Category: chronicle

Languages with high levels of heterography, the discrepency between how words are spelled and how they are pronounced, suffer the most when literacy in their constituancies starts to decline. Heterography survives on high doses of book-based education and linguistic policing. In the absence of any formal pressures towards the norm, a word like ‘enough’ would … Continue reading Easier or better

Learning is a universal human project. Whether orally or through writing, we are all learning all the time, even when we don’t think much about learning. But while every human being, to survive, has had to learn, only a few of us have stopped to think about learning. Learning how to learn may be harder … Continue reading Meta-learning

The world is full of books. That is to say, full of copies. Whether printed or made by hand, what sustains a book culture is not the original books, the archetypes, the autographs, but their multiple copies, and an autograph’s success is measured not by any intrinsic value, but by its ability to produce copies. … Continue reading Autographs

Words may have been born free, but they are everywhere in chains, subject to the rules of language. They don’t float around in nondescript clouds. They are tied to speech acts, shackled in links of meaning, struggling to live independently, fighting against referentiality, aspiring to freedom, but never quite getting it. And most of all, … Continue reading All words are not equal

To err is human. But some are more human than others. Especially scribes. Writing in the age of scribes and copyists saw the proliferation of textual errors. Nowadays, we are used to introducing mistakes into a text only at the authorial and editorial stage. The printer doesn’t err, it simply reproduces the errors which have … Continue reading A slip of the pen

Fewer and fewer things are today made by hand. In fact, we celebrate handmade products, whether clothing or food, as high-quality goods, and we are willing to pay a high premium to acquire them. The mechanisation of all things keeps accelerating. The retreat of the body from production means that all activity is being focused … Continue reading Hands and bodies

The greatest plagiariser in history has been History itself. The universe may be endless but it is experiencing a creative crisis. Unable to write a new chapter down, it rehashes bits and bobs that weren’t great to begin with. Some of us have had an intuition of the great Recycling. It used to go by … Continue reading Plagiarism

I am an error introduced by a tired scribe copying an old manuscript. I was born one evening when the candle was flickering and the wind blew the shutters of the dusty workshop, startling the old man. I was so close to being aborted, had it not been for the man’s hunger and failing eyesight. … Continue reading An error

The most divisive coexistence in literature is that between authors, translators and their readers. Each of the three has her own dilemma. The author is only an author in relation to the translator, who in this configuration is the author’s only reader. The translator is torn between being a transformer and an author herself, open … Continue reading The unholy trinity of translations

Forget the loci amoeni of the classical world. They don’t make sense anymore, unless they power the loci communes of the digital world. The pastoral meadow by the river, the open woodland, are there to be instagrammed, trapped in selfie narco-cissism, colonised by our lost sense of incontrollability and awe of the world. Enter the … Continue reading Online landscapes