personanongravitas

[personanongravitas]

app-titude

One-man app development has begun. Android Studio and JDK/JRE has been downloaded, the concrete smashing of the renovation work below has given way to paint fumes, setting the tone for some delirious XML schema writing.

Today I am setting out to establish my Android Manifest, declaring the app-to-be’s components, capabilities and requirements. It will be sketchy to begin with, but there is much potential here. Fertile fertile not futile futile.

[personanongravitas]

my hound my hound

The sweetest shepherd, I grasp at that limping emasculated ball of fuzz and teeth, his twitching brows / scoping ears.

i wonder what rocky would make of a penguin

[personanongravitas]

Parenthesis

Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant to let a good day depart or still bitching about a bad one. Different currents runs through our spells of unconsciousness. Every so often I find myself catapulted out of bed with fear of time and death, panic at the approaching void; feet on the floor, head in hands, I shout a useless (and disappointingly uneloquent) 'No, no, no' as I wake. Then she has to stroke the horror away from me, like sluicing down a dog that's come barking from a dirty river.

Less often, it's her sleep that's broken by a dream, and my turn to move across her in a sweat of protectiveness. I am starkly awake, and she delivers to me through sleepy lips the cause of her outcry. 'A very large beetle', she will say, as if she wouldn't have bothered me about a smaller one; or 'The steps were slippery'; or merely (which strikes me as cryptic to the point of tautology), 'Something nasty'. Then, having repelled this damn toad, this handful of gutter-muck from her system, she sighs and returns to a purged sleep. I lie awake, clutching a slimy amphibian, shifting a handful of sodden detritus from hand to hand, alarmed and admiring.  

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

[personanongravitas]

63. avadhû, mâyâ tajî na jây Tell me, Brother, how can I renounce Maya? When I gave up the tying of ribbons, still I tied my garment about me: When I gave up tying my garment, still I covered my body in it folds. So, when I give up passion, I see that anger remains; And when I renounce anger, greed is with me still; And when greed is vanquished, pride and vainglory remain; When the mind is detached and casts Maya away, still it clings to the letter. Kabîr says, "Listen to me, dear Sadhu! the true path is rarely found."

Songs of Kabir (writ 1440-1518)

[personanongravitas]

Eaters observe others who are similarly working their jaws. While one person’s mouth is full, his eyes can simultaneously behold a neighbor occupied with popping it in. And they don’t even laugh; even I don’t. Since arriving in Berlin, I’ve lost the habit of finding humanity laughable. At this point, by the way, I myself request another edible wonder: a plank of bread bearing a sleeping sardine upon a bedsheet of butter, so enchanting a vision that I toss the whole spectacle down my open revolving stage of a gullet. Is such a thing laughable? By no means. Well, then. What isn’t laughable in me cannot be any more so in others, since it’s our duty to esteem others more highly than ourselves no matter what, a worldview splendidly in keeping with the earnestness with which I now contemplate the abrupt demise of my sardine pallet. A few of the people near me are conversing as they eat. The earnestness with which they do so is appealing. As long as you’re undertaking to do something, you might as well set about it matter-of-factly and with dignity. Dignity and self-confidence have a comforting effect, at least on me they do, and this is why I so like standing around in one of our local Aschingers where people drink, eat, talk, and think all at the same time. How many business ventures were dreamed up here? And best of all: You can remain standing here for hours on end, no one minds, and not one of all the people coming and going will give it a second thought. Anyone who takes pleasure in modesty will get on well here, he can live, no one’s stopping him. Anyone who does not insist on particularly heartfelt shows of warmth can still have a heart here, he is allowed that much. 1907

Robert Walser, transl. Susan Bernofsky. NYRB Blog

[personanongravitas]

Jack and the Facebookstalk:   A tale of warning and voyeurism

[personanongravitas]

Garamond masala: serifs for the subcontinent?

[personanongravitas]

More Brighton Rock

Let Papists treat death with flippancy: life wasn't so important perhaps to them as what came after: but to her death was the end of everything. At one with the One - it didn't mean a thing beside a glass of Guiness on a sunny day.

[personanongravitas]

(to be) tuberculous i.e. what the uk border agency still suspects of non-immigrant and immigrant south asians, perhaps rightfully. tuberculoused = doused with TB ? louse with TB? verminous in any case

[personanongravitas]

If only I looked like this, when der Hund and I hang out

[personanongravitas]

He was small with a neat round belly; he wore a grey double-breasted waistcoat, and his eyes gleamed like raisins. His hair was thin and grey. The little bitches on the settee stopped talking as he passed and concentrated. He clinked very gently as he moved, it was the only sound.

Brighton Rock, Graham Greene

[personanongravitas]

In a letter (to Goethe I think) Schiller writes of a “poetic mood”. I think I know what he means, I believe I am familiar with it myself. It is a mood of receptivity to nature in which one’s thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself. But it is strange that Schiller did not produce anything better (or so it seems to me) and so I am not entirely convinced that what I produce in such a mood is really worth anything.

crit from witt, culture and value

[personanongravitas]

karl johnson as ludwig w, derek jarman's wittgenstein (1989)

[personanongravitas]

Ludwig W, Tractatus

[personanongravitas]

I shall certainly encourage him. Perhaps he will do great things … I love him and feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve

Russell, within a year of meeting Ludwig W