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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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The Reading Machine
At one point in the distant future, long after our sun has faded and its planets have passed, Pantography will produce the text, “in a village in la mancha, the name of which i cannot quite recalk”. One hour later, right on schedule, it will come out with a line that is indistinguishable from the opening words of the Penguin edition. If, upon seeing it, you were to hurry off to your local Waterstone’s, you would get nothing new from it other than a few capital letters.
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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...