February 2012
5 posts
1 tag
2 tags
3 tags
3 tags
The Aporeticus: Argos, dog of Odysseus →
superfluidity:
mills:
At the end of The Odyssey, Odysseus returns home in disguise after two decades of war and wandering; his old swineherd, Eumeaus, taking him for a stranger, walks him across his property and nearby his old dog, occasioning one of the earliest sentimental descriptions of the human-canine bond…
I’ve always loved this passage for exactly the reason Mills points out. It’s...
2 tags
January 2012
29 posts
2 tags
3 tags
2 tags
2 tags
1 tag
3 tags
Exposing Yourself to Foreign Experiences
This morning, Mrs. Tragos, Baby Tragos and I headed down to a big indoor mall in Ankara. It was time to get some more serious toys for Baby Tragos. It was also time for Mrs. Tragos to get a haircut.
While Mrs. Tragos sat down for the above-mentioned haircut, I took Baby Tragos for a walk around the mall. Normally, I would put her facing out in the Baby Bjorn, which she loves. She gets to...
2 tags
1 tag
2 tags
“I believe that literature must address itself to the problems of its time. An...”
– Mario Vargas Llosa, from the May 20, 1997 issue of Prospect Magazine, in an article that directly addresses the question (posed in the subtitle), “Does literature serve any higher purpose beyond entertainment?”
2 tags
“A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses it to come to a...”
– Alain de Botton on false standards and reclaiming the metrics of success. (via curiositycounts)
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
– Albert Camus (via gill-man)
A Tragos favorite, for its skeptical pessimism. The quote is from The Rebel.
The following sentence is:
“The question is: do we know if this refusal can only lead to the destruction of others and of himself…”
— L’Homme révolté,...
2 tags
2 tags
3 tags
3 tags
2 tags
Ms. Odradek: Life, Literaturized! →
Oh! l’unica parte importante della vita è il raccoglimento. Quando tutti lo comprenderanno con la chiarezza ch’io ho tutti scriveranno. La vita sarà letteraturizzata. Metà dell’umanità sarà dedicata a leggere e studiare quello che l’altra metà avrà annotato. E il raccoglimento occuperà il…
3 tags
3 tags
2 tags
2 tags
3 tags
“I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of...”
– Einstein to Thornton, 7 December 1944 (via superfluidity)
3 tags
night rpm: Fragment as Art →
noxrpm:
Sappho’s Fragment 137, from If Not, Winter - Fragments of Sappho (tr. Anne Carson) -
I want to say something but shame prevents me … yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful things and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say, shame would not hold down your eyes but…
Nox RPM doesn’t post often, but when he does, I always take notice. He has a masterly way...
2 tags
“The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good - in spite...”
– Robert Graves
3 tags
“Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at...”
– A curse issued by a medieval German monastery to scare away humanist bibliophiles, as quoted by Stephen Greenblatt in his wonderful book about the reception history of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.
2 tags
“He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the...”
– Dostoevsky writing about having met Charles Dickens in London in 1862, as quoted by Christopher Hitchens in his last article for Vanity Fair.
[Edit: That very well might be spurious.]
3 tags
“…all philosophy is an act of language. Rhythm, vocabulary, syntax, everything...”
– From an interview with George Steiner, “Europe is in the Act of Sacrificing its Young,” in Télérama.fr, December 12, 2011, trans. mine
[“…toute philosophie est un acte de langage. Le rythme, le vocabulaire, la syntaxe, tout ce qui nous conduit vers la poésie, nous le...
December 2011
19 posts
1 tag
Mr. Janus, You Rascal
…New Year’s Eve, 2011…
I began 2011 without a clue. After a chaotic New Year’s Eve day, in which a conversation with a very interesting Turk in Istanbul nearly caused us to not cross the Bosporus in time to get our flight to London. (As Mrs. Tragos might tell you, I have a tendency to get lost—very lost—in conversations.) We made it, just in time for me to kiss...
2 tags
2 tags
“What philosophy worthy of the name has truly been able to avoid the link between...”
– Michel Serres (from Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time)
2 tags
“Greene’s “dual-process theory” of moral decision-making posits that rationality...”
– The Biology of Right and Wrong (via theatlantic)
What disturbs me is that I’ve never learned to use the manual mode of any camera I’ve ever used.
1 tag
“Those first years when you can’t blow your own nose, when your father picked you...”
– A.A. Gill, “Fatherhood” - from Is Further Away (via winesburgohio)
2 tags
2 tags
“There should be pride in it, that you behaved no worse. There should be...”
– Clive James, discussing the cycling of generations and Gabriel García Márquez’s notion of a patriarch’s autumn. Brought to my attention by Salman Rushdie’s Twitter.
3 tags
“To put this as crisply as I can, the study of the classics is the study of what...”
– Mary Beard, “Do the Classics Have a Future?”, in the New York Review of Books. (via thebronzemedal)
3 tags
Il tuo primo (primissimo) Natale ad Ankara | No... →
The incredible Byronic invited to me to recount my Christmas adventures in Ankara last year for No Borders Magazine.
1 tag
“Generalmente, esa sensación de una absoluta soledad aparece mezclada a un...”
– El Túnel · Ernesto Sabato (via almiranteb)
“Generally, this feeling of absolute solitude is mixed with a proud sense of superiority, of contempt for mankind. Men strike me as dirty, ugly, greedy, rude, and mean. My solitude does not scare me. It is almost Olympian.” [my transl.]
3 tags
“Arriving in each city, the traveler finds a past he did not know he had: the...”
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili, Mondadori, Milan, 2002, p. 26 - 27, my transl.)
[ “Arrivando a ogni città il viaggiatore ritrova un suo passato che non sapeva d’avere: l’estraneità di ciò che non sei più o non possiedi più aspetta al varco nei luoghi estranei...
4 tags
3 tags
3 tags
“We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine....”
– Leo Tolstoy discussing cinema with Isaak Teneromo in August 1908, as reported in the New York Times on January 31st 1937.
The article also reports that Tolstoy was planning to write “a play for the screen” likely to have “a terrible and bloody theme.”
I really rather wish Tolstoy had written a...
1 tag
“Todos los hombres, en algún momento de su vida, se sienten solos; y más: todos...”
– Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad (1950)
“Man is nostalgia and the search for communion. That’s why whenever man feels his own presence it feels like the absence of another, like solitude.” (via algolenguaje)
2 tags
