About

Shelf 128 is a repository of folkworks from folks:

whose notion of spirituality is to explore normative questions about what we value, who we are, and what we should do, or
who are not fast and clever twitwits spontaneously tweeting away, or
who begin an email with an honest intention of writing a few lines to one correspondent,
yet clatter out screenfuls of unpolished goings on and on,
and then realize that several others could also serve as victim-recipients of their ramblings, or
who are victims of schooldays Latin translating speeches of Cicero,
leading to writing styles burdened with nuanced interminable chains of subjunctive clauses, or
who write as disjointed verbal collage, or
whose minds circle roundabouts, finding all exits equally attractive, and end up taking their passengers down all possible roads, or
who shamelessly quote Pascal or whoever before him coined “sorry, no time to edit for brevity”, or
who are afflicted with epilepsiless temporal lobe epilepsy, or
who suffer from bouts of leaky subclinical graphomania, or
who are empty nesters with unlimited time to embed ellipses and intra-nest tangents of ever-diminishing interest, or
who are putting off some onerous task, such as liberating garages, closets, backrooms, storage volumes,
where hoards of paper and digital invaders have colonized, or
who manifest some or all of these flawed design specs, self-grooming, in a seeming addictive manner, yet not suffering,
unaware of and unmoved by the inattention, pain or silence
of any readers who stumbled in and zoomed out.

Niall Ferguson

“… library cataloging systems are a much-underrated contribution to our civilization.”
“… it’s a fool’s errand to try to change people’s minds with 400- or 500-page volumes.”