Scholien
Marginal notes on a text that does not exist.
A scholion is a note in the margin of a text. That is what the scholars of Alexandria called their annotations to Homer, and philology still uses the word for the glosses along the edges of old manuscripts. The Colombian Nicolás Gómez Dávila gave his aphorisms the title «Escolios a un texto implícito»: scholia on a text that is merely implied. The name of this series goes back to him.
The first issue appeared in January 2009 in Vienna, printed and sent by post. Its preface explained the experiment:
The text I am working on does not exist. Perhaps it was lost. Probably it never existed. It is a context to which I add my scholia. May it gradually emerge from the fragments.
The booklets were meant as prompts for the coat pocket: free of filler and advertising, attached to no digital drip, not driven along by the news of the day. For more than a decade the Scholien reached their readers this way, month after month, the issues later collected in slipcases. Thoughts, questions, observations, encounters, quotations and recommendations found room in them, and with them a conversation slower than any forum.
Digital only
The printed series is complete. Since then the Scholien have appeared exclusively in digital form, as a monthly letter: short glosses, each a single insight in a few sentences, drawn from teaching, reading and entrepreneurial experience, with a pointer to the source. The letter is free, yet valuable, and it can be cancelled with every issue.
Some things cannot be said in five sentences. So from time to time longer essays join the glosses and appear here on scholarium.at: on Zug as a trading house for the world, on Luxembourg as a trading house without merchants, on money that is made for strangers. The letter points to every new essay.
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Scholien. Monthly marginal notes by Rahim Taghizadegan on the present, written in the mode of the Viennese school. Free, yet valuable.
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Ripened from two decades of Scholien: the book Win-Win.