Over the past 15 years, I have attended dozens of right-wing conferences and events, even in the Trump White House, and always as a credentialed reporter. This time, instead of being treated like the enemy, I was briefly embraced as part of the tribe, and it became clear how seductive this could be for some people. I saw up close how people felt liberated to be their worst deplorable selves in what they believed was a safe space, surrounded by supportive, like-minded enablers.
Source: Being Denied a Press Pass at CPAC Was the Best Way to Cover the Conference [archive]
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Daily(ish) poem → 00314 ◊ That Dark Other Mountain ◊ Robert Francis
That Dark Other Mountain
My father could go down a mountain faster than I
Though I was first one up.
Legs braced or with quick steps he slid the gravel slopes
Where I picked cautious footholds.
Black, Iron, Eagle, Doublehead, Chocorua,
Wildcat and Carter Dome—
He beat me down them all. And that last other mountain.
And that dark other mountain.
—Robert Francis
—found in The Sound I Listened For (1944)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00054 ¶ from The Lathe of Heaven ¶ Ursula K. Le Guin
…With a sense of play acting, she proceeded with the hypnotist’s spiel. He went under almost at once. She couldn’t believe it, and tested him. “You can’t lift your left hand,” she said, “you’re trying, but it’s too heavy, it won’t come. … Now it’s light again, you can lift it. There … well. In a minute now you’re going to fall asleep. You’ll dream some, but they’ll just be regular ordinary dreams like everybody has, not special ones, not—not effective ones. All except one. You’ll have one effective dream. In it—“ She halted. All of a sudden she was scared; a cold qualm took her. What was she doing? This was no play, no game, nothing for a fool to meddle in. He was in her power: and his power was incalculable. What unimaginable responsibility had she undertaken?
A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
—found in The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
Finished reading: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells 📚
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Daily(ish) poem → 00313 ◊ from The Poems of Sappho ◊ Sappho
At the end of the bough–its uttermost end,
Missed by the harvesters, ripens the apple,
Nay, not overlooked, but far out of their reach,
So with all best things.
—Sappho (c630-c570 BC; translated by Edwin Marion Cox)
—from The Poems of Sappho (1925)
[Note: the “sweetapple” referred to in the transliterated version of this fragment was likely the result of grafting an apple and a quince]
Finished reading: If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio 📚
Finished reading: A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont 📚
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Daily(ish) poem → 00312 ◊ Future Tense ◊ Charles Wright
Future Tense
All things in the end are bittersweet—
An empty gaze, a little way station just beyond silence.
If you can’t delight in the everyday,
you have no future here.
And if you can, no future either.
And time, black dog, will sniff you out,
and lick your lean cheeks,
And lie down beside you—warm, real close—and will not move.
—Charles Wright
—found in Sestets (2009)
Lawrence on what they don’t tell you about the Dump Biden ‘fantasy’
Pundits suggest replacing President Biden as the Democratic nominee because they don’t understand the job of the presidency or how conventions work. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell gives a history lesson in governing in the age of television.
Possibly useful @pratik
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Daily(ish) poem → 00311 ◊ My Childhood ◊ Matthew Zapruder
My Childhood
the orange ball arcs perfectly into the orange hoop
making a sound like a drawer closing
you will never get to hold that
I am here and nothing terrible will ever happen
across the street the giant white house full of kids
turns the pages of an endless book
the mother comes home and finds the child animal sleeping
I left my notebook beside the bed
the father came home and sat and quietly talked
one square of light on the wall waiting patiently
I will learn my multiplication tables
while the woman in the old photograph looks in a different direction
—Matthew Zapruder
—found in Sun Bear (2014)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00053 ¶ from "The Collapse of Materialism" ¶ G. K. Chesterton
Some little time ago Dr. David Forsyth delivered to the Section of Psychiatry (Royal Society of Medicine) an address which was certainly a psychological curiosity; of considerable interest to psychologists, pathologists, alienists and all other students of the mental breakdown in the modern world. It was a perfect and compact illustration of the very common combination of a superiority complex with arrested development, and inhibitions on almost all forms of intelligent curiosity. But I mention it here, not because of its narrowness, but of its direct negation of all that is really new in scientific discovery. It is no news to us that a materialist can be bigoted; but we do not always come upon so startling an example of his being antiquated.
