Two selfies & one rerun

This entry is split in two parts: the 1st contains a pair of blurry self-shots that were taken with a webcam, and the 2nd is just a rerun.

1. Selfies

I found a package of movies in my mailbox. My first thought was to go watch them, so I raced up the stairs of my apartment. After clearing the last step, I noticed an object on the floor – it was my laptop. My laptop was on the floor because I had left it there when I last finished abusing it. So I used its webcam to snap a couple pictures of me holding my new package of movies. I had to crouch in order to fit in the shot, because, as I explained, my laptop had earlier been thrown down onto the floor.

The rest of this entry is just a copy of an older post that I shared long ago on The Other Network. I stumbled on it today and decided to move it from there to here, for no reason. It consists of a number of excerpts from the books that I'd been reading. I thought that it might be amusing to look at the fragments out of context like this, one after another. I'll give their sources at the end.

2. Rerun

. . . everywhere at once and nowhere in particular.

A smoker blowing on a tinder to kindle it.

Leiris found him looking “slumped, and as though speaking from a great distance.”

The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.

In philosophy we should not seek to explain but only to describe (‘explaining’ amounts to constructing further theories)

The furniture then gives way to animals of the same size who look on me as a brother

. . . how is reality to be
rendered: how is 4,444 to be made 444 and 44 and 4 and 1: I
have that shaky feeling I’ve just said something I don’t trust

Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests

Upon awaking one morning I pulled the cord which opened the curtains and noticed that my very intelligent poodle stood there in amazement, looking up and to the side for the cause of the phenomenon.

Here is my husband—bad luck to him—and I don’t know what his coming back means, for he never returns at this hour.

If the soul comes to be in a state of acquaintance and flees the baptism of the church and the name of Sabaoth, who gave the law, it ascends to each heaven in turn, gives a speech of defense before each authority, and thus rises up to the superior mother and the parent of the entirety, whence indeed it descended into this world.

Who’s fleecing who, Sokrates? That’s what I’d like to know

---

Sources of rerun, in order of appearance: Ingrid Schaffner, Dear Reader, On Jane Hammond’s Collaboration with John Ashbery; Raymond Roussel, Instructions for 59 drawings; John Ashbery, Note on Raymond Roussel’s ’Documents to Serve as an Outline’’; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations; A.C. Grayling, Wittgenstein; Andre Breton, Vigilance; A.R. Ammons, Essay on Poetics; Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book; Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason; Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron; St. Epiphanius of Salamis, Against Heresies; Aristophanes, The Clouds.