
Wednesday 17 June 2015
feuilleton
Quartz presents a really fascinating and under-appreciated glimpse on the strange, strained affair that the Chinese government has with Western social-networking heralds and mavens.
catagories: ๐, ๐ฅธ, ๐ง , lifestyle, networking and blogging