July has been busy with summer stuff, including the arrival of [really quite magnificent] metal prints for our Joint Show in September. I’ve added a link to some other images from Flowers Cove to the page summarizing my part of the show.
A Convivium Question about Myth led to another exploration of the Twelfth Imam.
And there’s been the usual daily pleasure of eclectic reading in the barn, and the garden is burgeoning. A visit from John and Laura and Kian will round out the month!
Organizing stuff in the barn always means finding things of Significance that have been hiding for years. Some of them connect to stories and Stories.
This one ended 60 years ago. The tall person was David Lyon, my Chadwick roommate in 1958-59, after which he went to Paris for two years (long story there), before returning to Chadwick for his senior year, which was my first year at Harvard. He’d just been accepted to Harvard himself when he died in a car accident. The old people in the photo are Commander and Mrs. Chadwick, the grandparents of the three at the back and great aunt/uncle to the rest. Mrs. C. was a huge presence in my Chadwick life.
Here we see Betsy’s sister Caroline and her first husband Steve Butterfield, in 1973. Shame it’s not color — Steve’s hair was a magnificent red. He worked for Bolt, Beranek, and Newman when the internet was being born, and was the first person we ever saw use email. When we were at Stanford in the 1979-1980 sabbatical, Steve was at Xerox PARC. He gave me a tour of the Future just when the personal computer was being invented…
Broot took this one in summer 1963, the young guitarist clipping fingernails.
And this is Larry Fredericks, taken sometime in the 1980s. He was a colleague/friend in the first few years at Acadia, an enthusiastic member of CPC/M-L (Communist Party of Canada, Marxist-Leninist). He had a marvelous International Harvester Scout, red in colour, which at one point he traded in for a bronze-hued Impala with electric windows. He took me for a ride on the Big Road, getting it up to 90 or so, and zipped the windows up and down… I said “Lar, what you got here is a Bronze Pig”. He thought that characterization was funny until I wrote a rather mocking song about it. I learned the power of music and lost a friend… but then one day maybe 10 years later he turned up… he was doing something in banking or was it stock-broking in Toronto, and had rented the white Cadillac convertible at the airport.
I’ve just had this image printed 20 x 30 on metal, for the September gallery show we’re now planning:
Here’s Jan and myself about 3 years later:
…and then some 50 years later, while visiting Jan in Bolinas CA:
and one more of Jan in 1965:
I note that I didn’t post anything to the blog in February and that it’s now past mid-March. So what have I been up to in that time? Most of my keeping track has been managed on yellow pads, but one of the most recent distractions was email from HR65 about our 55th Reunion, delayed 2 years because of COVID and now scheduled to take place in May, and do we want to register and attend? This sort of thing usually puts me into some sort of tailspin: I surprised myself by actually enjoying the 50th Reunion, back in 2015 (which seems another world entirely), but my ambivalence about Harvard is pretty close to the surface. The 55th is basically a day of ‘symposia’ (which means listening to erstwhile classmates talk about something, and tends toward the Grand Questions) with bits in between for “breakout sessions” that are supposed to evoke conversation. I run screaming, but ?why? … and I have an answer to that. Or maybe it’s an Answer. The question one is surely likely to be asked (if anybody asks anything) is “so what have you been doing?” and you get a few minutes to try to say something significant, memorable, fulfilling. Ugh. But imagining that socially discomfiting question did inspire me to try to sculpt an Answer (impossible to deliver/convey in the allotted few minutes, and to a complete stranger at that), if only to remind myself about what actually matters.
So here goes: at the core of what I’ve been doing in the 16 1/2 years since I retired and moved to Maine has been curation of a lifetime of enthusiasms, putting It All Together for myself and perhaps for some as-yet-unimagined audience. There’s a catalog of activities that span parts of that 16 1/2 years:
Each of those is a saga of discoveries, far too complex for that elevator-pitch few minutes, and mediated by incoming periodicals and blog posts and books. In short, I’ve been enjoying my life day-to-day, no boredom or lack of things to do, and being pretty private about most of that, though it’s at oook.info for anybody to explore ad lib. I’m on the Periphery in almost every way, spatially and intellectually and practically, working at blamelessness. Self-absorbed covers it pretty well.
Has it really been a month since the last blog post? Of course lots of stuff in that time, books arriving and being wolfed down and at least partially digested, various end-of-year summings-up, and the plunge into 2022. Staying home, minimizing f2f encounters, watching It All Go Down.
Preparations for the weekly Convivium have supplanted blogging to some degree, and
tell the tale of my wandering attentions pretty well.
By way of paying attention to the world outside the many comforts of home, I’ve been following Heather Cox Richardson and Umair Haque, both sort of paywalled (or anyhow I’m not sure if hyperlinks to their posts on Substack and Medium are readily accessible), and both painting not-rosy pictures of what’s just around the corner.
