“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” - Walter Benjamin (from Our Kingdom)

Carlsberg don't do blog posts...

(via The Dossing Times).

I, for one, welcome our new snowclones database

The Snowclones Database

Considered harmful

Language Log traces the history of the Considered harmful snowclone.

Lost for words

I'm currently reading Master and Commander and trying not to get lost in the fog of naval jargon. Today I found my way to this post on Lost for words which links to this wonderful (and rather daunting) diagram of an 18th century warship:

The Sunlight on the Garden

The Sunlight on the Garden by Louis MacNeice.

TwitterLit

The mystery of Inis Meáin

James Joyce and Marcel Proust vs languagehat

(A Night At the Majestic remix).

Beckett's Actors

Colm Toibin on Beckett's Actors.

April is the cruellest month

April is the cruellest month, breeding  
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  
Memory and desire, stirring  
Dull roots with spring rain.

Recording of the Old Possum himself reading The Waste Land

Game Over

Pole Position never looked this good on the 800XL.
(via Joystiq).

To be sure to be sure

A suffusion of blue.

From XKCD (via Wadler's Blog).

Bomb #20 learns a little phenomenology

In Land of Lexicons, Having the Last Word

In Land of Lexicons, Having the Last Word