From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:

"To read is to risk making one's self vulnerable, to risk encountering what Wayne Booth has called 'the otherness that bites.'" —Megan O'Neill, Popular Culture (2001)

From our former outpost at Twitter:

From our former outpost at Twitter (where we sometimes drop the majestic plural or Victorian "we" so as to save a character):

"Transparency is so yesterday, and opacity so everyday, but [translucency] remains intriguingly unexplored."
—Jeff Hawkins

Previously re: translucency:

Attending a mime's birthday party

Unveiling the hidden

"I'm afraid ... the more absences there are, the more things are possible.  And so if there's an absence the size of God, then there probably isn't anything so appalling that we can count on not meeting it." —Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard (the astonishing secret history of the tragic lives of the Romantics)

One hundred years ago today, on July 3, 1913, Uncle Sam came out as a cross-dresser in LIFE magazine.

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him ... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.  Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation.  By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating." —Pearl S. Buck

You can guess where we're going with this one.  What if Alice and the Wonderland caterpillar had found romance?  Arthur's Home Magazine wondered the same thing (not really) in the same year that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published.

From our former outpost at Twitter:

It's commonly believed that the psychedelic drug LSD was first synthesized by the chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938.  However, we can confirm that LSD was first "cooked up" by one Mrs. Threadneedle in 1847.  The acronym LSD has nothing to do with her chemical compound but rather the cost of her "soothing syrup."  (L.s.d. stands for the old British monetary values of "pounds, shililngs, pence," from the Latin "librae, solidi, denarii.")

"In the long run, reality turns out to be inextinguishable, unreachable.  One can find out more and more about it, but not everything.  Even so, it's advisable to try to find out a little more, because in certain investigations surprises do occasionally occur." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (highly recommended!)

"One loves most books that produce the sensation, when opened for the first time, that they've always been there." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque

"The best thing to do is to travel and to lose all theories, lose them all." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque (highly recommended!)

"I must breathe in and breathe out, regularly, steadily, evenly, deeply. . . . In—out—in—out—in—out—that's right!  I'll manage if I go on—I'll get there if I go on." —John Cowper Powys, Porius

Here's the link to our Breathing Circle, the most popular interactive feature on this site.

Author Jeremy Edwards answers the age-old question, "to flirt or not to flirt?"  He backs it up with science and suggests wearing it as a button: "Game theory says I should flirt with you."

Why does humankind still grapple with the greatest questions?  Why can we ultimately know nothing?  And what, then, shall we occupy ourselves with?  All is revealed here:

"I have always been interested in the oddities of mankind.  At one time I read a good deal of philosophy and a good deal of science, and I learned in that way that nothing was certain.  Some people, by the pursuit of science, are impressed with the dignity of man, but I was only made conscious of his insignificance.  The greatest questions of all have been threshed out since he acquired the beginnings of civilization and he is as far from a solution as ever.  Man can know nothing, for his senses are his only means of knowledge, and they can give no certainty.  There is only one subject upon which the individual can speak with authority, and that is his own mind, but even here is surrounded with darkness.  I believe that we shall always be ignorant of the matters which it most behoves us to know, and therefore I cannot occupy myself with them.  I prefer to set them all aside, and, since knowledge is unattainable, to occupy myself only with folly." —William Somerset Maugham, The Magician

"It is characteristic of the imagination to always consider itself to be at the end of an era.  ... But the apocalyptic has always been there, in every era.  ... It exists in every civilization. ... [I]n our time the apocalyptic can only be dealt with parodically.  ... The apocalypse demands a lack of seriousness.  ... Any crisis, after all, is just a projection of our existential anxiety.  Perhaps our only privilege is to be alive and know we're all going to die together or separately. ... In the end ... the apocalyptic has a splendid fictional veneer, but it shouldn't be taken too seriously, because actually ... what it offers ... is the joyful, emphatic, and happy paradox of ... something to do in the future." —Enrique Vila-Matas, Dublinesque