…and I’ve revisited Joan Didion and Jorge Luis Borges profitably, and lately discovered Unflattening (Nick Sousanis) and The Secret To Superhuman Strength (Alison Bechdel), among (many) others.
Reacquaintance with Borges reminded me yet again of the charms of his Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, and The Library of Babel (see Jonathan Basile’s obsession: The Library of Babel and about The Library of Babel) … and if the Work itself is unknown to you, there’s a pdf available). Among the additional resources I’m now navigating, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel (William Goldbloom Bloch) and The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges (Edwin Williamson)
…and then consult The Aleph (pdf), when you’re ready for the next thing… Hell of a ride. I’ve just ordered The Total Library : Non-Fiction, 1922-1986, so The Future Is Assured for the rest of January. And of course other things will appear, seemingly out of nowhere.
I resolve to start building my very own Lifebox, inspired by Rudy Rucker’s The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, The Meaning of Life, And How to Be Happy. Well, I’ve been building it all along, but the project longs to have its own dedicated (hyper)space.
Days often begin with a meaty email message from John, always spiky with pithy observations, lively questions, pointers to interesting sources and resources. Following up on his links is just the beginning of the day’s fun, because there’s always a trickle of blog postings coming through as well (sometimes tucked away for later viewing, sometimes sucked right in, and maybe passed along to others), and often enough the various messages complement each other.
Today John pointed to Sarah Miller’s Annals of a Warming Planet (“The millions of tons of carbon emissions that don’t exist”) in the New Yorker. Some of the trenchant bits I wrote down:
wood pellets marketed as “sustainably sourced biomass” “…counting biomass as carbon-neutral…”
est. 60,000 acres of trees burned every year
to supply the growing pellet market…It takes between 40 and 100 years for a new tree to pay down the carbon debt
racked up by logging and burning an old one…supposedly “residue from the timber industry, made out of scraps and sawdust…”
but trees harvested in US and Canada to make pellets for export
supposedly “sustainably sourced forest thinning and low-grade wood”
“…if a government or private entity cuts down a forest but doesn’t redevelop the land,
it has not officially engaged in deforestation”no one has figured out how to capture and store enough carbon
to make any differenceThe problem is “the economy”, which is required to produce profits
and reproduce itself, and which requires large energy inputs to do so…The truth is that if the economy is not entirely remade,
the debates over the folly of biomass, over what counts as renewable,
over whether or not a tree can grow back faster than it burns
—all of it will vanish into a great silence.
John goes on to note the Smugth with which he piloted a biodiesel car for a decade, shudders to think about other things done or considered, and observes:
I’ve been struck during the pandemic that everyone draws their own line of what is a reasonable precaution and what is an unwelcome intrusion, and there are people who staunchly defend their particular stance along the spectrum of public health (collective gain) vs personal liberty (and economic gain). The same spectrum is clearly in place on the environmental plane…and I see the mixture of cognitive dissonance and preachy self satisfaction at work in myself and in so many others.
Other things that rolled in today:
(another version of the Thomas Midgely story)
…Mayer died in 2014. She continued to make work through the last decades of her life, but was largely left behind by the art world, a casualty of proliferating commercial galleries and a fervid market that had little use for her ephemeral works.
We live in a world where capitalist states and giant companies largely control science. (Just consider the moral insanity and capitalist logic of global vaccine apartheid.) Some of the biggest backers of technology to capture carbon and store it underground are oil companies like Exxon. Yes, we need to consider technologies with an open mind. That includes a frank assessment of how the interests of the powerful will shape how technologies develop.
A week or so I was wondering to myself ??What does one do when one recognizes that one is caught in a Contradiction? When one realizes personal implication in something that one deeply deplores? ?When one wishes to at least be consistent… ?? …which of course happens all the time, trivially and grandly. When one reads about water in the San Joaquin Valley and learns about the structure and depradations of the almond industry, is it thinkable to keep buying almond milk? And what about that 2 cord of wood we burn each winter, just how much better or worse is it than, say, propane in our wall heaters… and so on. Such thoughts are pretty small potatoes in comparison to the Big Delusions of our society and culture, our nation, our species…
the in-built addiction to Growth that underwrites pretty much everything we do, and that we have been pretty much constantly reminded of since The Limits to Growth (1974; 2004 30-year update), which I’m starting to re-examine.
And this all in the context of reading Edward Tufte’s fifth book, Seeing With Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth
A sense of the relevant is the ability to identify and detect
those things that have consequences beyond themselves.creativity is connecting things
spaces and linebreaks create poetic meaning
Photography is alright, if you don’t mind
looking at the world from the point of view
of a paralyzed Cyclops
—for a split second
(David Hockney)models sanctified and celebrated by insiders
can evolve into uncontested, lucrative, congealed
monopolies/specialties/cartels/cults/disciplines
—which in time become self-centered and selfish,
more and more about themselves, and less and less about
their original substantive content.
