Dan Abbe

I'm a writer focusing on photography.

I also do web development.

I live near Araiyakushimae, Tokyo, Japan.

dan@mcvmcv.net
(+81) 080 4408 2720

Work

2011— Freelance writer

Online

Street Level Japan: my own blog about photography
American Photo Magazine
Tokyo Art Beat
LPV Magazine (NYC): "Letter from Tokyo" column
Japan Exposures (Tokyo): 1 2 3

Speaking events

Marebito School lecture series, "Hello World!: 写真家のための世界と繋がるネットワーク術". Course for photographers, given in Japanese, with the aim of showing how to connect to foreign audiences using the internet. July—September 2011.
Marebito School Talk, "MOTTAI-NAI! あなたの写真は、世界でもっとモテるはず！." June 25, 2011.

Client work

Akaaka
Tosei-sha

2009—2011 Junior High School English Teacher, Tokyo
Taught in public schools in Tokyo's shitamachi area
Ate many delicious school lunches
Played some baseball

2006—2009 Google Book Search, California
Wrote & edited corporate blog posts

2006 BA in Comparative Literature, Northwestern University
Honors thesis "Reading and Citation in Borges and Benjamin" won top departmental award

1984 Born in San Francisco, California

Links

Social whatever

Flickr
Tumblr
Twitter

Blogz

Eyecurious
LPV Magazine
That might be it

Photographers

Andrew Acacio
Andrew Thorn
Aya Fujioka
Aya Takada
Ed Panar
Daisuke Yokota
Emi Fukuyama
Hiroshi Takizawa
Kazuyoshi Usui
Koji Takiguchi
Koyuki Tayama
John Sypal
Mark King
Mårten Lange
Michael Jang
Patrick Tsai
Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs
ROLLS TOHOKU
Ryosuke Iwamoto
Shinya Arimoto
Tatsuya Shimohira Yuhki Touyama

Personal photography

Fervor de Tokio
strange.rs

MCVMCV??

       First: The Library exists ab aeterno. Of this truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, no reasonable mind can be in doubt. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurges; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these rude, trembling symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, blacker than black, inimitably symmetrical.

       Second: The number of orthographical symbols is twenty-five. This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and satisfactorily resolve the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. One, which my father saw in a hexagon of circuit fifteen ninety-four, was made up of the letters MCV perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time your pyramids. It's clear: for one reasonable line or straightforward statement there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal messes and incoherencies. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm... They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.)

       For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to past or remote languages. It's true that the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a language far different from the one we now speak; it's true that a few miles to the right the language is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it's incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of inalterable M C V cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the next, and that the value of MCV in the third line of page 71 was not the one the same series may have in another position on another page, but this vague thesis did not prosper. Others thought of cryptographs; this conjecture has been accepted universally, although not in the sense in which its inventors formulated it.

Jorge Luis Borges, La biblioteca de Babel, partial translation, ©