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Jean Paul: Schulmeisterlein Wutz
What wonders hide within your letters, what adventures within your words, mysterious Schoolmaster Wutz! Pompous and mocked you make your entrance: a rustic pedant with eyes on the greater world, re-imagining the wisdom of ages at the kitchen table. The volumes in your library bind fancied epics, elaborated rumours of ideas and histories—a matchstick model of the soul! Since that day when I was...
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Opportunity Cost
I often go to an exhibition only to end up being far more impressed by the gallery than by the exhibition itself. There are very few works of art that can improve on the empty gallery. That perfectly empty space in the city, with its audacious dimensions. Sometimes a gallery has sufficient space and surplus whiteness so as to endow any art piece with an urgent grandeur. This was the case with the original Saatchi Gallery in London, for instance. But at other times, I have felt that some artist’s heavyhanded efforts are ruining my enjoyment of a sublimely plastered wall.
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Packing My Library
I am packing my library. Tomorrow morning, these books will be packed inside ten cardboard boxes, loaded onto a van, and shipped to another country. Were it not for these several hundred books, the question of moving would be trivial: a couple of suitcases would carry all my clothes, and everything else I possess would happily fit into a large box. The rest—all the other things that are...
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Writers and their Professions
The compulsion to write is a mysterious one. After all, there’s something suspect, something unattractive and childish about wanting to impose your words on others, lashing your every passing sensation to the alphabet. The invitation to read one’s particular arrangement of words, therefore, always comes circumscribed, with excessively humble titles and self-lacerating prefaces...
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Jean Paul: Schulmeisterlein Wutz
What wonders hide within your letters, what adventures within your words, mysterious Schoolmaster Wutz! Pompous and mocked you make your entrance: a rustic pedant with eyes on the greater world, re-imagining the wisdom of ages at the kitchen table. The volumes in your library bind fancied epics, elaborated rumours of ideas and histories—a matchstick model of the soul! Since that day when I was...
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Text 214
It is strange to be reminded now just how noisy was the writing process for most of the 20th Century. There was no question what impact your text had on the world—you could hear it. Each letter was hammered into the paper with a thud, each line celebrated by a little bell and a prolonged crunch as the carriage spring was reloaded. The decades rolled by and the reception of typed letters grew ever more matter-of-fact, the bell was silenced, the carriage moved electrically...
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Copyleft and Right
When a public gallery announces that it has been bequeathed the works of a recently deceased artist, the tone is always one of gratitude and praise for the artist’s generosity. Museums and universities accept the papers of retired statesmen and writers with equal gratitude. Such donations, I’m sure, are transacted across several meetings and much legal negotiation. But surely these organisations must receive...