It is not worth while to take any particular notice of all the diseased stuff about sadism and masochism being the sources of religion. We may note in passing, with a rather dreary amusement, that this sort of writer can never sustain a connected train of thought; and that he gets even these dismal technical terms hopelessly entangled; for he declares that Islam stands for sadism and Christendom for masochism, having just argued that the Christian persecution of heretics was typically sadistic. But all this judgment of great human events, good or bad, in terms of some obscure streak of lunacy, is itself an amusement for lunatics. It is exactly as if a man were to argue: “There is a special sort of madman who thinks he is made of glass; I will call this disease Vitreosity; and I will then show that anybody anywhere, who for any reason had anything to do with glass was a victim of vitreosity. The desert merchants who were said to have invented glass, the medieval craftsmen who so successfully coloured glass, the early astronomers who first fitted telescopes with lenses of glass, all showed Vitreosity in various stages of that disease; it is akin to subconscious libido because Peeping Tom looked through a window, which may have been made of glass; it is the root impulse of alcoholism, because people drink out of glasses; and Prince Albert and Queen Victoria were obviously stricken with raving and uncontrolled Vitreosity; because they built the Crystal Palace.” The slight defect in this theory (which is quite as scientific as Dr. Forsyth’s) is that in order to theorise, it is sometimes useful to think. It is obvious that all these people had a thousand other reasons for doing all they did, besides being mad on glass; and it is equally obvious that the great religions, true or false, had a thousand reasons for doing all they did, without being mad on masochism or sadism.
—G. K. Chesterton
—from “My Six Conversions V: The Collapse of Materialism”
—found in The Well and the Shallows (1935)
I wonder if ChatGPT 4.5 Turbo was supposed to be ChatGPT 5 but the entire approach is plateauing. That might actually be good given the AI panic in some circles (and I don’t mean about the existential threat), though I personally think it’s sad. As is a lot of the discourse about AI and art already.
I need to reconsider my podcast listening habits the same way I did my social media use. Too many news and news-adjacent pods pouring into my earholes.
I taught courses on social software and media, web presence and culture, etc., for years. And I maintained (and periodically destroyed) a complex web of different sites and services for many years. Pictures here. Short posts there. A big topic in another place. A wiki for this and another for that. You get the idea.
And my penchant for order carried itself down to a lot of hand-wringing about categories vs tags, nesting and hierarchies, etc.
But I look back now and almost all of that was wasted time and energy. Not just intrinsically, but also because it provided a convenient procrastination station, a place for me to spend a lot of time preparing and planning for work instead of creating those works.
What I wish almost every individual making web stuff would do is: choose a web bucket that provides an RSS feed and put everything there. If it makes sense, perhaps another bucket or two for specific kinds of media, or masses of media, such as a place for all of one’s pictures if you take a lot of them. And that’s it. No need for endless conversation about organization, constantly moving from site to site looking for perfection, and trying to tweak every post for dozens of streams or purposes.
If this sounds a lot like the old web, that’s because it is a lot like the old web. And if it sounds like a plea for more people who talk less about the mechanics of hosting and sharing creative work and more creative work, that’s because it is also that.
Perhaps it was the sheer mass that allowed for topical communities that were more about the topic than the platform, but I was part of many groups on X/Twitter/TheBirdSite that spent very little time talking about X/Twitter/TheBirdSite: poets talking about poetry, typewriter people geeking out about typewriters, coffee enthusiasts arguing about coffee…on Mastodon and Micro.Blog those communities are exceedingly difficult to find (if they exist at all).
I get that some of the difference is because the first adopters of new platforms—especially those platforms that may be less initially user-friendly than popular social media sites—tend to be technically-minded, but I suspect there is a large, mostly untapped demand for topical groups that rarely, if ever, talk about the platforms they are on.
🔗 Japanese bookshop stocks only one book at a time [archive]
This bookstore that sells only one book could also be described as ‘a bookstore that organises an exhibition derived from a single book’. […I ask the authors and editors to be at the bookstore for as much time as possible. This is an attempt to make the two-dimensional book into three-dimensional ambience and experience.
(via @dajb@social.coop)
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Daily(ish) poem → 00310 ◊ John Chrysostom ◊ Richard Wilbur
John Chrysostom
He who had gone a beast
Down on his knees and hands
Remembering lust and murder
Felt now a gust of grace,
Lifted his burnished face
From the psalter of the sands
And found his thoughts in order
And cleared his throat at last.
What they heard was a voice
That spoke what they could learn
From any gelded priest,
Yet rang like a great choir,
He having taught hell’s fire
A singing way to burn,
And borrowed of some dumb beast
The wildness to rejoice.
—Richard Wilbur
—found in Things of This World (1956)
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00052 ¶ from The Snow Child ¶ Eowyn Ivey
As I recall, you slept more than one night in those great oak trees, and when Mother found you the next morning you would swear you had seen fairies that flew like butterflies and lit up the night like lightning bugs. I remember with some shame that the rest of us teased you about seeing such spirits, but now my own grandchildren chase similar fancies and I do not discourage them. In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.
—Eowyn Ivey
—found in The Snow Child (2012)
Seattle police officer who struck Jaahnavi Kandula won’t face charges | The Seattle Times [archive]
Un-fucking-believable.
Also, AI generated and assisted art absolutely does put the question to many values and valuations of art. But perhaps that interrogation isn’t wrong just because some of those values and valuations come out reduced. In fact, maybe some of that is good.
I love art & feel making it is something everyone can benefit from. But the artist’s car of the anti-AI train just doesn’t cohere, conflating creation with audience. Nothing is threatening the first, and the “driven to create” crowd contorts itself to rely on arguments based on the latter.