A Feast of Form III

[ by Charles Cameron — exploring recursive form as a mode of pattern recognition ]

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I was explaining what this series of posts is about to a friend the other day. I said it’s a compilation of tweets that in some way reflect a “serpent bites its own tail” form, which some people seem to be particularly attuned to, and which almost always exposes some point of humor, irony, paradox or discovery that’s worth paying attention to. And then I read my friend fifteen or twenty examples from the last post in the series straight through — and taken neat, one right after another, they’re hilarious.

Here’s a sampler:

CONFIRMED: Nothing coming out of Syria is confirmed.

News photographer .. decided to put his camera aside and walk into the photo he would have clicked.

Please donate to my Kickstarter to help fund my search for a great idea for a Kickstarter.

Why coups beget coups By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson | Foreign Policy

For $3,200 I can pay for open access to my 5,000 word essay on open data.

The Business of America is Spying on America

The conference call that wasn’t. How’s that for responsible reporting that isn’t?

Poitras also finds herself in a strange, looking-glass dynamic, because she cannot avoid being a character in her own film

This is what we’ve come to: I am ordering packing tape from Amazon so I can seal up a box I need to return to Amazon.

The BBC says anyone who accuses it of bias – is biased

Writing your name with a marker on your arm so that if you are killed your body can be identified.

Important personal details about Junipero Serra: he loved chocolate and self-flagellation.

Decapitated snake bites itself (warning: it’s kinda creepy)

The joke of the century: Al Jazeera accuses the Copts of burning their own churches! Talk about irresponsible reporting, unbelievable!

Whoops! Surf City Riot Suspect Arrested After “Liking” His Own Photo On Police Facebook Page

Scientists Unlock Self-Fertilizing Crops

There’s real tragedy there, and comedy aplenty — and also simplicity, beauty:

All that is visible rests on the

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) August 16, 2013

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In one of my academic byways, I came across this parenthesis, which is now my favorite parenthesis of all time. It’s from a scholarly discussion of an early “magical” treatise, the Picatrix, which is of interest among other things because it contains the earliest known description of the experimental method in science:

(with the parenthesis that speech is a kind of magic)

That’s from a summary of the Gayat al-Hakim or Picatrix, from Martin Plessner’s introduction to “Picatrix” Das Ziel des Weisen von Pseudo-Magriti. And it’s almost a Matrioshka parenthesis…

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I’ll be continuing to collect these serpent-eats-tail tweets in the comments section here, but will probably try to hold off on individual examples until I have a bunch to post at once, to avoid constantly occupying the list of recent comments when I run across these things quite regularly…

First cluster coming right up…