Status:

Spent a lovely afternoon in the garden enjoying the cool breeze, at one point considering fetching a hoodie. Madness.

Have been thinking about this blog a fair bit this week. Nothing too concrete — I’m very happy to let it slowly iterate — just marking an awareness of where it’s changing and how it might develop. I’ve found myself batching things up a bit and saving links for later days and I think that might lead to something more curated.

When I started this is was simple a log, in the classic Web Log sense, indiscriminately listing most of the things I’d seen online, like a peek into my browser history. That was about the limit of my capacity back then and as I’ve built up resilience I’ve gotten a bit more selective about what I share and how I share it. I still like the laundry list approach (sidenote: what even is a “laundry list”?) because it gives a broader view of my ingestions and allows for interesting connections and discoveries to be made, and also matches my composting approach of throwing everything in the pile to make a nutritious mulch to feed future growth.

But I’m also drawn to what we might call a zine model, like Patrick does with Sentiers each week. I really like the idea of email or web page that has the same balance of lightness and heft as a 24 page zine, that is both of and off the network, deeply intertwingled and autonomous. I don’t think it’s possible to bridge print and screen without serious copyright violation (or QR codes everywhere) but I think the spirits and intentions of each medium could inform each other.

If pushed I’d say I’m probably moving towards two modes: a daily record of the churn of my life online and off, and a coherent weekly publication of some kind. The funny thing is I don’t really want to separate them. I’d like whatever it is to be both at once. Operating at the intersection of coherence and churn, as one might put in a pretentious artist statement.

Big Read:

Hope is not naive: Rebecca Solnit on backlash, power, and political memory

A long but thoroughly readable (or listenable if you prefer) discussion between Solnit and Kelly Hayes (co-author of Let This Radicalise You) which covers so many topics in just enough depth that the whole thing is like a buffet you can dip in and out of. I’ve long thought Solent to be one of the best thinkers to see us through this current moment and I’m delighted that she also seems like a fun person to hang out with — that rarely happens!

The conversation starts strong: ‌I’m a bit euphoric, because […] the most San Francisco thing that could possibly happen to a person happened to me. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, at their annual Hunky Jesus Easter extravaganza, canonized me as a saint whose name, which I helped with a bit, is Esperanzapedia. […] What better than to be canonized lovingly by the most flamboyant drag queens in service of the community […] with 10,000 San Franciscans hooting and cheering

Her main theme is that all the disparate causes and issues of the left are really deeply interconnected, and proof is that the far right sees them as one thing. But more importantly they see us, in the broad sense, as a powerful threat, even thought we might feel powerless.

‌ Because if you listen to what MAGA, and Trumpism, and the right is saying, they’re telling us five things. The last two will sound super familiar to everyone, but I don’t think people are hearing the first three clearly enough. So here’s my little list. You all are very powerful, number one. Two, you’ve changed everything. Three, all those different things you do are actually all connected. All the queer rights, human rights, anti-racism, feminism, environmental, climate, anti-colonialism, et cetera. Those are the things we don’t hear clearly enough, maybe because they’re shouting so loudly, “You did all those things and we fucking hate it,” that’s four. And, “We want to change it all back.”

It’s like a version of “a rising tide lifts all ships”, something Solnit explicitly credits her own enlightenment to. “I grew up in San Francisco and gay men have liberated me, a tragically heterosexual woman, by just modelling as all the queer and trans people in San Francisco did […] that there’s so many ways to be human, so many ways to be sexual, so many ways to be attracted to other people or not. And that rules are there to be broken, in those cases."

I’m skimming through this again looking for pull quotes and there’s just too much good stuff. Go read it at your own pace.

I often struggle to hold all the important things together in my mind and to draw the necessary connections to make sense of it, so I was relieved when she says “I know that rambled a little bit, but it’s very hard to connect all the dots without meandering across all fields. Or even connect some of the dots, I should say. All the dots is a tall order."

“All the dots” is a tall order but it’s good to know that they are connected, even if, like mycelium in the soil, we can barely see the connections.

Reading:

• Still blazing after all these years: Mel Brooks at 100 — This reads like an obituary, but it’s nice to read a celebration of someone still alive for a change. Reading this I realise to my horror I still haven’t seen The 12 Chairs. Must rectify that soon.
• The Cult of Optimization — A solid history of the concept from it’s origins in WWII to its deadening hand on all that is good today. “Optimization privileges the measurable over the unmeasurable. And it places the onus for improving society on the ever-striving individual rather than asking more fundamental, structural questions about why systems work as they do and whom they empower and disempower."
• Finally: Someone who wants to reform Westminster has the power to do it — Ian Dunt is cautiously optimistic about Burnham in Westminster. “Might he fail? Yes, absolutely. Might he not even really bother trying? Sure. But honestly: when was the last time we saw a scenario like this?"
• Janet Street-Porter introduces the Post-War Architecture Collection — A selection of archive programmes on the iPlayer.
• Earth’s underground fungus network is so gigantic that if you stretched it out, it would reach to other star systems — The global fungal network weighs around 300 megatons.
• Phil Gyford’s weeknotes

Watching:

• True Facts: The ferret and the plague ‌(6:55) — More about the ticks on the prairie dogs the ferrets eat than the ferrets themselves, but all the better for it.

Listening:

• I’ve been making good progress with Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists, finishing the first part which covers the shift of Palestinian resistance from a local movement to an international campaign through the evolution of plane hijackings. (This nicely fits with that story about the Boeing 747 I posted yesterday, making me wonder how close I came to being in a hijacking in my youth.) Burke’s format is nicely established now, telling big-picture history through the personal stories of the characters who actually hijacked the planes and set the bombs. It’s a surprisingly neutral tone for an account of people who were best useful idiots caught up in their own righteousness and at worst evil fuckers, but somewhat refreshing for it. Next we move to Germany…

Music:

• Listened to some more of Iwo Jedynecki’s Phil Glass covers on his accordion (do they call them covers in the classical world?) and not only are they really good and odd, they reminded me of that classic “incredibly strange” album But You’ve Never Heard Gershwin With Bongos, which brought a big smile.