“The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d’etre in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage. His ideal of producing a work consisting entirely of quotations, one that was mounted so masterfully that it could dispense with any accompanying text, may strike one as whimsical in the extreme and self-destructive to boot, but it was not… To the extent that an accompanying text by the author proved unavoidable, it was a matter of fashioning it in such a way as to preserve “the intention of such investigations,” namely, “to plumb the depths of language and thought … by drilling rather than excavating” so as not to ruin everything with explanations that seek to provide a causal or systematic connection.” – Hannah Arendt on Walter Benjamin

The brain.anomalogue.com wiki is my extended brain, a sprawling latticework of related passages from the books I’ve read over the last couple of decades. It began life in 2004 as a physical notebook, where I recorded connections I saw in my reading. In 2005, when the notebook grew to a size where finding passages took too much time, I transferred it into memos I could keep on my desktop and sync with my Palm PDA. I hacked the memo app so it could work like a wiki. But then the number of passages choked the memo app and in 2008 I had to migrate the whole mess to a proper web-based wiki, where it grew even more massive, and began to bog down that server. I’ve since migrated it to a new faster host, and re-named it brain.anomalogue.

It is thinly protected to discourage casual discoverers and legal hassles, but if you would like to explore it follow this link, or the link in the top navigation, or you can follow one of the many embedded links in the blog posts.