In Following the Equator, this quote is attributed to the Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar. Those quote serves in part as a promotional tool for Mark Twain’s previous novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, published in 1894.

Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar — MT came back to Pudd’nhead and his homespun ironies a few years later, when he used more of these maxims as chapter epigraphs in Following the Equator (1897). He came back to Pudd’nhead in this way in part, obviously, because he hoped to continue to promote the novel, and in part because of the popular attention the first batch of Pudd’nhead’s sayings had received. But whatever boundary had separated Sam Clemens’ experience from Pudd’nhead’s voice is even more permeable now: it is harder than ever to attribute what Wilson says in these “new” aphorisms with his character as it is developed in the novel. So it makes sense to think of the “Pudd’nhead” role as another of the disguises (like “Mark Twain” itself) Clemens found useful as a rhetorical resource. (Mark Twain in His Time)

The whole “new” Wilson’s calendar is available over at the Mark Twain in His Time website.

The above quote can be find D.T. Max short essay “The Unfinished. David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest.”” which was published in The New Yorker, March 9, 2009.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12, 2008.

The excerpt above was translated from French by Richard Howard and published in the latest edition of The New Yorker (September 13, 2010, p. 27).

Here’s the original French version:

―Qu’est-ce qu’un philosophe?
―Voilà une question anachronique, peut-être. Mais j’y ferai une réponse moderne. Jadis l’on disait : c’est un homme qui s’étonne; aujourd’hui, je dirai, empruntant ce mot à Georges Bataille : c’est quelqu’un qui a peur. (L’entretien infini, éd. Gallimard, Paris, p. 70)

An electronic version of this English translation can be found over at Radical eBook Archive (along with many others).

An excerpt from this book was published in Wired magazine back in May:

There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. (Wired: “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains” by Nicholas Carr, May 24th, 2010)

About Nicholas Carr:

Nicholas Carr writes on the social, economic, and business implications of technology. He is the author of the 2008 Wall Street Journal bestseller The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, which is “widely considered to be the most influential book so far on the cloud computing movement,” according the Christian Science Monitor. His earlier book, Does IT Matter?, published in 2004, “lays out the simple truths of the economics of information technology in a lucid way, with cogent examples and clear analysis,” said the New York Times. He is working on a new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which will be published in 2010. Carr’s books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. (Bio)

Three things: 1) It’s yet another good reason to try and differentiate between information and knowledge (one could say that information is to knowledge what grapes are to wine : its raw material); 2) It would be a mistake to think that gadgets or the Internet are changing our brain configuration. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s an incomplete statement. What then, should one ask, caused the gadgets to change? What caused the Internet? 3) The form of this post can be understand as an illustration of what the content of the post is about.

First published in Leipzig in 1845. The English edition (authorised by Engels) was published in 1887 in New York and in London in 1891. Source: Panther Edition, 1969, from text provided by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow. Transcribed by Tim Delaney in 1998. (more)

A similar (not identical) argument motivates various “murder by proxy” theories regarding mass murders. See for example Going Postal by Mark Ames (2005) and the documentary Murder by Proxy. How America Went Postal.

About Supervert.com :

If he were alive today, would the Marquis de Sade have a web site? (120 Days of Sodom, ancestor of the sex blog.) Would Charles Baudelaire employ venture capital for a sinister new internet startup, Fleurs du Mal Inc? Would Arthur Rimbaud use information technology to disorder the senses? Would any of them, were they alive today, find some way to advance literature by means of artificial intelligence?

Supervert is what an author can be when amplified by technology. Creator of books, web sites, and CD-ROMs, Supervert stands at the intersection of literature, technology, and perhaps also abnormal psychology — for in all its endeavors, Supervert utilizes the techniques of vanguard aesthetics to research the pathology of novel perversions. A sort of deviant Bauhaus, Supervert strives to create new experiences through the synthesis of art, technology, pornography, and philosophy. (more)

Reblogging is fast and effortless. If the author of a Tumblr blog (or any other blog for that matter) doesn’t take the time to track down the original source of the quote or picture he’s interested in, it will get lost in the reblogging process (for example, try to find the original artist of a picture published on ffffound!). There’s a reason why Skandalon release only two posts a day : providing adequate references can be a time consuming process. But without them, this archive won’t be a proper archive. And I’m not saying that everyone should do this. It’s a personal choice. But then again, for it to be a choice, one would have to take the time to think about it : do I want to know who’s behind this nice illustration? Do I want to spend time to look into it? Do I need the reference? What could I gain from it? And so on.