Stuff from (or about) the books, articles, blog posts, pdf files, & all the other sundry texts I read.
From The Journal 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau.
Oct. 22 [1837] “What are you doing now?” he asked. “Do you keep a journal?” So I make my first entry to-day.
I propose that this become the standard first blog post, rather than “Hello world!”
I read the post On Dreams and Goals on Manu’s blog this morning. That post is an example of the internet at its best. If you’re reading this, please click the link and read what he wrote. It’s not long, and it is very, very cool.
P.S.
This is an old post from a prior blog, which I’m currently migrating over to From78.
Writing on disquiet, Marc Weidenbaum says,
The key thing is that blogging is not about final drafts. Blogging is as much a public notepad as social media is at its best (to be clear, most of social media is social media at its worst). It’s not a magazine; it’s a journal.
Earlier in the same post, Marc also had this to say about an RSS feed being a key part of a blog because RSS gives the reader a different experience than going to the blog-as-a-website.
A certain breed of email newsletter counts [as a kind of blog], as well, when the issues double as URL-specific posts, and — and this is key — there is an RSS feed to access them. I remain convinced that an RSS feed is an essential component of a blog — that, alternately, to require people to repeatedly visit your website of their own volition, and in the process for them to recall precisely where they left off reading the last time they were there, is simply too much to ask of a reader. It was too much to ask in the late 1990s, and in our cellphone-mediated, notification-riddled present, it is all the more so. RSS brings the writing to the reader, and in some ways isn’t that distinct from email.
I’ve been thinking back to what early blogging and podcasting were like lately. Reading Marc’s post reinforced something that had crossed my mind: a return to an older style of blogging (and podcasting?) could be a good idea. Certainly something to try.
P.S.
This is a re-post of an old post from a prior blog. I’m slowly migrating those posts over to From78.
Many people have been posting about an essay by Terry Godier that articulates something he calls “phantom obligation”. I’ve read it twice and have been thinking about the concept much more than unexpected.
However, the way I’ve been thinking about it has more to do with how I feel a version of phantom obligation in relation to small household tasks, and within significant relationships with other people and institutions.
It’s nice to have phantom obligation as a signifier to think with, to name what I might be feeling after I feel it…
The rendering of the concept into words does not cure my tendency to experience phantom obligation, but it does help me retroactively interpret that experience in a way that has the affect of reducing the pressure of the imagined/assumed/felt sense of obligation.
I think this is a good thing.
From a post on Michael Easter’s 2% Substack.
We all know we spend too much time on our phones. There are thousands of articles offering tips on how to use your phone less. But these often miss an important point. When people reduce their phone screen time, they often get bored—and immediately replace it with another screen, short-circuiting the very mental state that drives creativity. Taking a couple of hours off your phone screen time only to add in more TV time is like replacing cigarettes with chewing tobacco.
Yeah!
Easter’s larger point is that, rather than telling ourselves we need to look at our phones less, we should try to increase the time we spend not being stimulated by a screen.
“Instead of less phone, more boredom,” he said in a different podcast/interview.
It’s a simple and obvious observation. One that is so simple and so obvious that people (myself included) don’t think it.
I read this in a New Yorker profile of Tim Berners-Lee, the man who is credited with inventing the word wide web: [Tim’s mother] Mary, a believer in “watchful negligence,” would let him and his three younger siblings wrap themselves in extra perforated tape.
I now really like the term “watchful negligence”!
I also really like how the author of the profile put that term in quotation marks. A great small editorial choice.
P.S. This is a post from one of my old blogs that I’m moving over to From78.
From Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams
If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feelings of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.
Yeah.
Via Manton Reece (@manton)
Moltbook — a social network for AI agents to have discussions with one another. This is wild. I often joke about “our future AI overlords” but this might’ve just crossed a line into actual concern… We are putting a lot of trust into these new bots. 🦞
OMG!
My immediate first ass association is to the concept of “the jackpot” from the recent William Gibson novels.
For those who may not be familiar with the “jackpot” as a term/concept:
The Jackpot is a term coined by William Gibson in his novels, particularly in The Peripheral and its sequel, Agency. It describes a gradual, multi-faceted apocalypse rather than a single catastrophic event. This concept reflects ongoing crises that humanity faces, primarily driven by climate change and societal issues.
Ironically, the quoted text above came from the AI generated summery when I searched for the term via DuckDuckGo.
From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, by Catherine Clément
all psychoanalytic practice is based on the ability to hear something other than what the patient says. on the capacity to hear, within the conscious message enunciated by the speaker, the patterns produced by the unconscious. (p. 36)
I’m finding Clément’s uncomplicated way of describing psychoanalysis very enjoyable.
From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, by Catherine Clément
The unconscious is not directed toward a goal. It plays and then it settles down. (p. 33)
Yeah.
From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, by Catherine Clément
About love nobody ever spoke better than Lacan […] Love was a permanent presence, ever so lightly touched upon as he - lingered lazily, lengthily over the dead ends of desire, the desperations of fantasy, and the impossibility of “sexual intercourse.” In Lacan’s system, which is less inflexible and less fully worked out than some people think, love will no doubt remain one of the few escapes, perhaps the only one. Love was a door which, unlike the others, was not closed. A door left ajar. (p. 21)
There are several interesting things in this.
From The Kohut Seminar: On Sslf Psychology and Psychotherapy with Adolescents and Yoong Adults.
Coleridge spoke of “the willing suspension of disbelief,” there is also a necessity for the willing suspension of disbelief when you listen to a particular mode in which a topic is presented to you. I do not suggest the willing suspension of disbelief forever; I suggest only a suspension of disbelief until you have grasped what the other person has to offer. In other words, one does not object before one has first heard the other person out to some extent. (p. 4)
Yeah. Very well said .
From an interview with George Saunders in The Atlantic, where Saunders is talking about admitting to what we have gotten wrong, as opposed to avoiding it in all the ways we can avoid owning up to what we have done or failed to do.
And as they got older, we would have talks with [our kids] where we’d say, You know, we kind of messed that up. Sorry. And it’s amazing how that kind of just takes the wind out of any negative sails, to just admit it.
Yeah.
An association: This reminds me of one of the many 12 step sayings, “You’re only as sick as your secrets.”
If keep something I’ve really messed up a secret, it can really mess with me a lot… it takes effort to keep something a secret. Admitting to what I’ve done wrong, or poorly, or failed to do, is not fun, but it takes less energy than keeping something a secret.
From the book Winnicott: Life and Work by Robert Rodman (Amazon)
Her beliefs in the supernatural, evidenced by the notion that Lawrence of Arabia was communicating with her through a parrot, further suggest that at the very least, she was not accustomed to the rigors of scientific thought. (p. 53)
What a great sentence that is.
From Being & Having by Gabriel Marcel.
There is no privileged state which allows us to transcend time
Yeah.