in a cursory mode

sometimes i think i’m capable of generating original thought, but then… inevitably i re-read something, which i first read in some time out of mind and … well, i invariably find thoughts which i’ve only just had and fooled myself into believing where novel. ah well…
with that in mind, here’s something on the serial comma, via wikipedia. i just really liked the example sentence :

Ambiguity
Resolving ambiguity

Use of the serial comma can sometimes remove ambiguity. Consider an apocryphal book dedication:

To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

There is ambiguity about the writer’s parentage, because Ayn Rand and God can be read as in apposition to my parents, leading the reader to believe that the writer refers to Ayn Rand and God as his or her parents. A comma before “and” removes the ambiguity:

To my parents, Ayn Rand, and God.

HA! I like the idea of the child of God and Ayn Rand dedicating a book to Them! HA. Any child of Ayn Rand would be as ungrateful as they were militantly independent and delusionaly self-made…that being said, we know the son of God was rumored to be far more laudatory and grounded, so who really knows. (I encourage you to look at the additional examples on the serial comma page, they’re worth a browse & giggle.) Regardless, maybe i can’t really generate new atomic thoughts, as it were, just novel juxtapositions of my cultural atoms - and with that, a big hurrah to synthesis! of course, this same spirit was relayed, far more melodically, in this excerpt from within a buddy grove:

But let us bear in mind, rather, the countless writers who, dissatisfied with the passage they have just written, read some eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or evoke the spirit of some great artist whose equal they aspire to be, humming to themselves, for instance, a phrase of Beethoven the melancholy of which they compare with what they have been trying to express in their prose, and become so imbued with this idea of genius that they add it to their own productions when they return to them, no longer see them in the light in which they appeared at first, and, hazarding an act of faith in the value of their work, say to themselves: “After all!” without taking into account that, into the total which determines their ultimate satisfaction, they have introduced the memory of marvellous pages of Chateaubriand which they assimilate to their own but which, after all, they did not write; let us bear in mind the numberless men who believe in the love of a mistress who has done nothing but betray them; all those, too, who are sustained by the alternative hopes, on the one hand of an incomprehensible survival after death, when they think, inconsolable husbands, of the wives whom they have lost but have not ceased to love, or, artists, of the posthumous glory which they may thus enjoy, and on the other of a reassuring void, when their thoughts turn to the misdeeds that otherwise they must expiate after their death; let us bear in mind also the travelers who come home enraptured by the over-all splendour of a journey from which day by day they experienced nothing but tedium; and let us then declare whether, in the communal life that is led by our ideas in the enclosure of our minds, there is a single one of those that makes us most happy which has not first sought, like a real parasite, and won from an alien but neighbouring idea the greater part of the strength that it originally lacked.

Which, upon recently talking about that section with Chad, I relayed that the last (bold) portion really strikes me as a blueprint for the meme idea of Dawkins (the idea-as-gene metaphor which has given rise to all those decorous new viral marketing metaphors…) and, i asked, in a tone borrowed disasterously from the section :

do you think it was intellectually dishonest of richard dawkins not to cite proust when he went on his whole meme shpeel? or, shall we bear in mind the popularizer who, when confronted with the task of rendering the mundane profound, shed’s the monk’s robes of scientific discipline in favor of the poetic flourish of borrowed prose, and think, that he struggles, too, in the throws of reselling ideas only half his own.

how heavily cross-referenced is heaven’s library?

- upon a burning stove.

to which Chad replied that he hadn’t gotten any of that out of his reading of the passage, and… well, which really just led me to wonder - maybe it’s the ideas we read into the thing as much as the thing itself. which is the idea behind interpretable art, in general. not that i’m supporting the postmodern/buddhist/pseudo-scientific route here - i won’t assert that reality is what we read into it.

 ps I do really wonder about the cross-references which exist in an ideal library.  The networked library is certainly bringing us asymptotically closer.