It’s interesting to trace a stream of morning activity, if only so that I might be able to get back to sources too briefly examined, and of course it’s useful to dip a toe into the slipstream of my Attention from time to time.
I’ve been reading Mark Arax The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, on the recommendation of Robert Glennon, and got wondering about all the concrete that went into the aqueducts, then recalled reading a New Yorker article about sand (May 22 2017) … which inevitably led to the google for other bits of the Tale of Sand. Here’s some of what I found:
Silica sands – Supply shortage, 2022 demand outlook
High-quality sand is in short supply
Sand Shortage 2021: Is The World Running Out of Sand?
Sand shortage: The world is running out of a crucial commodity
Sand and Sustainability (pdf of the 2019 UN Environmental Program report)
Vince Beiser – black market sand (author of The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, now queued up on the Kindle)
The truth behind stolen beaches and dredged islands
The world is ‘running out of sand’, and it’s fuelling murders, mafias and ecological devastation
The world is running out of sand — there’s even a violent black market for it
And then along came this: Visualizing the Accumulation of Human-Made Mass on Earth (via Bruce Sterling’s blog)
…the mass embedded in inanimate solid objects made by humans that have not been demolished or taken out of service—which is separately defined as anthropogenic mass waste.
Global Biomass: the dry weight of all life on Earth 1120 Gt
Anthropogenic mass: “everything the human population has created since 1900, to 2020” — 1154 Gt, incremented by 30 Gt/year
549 Gt Concrete
286 Gt Aggregates (clay, sand, gravel)
92 Gt bricks (ca. 15 billion bricks/yr; 85% from Asia
65 Gt Asphalt
39 Gt Metals
23 Gt Other (wood, glass, plastic [8 Gt of that]…)
…and that led to further exploration of the Visual Capitalist website, which offered Visual Capitalist: Maps, full of enticing rabbit holes…
And so a bit of cleaning up of recent explorations, consequent upon recent reading of Termination Shock and The Ministry for the Future, it occurred to me to wonder about the current state of The Aleph: an analysis of Borges’ masterpiece
In September 1945, the short story “The Aleph” was published in the Argentine journal “Sur”. It is written by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges to narrate his fictionalized character’s experience as he saw the Aleph, a point in space where all points in the universe can be seen. Reprinted as the title work of Borges’ 1949 collection “The Aleph and Other Stories” … a matter of literary craftsmanship to explore “infinity”. With its varying theme, the literary piece argues that the universe is ineffable, time is inexorable, experiences shape perception and rationality. … According to the narrator, the Aleph is a “small iridescent sphere with unbearable brilliance” where all places on Earth can be seen from every angle without distortion or confusion, simultaneously.
…the Aleph or “Alef” is the Hebrew alphabet’s first letter and in Jewish Kabbalah, it is the “En Soph” that signifies the nameless being called “YHWH” who created the world.
(and/or)
In his first set theory article in 1874, Georg Cantor outlined that the Aleph is the representation of transfinite numbers.…Aleph is a representation of how unpredictable, indescribable, and unconscious life can be for the human-animal as unseen forces move him/her.
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And quite by chance a couple of links to our sort-of neighbor when we lived in Lexington VA, Sally Mann:
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and this, from email from Lapham’s Quarterly:
“What do you know about this business?” the King of Hearts asks Alice during the trial at the end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Nothing,” she replies. “That’s very important,” responds the king. The scene continues: ” ‘Unimportant, of course, I meant,’ the king hastily said, and went on to himself in an undertone, ‘important—unimportant—unimportant—important—’ as if he were trying which word sounded best.
Some of the jury wrote it down “important” and some “unimportant.” Alice could see this, as she was near enough to look over their slates; “but it doesn’t matter a bit,” she thought to herself.
At this moment the king, who had been for some time busily writing in his notebook, cackled out, “Silence!” and read out from his book, “Rule forty-two: All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.”
Everybody looked at Alice.
“I’m not a mile high,” said Alice.
“You are,” said the king.
“Nearly two miles high,” added the queen.
“Well, I shan’t go, at any rate,” said Alice, “besides, that’s not a regular rule; you invented it just now.”
“It’s the oldest rule in the book,” said the king.
“Then it ought to be number one,” said Alice.
The king turned pale and shut his notebook hastily. “Consider your verdict,” he said to the jury in a low, trembling voice.
“No, no!” said the queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterward.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the queen, turning purple.
“I won’t!” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
And finally, a very high tide at 11 AM today!
