I listened to an episode of Judge John Hodgman called “Objection! Sustainable”. The defendant had had a blog when she was in grad school called “Ecopathology” with the motto “The only cure is contagion”.
Hodgman pointed out that that is some “high-level Batman supervillain shit”.
Wait, wait, wait. David Wallace on The Office was named after David Foster Wallace?
I was thinking about why over the decades I have always found Penn & Teller so delightful and I think it is because they combine two important aspects of my own personality: cynicism & exuberance.
Almost daily I think about this clip of William Gibson talking about the time-and-space trauma we as a culture are enduring, much like the Victorians before us:
In futurist Alvin Toffler‘s book The Third Wave he coined the term “electronic cottage” to describe a hypothetical future when, thanks to advances in telephony, people would be able to work from their own homes. He thought of this as a counter-revolution to the Industrial Revolution—a reversion to the world before factories & offices where everyone worked in isolation from their own cottages—but with all the advantages of interconnectivity.
I feel like by forcing the widespread adoption of work-from-home, the Pandemic has brought about the fulfillment of the “electronic cottage” idea.
There is a very specific feeling I experience from time to time. And I find myself always using the same word to describe it: “upsetting”
I think it might be something like the 18th century usage of “sublime”.
The last two lines of the Robert Hass poem “Bookbuying in the Tenderloin” has this same feeling:
The sky glowers. My God, it is a test,
this riding out the dying of the West.
I’ve coined the portmanteau word “quarantime” for the weird, elastic sense of time during quarantine. Every day feels like Monday and Friday simultaneously.
While reading three wildly different books…
…I noticed that all three mentioned Michel de Montaigne. Seems like it’s time to read The Essays.
People keep asking me how I’m dealing with the lockdown and I have to remind them that a lifetime of introversion, earthquake preparedness, and post-apocalyptic media means that I am well-equipped for this exact scenario.
“We’ve experienced parts of this before, just never all at once.
As others noted, it’s like the Spanish flu of 1918 and the stock market crash of 1929 at the same time, but overseen by Harding’s total incompetence plus Nixon’s pettiness and paranoia.
It’s like Disaster Voltron.”
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) March 13, 2020
“Serious question when was the last time we experienced something like this? Accepting responses from historians only”
— Meena Harris (@meenaharris) March 13, 2020
Learned a new concept today.
“This generalized view of autopoiesis considers systems as self-producing not in terms of their physical components, but in terms of its organization, which can be measured in terms of information and complexity. In other words, we can describe autopoietic systems as those producing more of their own complexity than the one produced by their environment.”
—Carlos Gershon “Requisite Variety, Autopoiesis, and Self-organization“
View of the Milan Centrale train station from my room at the Glam Hotel Milano directly across the street. I was able to avoid the rain by using the warren of Metro tunnels under the Piazza Duca D’Aosta.
For my last night in Italy, I got (surprisingly excellent) takeaway pizza from a Milanese chain called Spontini which had a location at the corner on the ground floor. With a bottle of wine I picked up from Sapori & Dintorni, I had a little feast while watching the only English-language news channel on the hotel’s cable channels: China Global Television Network. CGTN’s coverage of the Honk Kong protests was as nakedly propaganda as anything I’ve seen in my life.
Throughout Northern Italy, I kept running across paintings of Madonna and Child in the most ridiculous poses…
“What is this? Cashmere? This cashmere? So soft!”
“Yo. Ma. Make me spend one more night in a manger and I’m gonna garotte you with your own veil. Capische?”
“Look, I don’t like this any more than you do! But you’re the one who decided to pick up a jellyfish! So hold your hand still so we can get this over with!”
“This looks suspiciously like my nose. This whole time, you haven’t been ‘getting’ my nose at all, have you? I have never felt more betrayed.”
“Shhh. Shush. Stop…talking…stop talking. Shush.”
Alas.