R & D

“The sunset colours of a civilisation are the most lovely”
John Strachey

“In today’s cynicism, the disavowal of knowledge is not embodied in a fetish object – things are bought to a self-referential extreme so that the fetish enables us to disavow knowledge itself. “Knowledge” functions as an obstacle which prevents … seriously accepting and assuming knowledge itself… You accept knowledge precisely in order to neutralize it.”

Slavoj Zizek, Power, Betrayal and Brexit (53.00 approx)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xtfe4tfOoDM

Chief Librarians

1852–1858
Edward Edwards

1858–1864
Robert Wilson Smiles

1864–1879
Andrea Crestadoro

1879–1920
Charles William Suttan

I read the list of librarians, sitting
next to the old
Manchester Library fireplace, it reminded me
of a man for whom everything
in this world
more or less resembles
dust

it is always harder and
harder
to swallow the ashes of my words
without pain

Sigitas Parulskis, (The Vilnius Review, 2010)

“Inundated by perspectives, by lateral vistas of information that stretch endlessly in every direction, we no longer accept the possibility of assembling a complete picture… We are experiencing in our time a loss of depth – a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth.”

Sven Bikerts “The Gutenburg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age” (1994)

“Once upon a time, stories grew out of the fabric of our spirit. We were one with them. Along came information: present-bound, unambiguous, surface. This is why information is a menace to storytelling, observes Walter Benjamin, and why storytelling is coming to an end.”
Maggie Jackson “Distraction – The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age” (2009)