Ah, Podría Ser Nuestro Primer Bocho, Justa Ahí, En San Miguel De Allende!

A Very Short Fact: or rather, 10 very short facts. Here are the top 10 facts you should know about atheism.

“The name [atheism] is a historical accident. It’s only because we live in a historically theistic culture, that atheists have to be defined in negation to that.”

[Atheism: A Very Short Introduction by Julian Baggini]

Like the Very Short Introductions on Facebook for more from the series.

Kurt Vonnegut’s classic lecture on the shapes of stories, now in an infographic. 

What the music says may be serious, but as a medium it should not be questioned, analysed, or taken so seriously. I think it should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself.

David Bowie (1947–2016) in Rolling Stone, 1 April 1971 (via oupacademic)

¿Qué hemos hecho...?

Night Hawk, Derrick Lin

No sé qué estoy viendo, pero me fascina.

[Es una pieza de Tommi Grönlund y Petteri Nisunen, expuesta en Berlin]

La Biblioteca Central de la UNAM

University Library (1956) Mexico City, Mexico. Architects: O´Gorman, Saavedra, Martinez de Velasco.

Los perros de Colima

Howling Dog Effigy, Jalisco, 300 BC-AD 200. 

Why were dogs so significant to the Mexica?

Dogs were associated with the god of death, Xolotl, among the Mexicas of the highlands of Mexico. Both a dog and Xolotl were thought to lead the soul to the underworld. The skinny body and white hue of the shown dog represented above may have underworld connotations, connecting it to this belief. Xolotl was also associated by the Mexica with the planet Venus as the evening star, and was portrayed with a canine head.

The dog’s special relationship with humans is highlighted by a number of Colima dog effigies wearing humanoid masks. This curious effigy type has been interpreted as a shamanic transformation image or as a reference to the modern Huichol myth of the origin of the first wife, who was transformed from a dog into a human. However, recent scholarship suggests a new explanation of these sculptures as the depiction of the animal’s tonalli, its inner essence, which is made manifest by being given human form via the mask.

The use of the human face to make reference to an object’s or animal’s inner spirit is found in the artworks of many ancient cultures of the Americas, from the Inuit of Alaska and northern Canada to peoples in Argentina and Chile. (Walters)

On the subject of the significance of dogs, and dog effigies wearing humanoid masks, check out this post from a while back of ‘examples of dogs represented in ancient Mexican art.’ The final artefact here is from Colima, and shows a dog wearing a human mask.

Courtesy of & currently located at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA, via their online collections, 2009.20.148.

The art of reading is in many ways opposed to the art of writing. Read- ing is a craft that enriches the text conceived by the author, deepening it and rendering it more complex, concentrating it to reflect the reader’s personal experience and expanding it to reach the farthest confines of the reader’s uni- verse and beyond. Writing, instead, is the art of resignation. The writer must accept the fact that the final text will be but a blurred reflection of the work conceived in the mind, less enlightening, less subtle, less poignant, less pre- cise. The imagination of a writer is all-powerful, and capable of dreaming up the most extraordinary creations in all their wishful perfection. Then comes the descent into language, and in the passage from thought to expres- sion much—very much—is lost. To this rule there are hardly any exceptions. To write a book is to resign oneself to failure, however honorable that failure might be.

Alberto Manguel 'Curiosity'