So look for this blog to become something like Cory Doctorow’s Memex Method, a commonplace book as a public database — though I prefer to call it the Mathom-house Method. There will be more posts here, I think. But for heaven’s sake if you don’t like, or don’t agree with, or otherwise disapprove of something I quote, don’t send me an email about it.

Benjamin's travelogue is a product of his imagination, influenced by biblical authority and rumors, rather than actual geographical knowledge.

personal experience and is likely an insertion made by him or a later editor.

rather a way to link places along a real but somewhat abstracted route.

travel times in the Sefer masa'ot may be unrealistic.

medieval understanding of travel writing.

partiality for southern French communities,

Book of Travels as a literary work rather than a positivist account,

“A tool to think with, not a tool to publish with” — this seems to me essential. I feel that I spend a lot of time trying to think with tools meant for publishing.

circulation is the lifeblood of reading.

This book is not an attempt to convince people that Jesus would prefer his followers not to use lethal force, even for a good cause. Instead, in many of the chapters that follow, I aim to give Christians a taste of what they’re buying when they affirm the legitimacy of even a little bit of lethal force, even in the most reasonable of cases. They want a Christ that allows them to kill, so I’m giving them especially that, especially when they think they’re affirming something else. 

“Culture catechizes,” Alan Jacobs, a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University, told me. Culture teaches us what matters and what views we should take about what matters. Our current political culture, Jacobs argued, has multiple technologies and platforms for catechizing—television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts among them. People who want to be connected to their political tribe—the people they think are like them, the people they think are on their side—subject themselves to its catechesis all day long, every single day, hour after hour after hour.

The criticism of Celtis turns against the entire tradition of 15th century art of memory, but particularly against the teachings of Jacobus Publicius,11 whose Oratoriae artis epito-mata he had excerpted both in his summary of the Ciceronian rhetoric and the treatise on letter writing.