Fin Keegan

Working on Production-to-Consumption Ratio

The Culture Singularity

“We’re close to a world where culture automatically and magically creates infinitely more culture.”
-Mike Rugnetta, “Are Memes & Internet Culture Creating a Singularity?”, PBS Ideas Channel, 22 Aug 2012: URL

The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.

—

Andrew Carnegie, “The Gospel of Wealth”

Monday First Sentences | Every Monday, we offer the opening sentences of a Penguin Classic to start the week.

(via classicpenguin)

(via lareviewofbooks)

I happen to believe that the filter process in apps like Instagram and now increasingly pervasive across digital photography is a semi-conscious process of legitimisation in time, engraining disposable images of the moment with a patina of memory and experience, in order to save and justify them.

—James Bridle, June 2012: booktwo.org

Andy Warhol’s words to Lou Reed…

He said, “How many songs did you write?”
I’d written zero, I’d lied and said, “Ten.”
“You won’t be young forever
You should have written fifteen”
It’s work, the most important thing is work
It’s work, the most important thing is work

The Human Homunculus

via Rourke, this image is a Somatotopic representation of the human homunculus or Cortical Homunculus.

The cortical homunculus is a visual representation of the concept of “the body within the brain” that one’s hand or face exists as much as a series of nerve structures or a “neuron concept” as it does a physical form.

-Wikipedia: Cortical homunculus

If you want to stay hale and healthy,stop worrying about trifles and do not allow anger to take hold of you. Do not drink too much wine, and do not overeat. Have a light lunch and skip the afternoon nap. Have a pee before your bladder gets too distended and do not strain too hard when at stool. If there are no doctors around, do not worry: the best doctors are a happy mind, the absence of stress, and moderation.

—Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum (c1300)

The Line of Propriety

It is thanks to Joyce that we have a much clearer idea, not only of what went on in people’s inner lives in Dublin in 1904 but in urbanized life everywhere: these men and women’s secret trials and triumphs, their uncensored desires and fears, were hidden from view before brave artists such as Joyce (and Tolstoy and Flaubert before him) broke Victorian taboos and demolished the line of propriety.

-Fin Keegan, Dubliner: The Story of James Joyce amzn.to/KZA1iy