Every now and again I write out a metathoughts summary, for my own future edification. I’ve just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock, which is more or less a speculative fiction take on geoengineering, and have of course been considering the Crises of the era/moment: epidemiological, ecological , climatological, technical, existential, politico-economical, socio-cultural, psychological and so on, the whole litany of -als … which are of course also dynamical, continuing to evolve, and with which we mess at our Peril. But one does wonder about the notion of Fixability.
So you have what we observe as this mysteriously organized Realiity, with vast numbers of internal connections whose dynamics are only imperfectly understood, through which course energy and information. One’s brain is a local manifestation of this architecture of Reality, and there are now billions of [human] brains in operation; but that operation is not upon independent billions, though the mapping of their interconnections and contingencies would be very complex indeed. And there are surely modalities of exchange amongst those brains [and the brains of many more billions of no-longer-extant individuals, not to mention other sentients…] besides the sight-and-sound that are readily perceived.
The Mechanism is … exquisite. And it’s more organic than simply mechanical levers and circuits. The animation is Life, which comes down finally to the processing, the allocation, of Energy, ultimately (?) stellar in origin. But what is it all for? Amusement of the gods, if gods there be?
The User’s Manual for that Reality is continuously edited, mostly in the direction of greater complexity of what we understand (as opposed to simplification).
And what I’m doing these days is spelunking in that grand territory, poking my nose into various corners of that land/thoughtscape to see and hear and touch what there is to be learned, just for the sake of learning’s pleasure and joy. What a gift, and opportunity, to live therein.
Never too far away is the “and so … what?” question, part of the idea that one might have Responsibilities, in the direction of what to do with that learning, beyond the pleasures of basking in it. If I do, I have no idea how to meet or discharge those Responsibilities, and presently find it satisfying to ignore them, or think of them as discharged in years of teaching [which were more years of learning] and librarianship. Am I writing a book? No. Though the 12 Blurb books are surely products of some of my explorations, and my pile of yellow pads tracks the last 3 years or so of adventures.
At the moment, the musical and photographic facets of my enterprises seem to be somewhat in abeyance, but may revive thanks to some nudge—perhaps the just-purchased Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World (Nina Kraus, on Kindle).
A lot of garden marvels, new vistas pretty much daily:
New rock creatures, even one right in the back yard where it’s been (I suppose) hiding in plain sight for 16+ years:
Color infrared experiments
There’s Another New Instrument (Daddy’s Day was my excuse this time).
And a lot of work (reading, writing, cogitation) on Convivium questions centered on memory.
There’s a Project just taking shape to make better sense of the welter of books on language, linguistics, lexicons, lexicography. That will probably enliven July, and necessitates a reorganization of the Auxiliary Library in the barn. And of course the piles of books on divers subjects grow and totter, delightfully.
And 25-30 miles a week of St. George peninsula roadside trash continues to be picked up on an almost daily basis (well over 140,000 cigarette butts in the four years since we started counting).
Wende posed a Convivial Question for this week:
We are 20 years into a brave new century.
Remember when 2000 rolled over and we all thought there weren’t gonna be enough digits to keep the internet from crashing? So much history has rolled by, over and around us . . .affecting each of us in a myriad of ways.What has the impact of these years been on you and your inner life?
How might you be a different person from the one who saw in that new century with all the zeros?
So I went to my shelf of journals and found the volume that includes 2000 and read through that year and into 2001, and so I have data to help me note some ways in which I am
grandparent
retiree
photographer again
last of a sibling set
yogi
avid Appalachian Trail hiker (we finished the 11-year odyssey of day hikes in 2003)
GIS (Geographic Information Systems) Evangelist
in the role of Librarian and Professor
engaged with liberal arts colleges
working on Global Studies/Stewardship
entangled with digital library initiatives
omnivorous quester
bibliophile
cyberspace participant
hypertext author
foodie
walker
æsthete [in a good way…]
collector
heathen
musician
watcher from the sidelines
Mocker [Ringo’s answer when asked if he was a Mod or a Rocker]
Yes, folks, for 20 years it’s been ODTAA (One Damned Thing After Another). Some things I discovered in the journal entries: few of the films I watched 20 years ago are memorable (most left no trace); I noted lots of boring meetings; lots of travel; lots of (less boring) task-focused meetings; lots of consultations, many leading to Web documents; a wide variety of courses and workshops taught; schemes to change the World around me hatched; weekends on the Appalachian Trail, lots of driving north and south from Lexington VA to trailheads. It was a very full and satisfying life, and so is its 2021 successor.
See some examples of my Web-based record keeping, ca. 2000: ‘Protest Music’ for Brooks Hickman, Hollows and other place names: a toponymic excursion (examples of GIS work), on Information Fluency, Teaching and Learning Resouce Group, Tracking Scientific Information, Technology and American Frontiers course, A History of the Web at W&L (2000).