yardor: one’s love for their lawn
Daily(ish) poem → 00297 ◊ Minstrel Man ◊ Langston Hughes
Daily(ish) poem → 00296 ◊ The Waking ◊ Theodore Roethke
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00041 ¶ from "Buddha Boy" ¶ George Saunders
Finished reading: Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell 📚 – A bit repetitive, but Montell is a witty writer, providing some laughs, needed respite while exploring the workings of language in cults and cult-like groups. Fascinating stuff.
📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00040 ¶ from Consolations ¶ David Whyte
I wonder if 12 year-old me, marvelling at the Apple ][ computer, could’ve understood a future where he’d be yelling at his phone to tell him if dogs can eat tofu?
Tabled: Filth by Irvine Welsh 📚 – I love the Scots English dialect but the main character(s) are just too dark for me to take right now.
Finished reading: The Embedding by Ian Watson 📚
Hard to believe I hadn’t read this before. It’s largely aged well, though clearly a product of its time in terms of revolutionary politics and, as of late, the Chomskean understanding of language.
Daily(ish) poem → 00292 ◊ Fear ◊ Ciaran Carson
Daily(ish) poem → 00291 ◊ [I SAW MYSELF] ◊ Lew Welch
Technocrats are right that technology is a key to making the world better. But first we must describe the world as we wish it to be—the problems we wish to solve in the public interest, and in accordance with the values and rights that advance human dignity, equality, freedom, privacy, health, and happiness. And we must insist that the leaders of institutions that represent us—large and small—use technology in ways that reflect what is good for individuals and society, and not just what enriches technocrats.
—from The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism [archive]
This whole piece is an exercise in…I don’t even know what. Naïveté? Virtue signaling? Rah-rah for a crowd that already knows…and already knows there’s no reality to this call to action?
There’s virtue to making individual choices, but the system won’t be changed by it, and the global nature of the problems means that these technologies will be developed somewhere in just this way, regardless of the harm and despite any nation’s policies and laws.
I sympathize with the call, just as I sympathize with calls to digital silencing, retreats from technology, back to the land…you name any number of dreamy, idealistic notions despite being barely possible for individuals or small groups, much less on larger scales. The entropic reality that is the combination of the human affliction of consciousness, and living at scales and densities that are deeply harmful to our evolutionary present, will not be denied.
What if you took EVERY DJ break Howard Hesseman ever made, as Dr. Johnny Fever (WKRP in Cincinnati), and just …followed his lead?
Magic, that’s what!
I hope Firefox and Chrome start stealing some features from Arc (it overcame my skepticism to be my primary browser) because a lot of the momentum is now going in directions I’m much less interested in.
Daily(ish) poem → 00290 ◊ Corpus Alienum ◊ Ayokunle Falomo
Republican senators who walked out of Oregon Legislature can’t seek reelection, state Supreme Court rules [archive]
Drafters of Measure 113, which voters overwhelmingly approved in 2022, intended for it to stop walkouts that Republicans, as the minority party in the Legislature, have frequently used in recent years to stall bills pushed by Democrats.
Finished reading: Killing Eve: No Tomorrow by Luke Jennings 📚
Mixed feelings. It’s hard to get the TV characters out of my head, but that might not help. The over-the-top unreality works much better on screen and great acting redeems the book’s thinly written women. Recommended with reservations.