.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

Sarah Paine: China, Russian, Japan, 19thc-20thc.

Noah Smith: Center-left types are incredibly susceptible to B.S. about AI taking jobs. It’s like rightists with seed oils and soy.

Surprised to find it’s strongly suspected, but not definitively known, whether the words ‘Syria’ and ‘Assyria’ are linked. Wikipedia article, Name of Syria.

“It’s the Mount Everest of corruption” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat.

The feeling of love is like wondering if it’s started raining again or if it’s only the wind in the trees full of rain.

Thinking of your photograph, I find myself vulnerable to writing a bad poem. I feel on my skin, the rain from the trees, but upon myself, the rain.

I was okay with having woken late in the morning, since I was awake for more of the night than I could handle. So much to handle, at 2 am, at 4 am, I had to pick up the Emerson.

I laughed, I shut the book, I read L’Homme and La Mer, I turned off the light, I laughed, I failed to return to sleep. I listened to “I Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Drink” and did just sit there and drink. Though I failed to return to sleep, I did not turn on the light, or sit there and drink. I did not try to read Emerson. I lay there alone and patient in the dark. “I Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Think.”

Sometimes, I thought how that one passage of Emerson seemed to relieve the moral imperative of another passage. Sometimes I felt anxious that I was not asleep, and of what that would mean for me the next day at work, and sometimes I would tell myself “don’t think, don’t think–” for it was Thought, I imagined, that was somehow keeping me awake, rather than what was keeping me awake keeping me thinking — thinking “don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.”

Then I woke with pleasant dreams and I spent some of the time lying there, trying to live again in my dreams, my dreaming self being spatially so close to my conscious self it seemed incomprehensible that I couldn’t shift back and forth. I spent some of the time, knowing I would be lying there for a while, seeing if those “visions,” (what are they called again?*), on the insides of my eye lids would appear (I’d been looking for them too in the middle of the night) then rose for work.

* phosphenes.

Yglesias: “All the places whose ‘character’ one might want to preserve were created during periods of openness to change.”

A passage in Walden reminding me that birds don’t have “backwards knees”: rather, what we think are their knees are in fact their ankles…. (What did the Archaic English word ‘yclept’ mean again?) (It meant “Named, called.” “He was yclept Paul,” for example). Photography was a technology and so was writing, but didn’t linguistic thinking precede imagistic thinking? Wasn’t Thought essentially verbal?

Making preparations for a guest. Wheel chair and other medical apparatus *outta here* (the guest needs lively invigorating sights and entertainments, not wheel chairs, pill bottles, bandages, gait belts, blood pressure monitors, elaborate harnesses for arms and chests, “grabbers”… or maybe I can wheel my guest around in the chair, if things get sufficiently lively, maybe I can achieve a meaningful type of holding with these “grabbers”…?) A new cutting board because food borne pathogens may be alright for the attendant (though he’s not actually all that crazy about them) but they are not alright for his guests!

Thought is essentially verbal not visual or aural, I tell you, I don’t know why. There is a reason that scientific papers aren’t written in music. (And there is a reason, too, that often they contain a lot of math, I admit.)

Derek Thompson: “The quiet miracle of charity and global aid is that the uneven distribution of global wealth creates an asymmetry by which relatively trivial amounts of money from the rich can prevent immense suffering and death among the poor.”

CNN: But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN.

KYIV INSIDER: “There’s a real fear now that the U.S. will turn off support mid-fight,” said a senior European defense official who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “Trump already did it to Ukraine. No one wants to be next.”
The issue is not just technical — it’s political. Many of the systems at the heart of NATO’s warfighting capacity, including long-range missile platforms and air defense networks, require not just hardware, but continuous U.S. cooperation for updates, targeting, and operational integration. That cooperation now feels conditional.”

I have never experienced what they call a runner’s high, but I will say that, during long runs my experience of time will be altered.

Having gone 8 miles I will turn around and think, wow, I’m a long way from home, this will take me forever to get back! but then by some process that I never get to the bottom of, I get closer and closer to home — then I’m home.

This is a new one from me, a long one, though it is basically a stitching together (rhapsodizing???) of old ideas. The attempt indeed was to stitch together some of my oddest ideas. I tentatively call it…. Self Respect and Freedom of Thought

I will say it would be nice to have an editor rather than just conceding that tediousness is part of my style. This could be a valid application of A.I. — as valid as having an editor anyway — but I haven’t yet made the experiment.

(exactly where) (exactly how, now or when) (or later) here (then lifts up, feels, his perpetual feeling of hand).

“Lower down, higher up” ; “neither ahead nor now”; “neither later yet ahead”: (in need of a decision, someone else in him/her/them arises to make it. Someone besides — some one literally beside — the one who saw a need for a decision — decides.)

Cut grasses, placed rocks, a parking sign, landscaped trees, their hue and kind with the embossment of the hour, with the background of the cloud….

The sun beam hit the cloud curve then landed on the trees’ tips. (hm)

“Trees like runway models on lane tops and phone trunks, a seductive drapery of street designs” (hm)

Stuttering sign language across the intersection as well (hm)

Odysseus said to have been wider than he was tall when seated — because he was barrel-chested not because he was fat. (True.) Yet why had the tale of fat Odysseus not yet been written? Was it because Don Quixote was the actual fat Odysseus? (Quite true.)

These trees are from a synthesizer. This copse is an all 80’s station. Cellophane shrink wrap is covering this wall street (Quite true.)

« Néanmoins, dit-il, les passions, violentes ou non, ne doivent jamais être exprimées jusqu’au dégoût, et la musique, même dans les situations les plus horribles, ne doit pas affecter l’oreille, mais la flatter et la charmer, et par conséquent rester toujours musique. » (*, *)