Books 📚

Beautiful looking ebook classics

• Bringing me a lot of pleasure this week is the arrival of Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway and reading it a few paragraphs at a time, interstitially, then lifting gently off into daydreaming.
• Thoroughly enjoying Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent. Barba’s been on hold this week. Tsing has been subterranean this week.
• Picked these two up during the week in the office. Some uncomfortable but promising tension here: Mihnea Tănăsescu in Ecocene Politics (2022) & Rebecca Solnit’s Not Too Late (2023) re. Ways of thinking about HOPE  … the timing of the Ecological Tragedy … the location of the ruins … apocalypse’s remnants …

Notes & Quotes 💬

Further to my contemplating 🔖 Ruins (遺跡? Also … 廃墟, 残骸, 遺址, 旧墟. What is what? Which fits best?), Poetry. Miłosz wrote in “Witness of Poetry”

“What surrounds us, here and now, is not guaranteed. It could just as well not exist—and so man constructs poetry out of the remnants found in ruins.”

For me, a striking connection: @ayjay here writes a post about the yin & yang of purity and katharsis cultures and 🔗 I’m reading Anna Tsing’s Mushroom book picking up that messiness is the name of the game.  Chapter 2, entitled  “Contamination as Collaboration” shows how diversity breeds resilience, breeds life, allows for ongoingness.

🤯 Genetic ancestry and the critical importance of the Neolithic period and Bronze Age as determinants of modern immune responses.

5000 years ago ancient herders from the Pontic steppe ‘rewrote’ a genetic story.

• Gene changes linked to MS boosted Yamnaya herders’ immune defences against diseases transmitted from their horses, cattle, sheep and goats, the researchers suspect.

• Modern, sanitised environments have altered immune systems in ways that have increased MS risks

• This is the first evidence of this evolutionary process in an autoimmune disorder

🖐🏻 High five on “Contamination as collaboration”! (Sometimes ‘ongoingness’ goes a little off-piste!)

Isn’t this eye-catching?!

a publication that specialises in slow-release high-quality work

What a concept!

I’ve been reading Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble and revisiting the old practice of Cat’s Cradle which we learned as children. What a fun why to begin teaching Systems Thinking!

Here’s Federico Campagna’s generative take on World-making (or World Meeting?) via ‘thick’ description/yarning - twisting, spinning …

🌌 This delightful dizzying breaking of the cosmological rules by hyper-hyper objects. A huge ring of galaxies challenges thinking on cosmos 🔭 🤔 😆 🖖🏻

Podcasts 🫛

More busyness = Less walking = less listening to podcasts, but enjoyed these two on the weekend.

• Ezra Klein, Attentional Well-Being On employee well-being, work culture, worker autonomy… the necessary psychological detachment from work. What management might benefit from knowing about humans working.

The concept of YOHAKU NO BI (the beauty spaciousness lends to wellbeing).

• Mark Vernon and Elizabeth Oldfield, What’s afoot in the new (mostly male) interest in Christianity? I’ve been wondering, too. Some excellent turns of phrase in this one and memorable analogies.

Poetry 💘

And what, little girl, will you be when you grow up? a poem by Jenny Flores

Write it on your heart by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Questions & Open Tabs 🔖

Why the push to go cashless? I find it very unsettling, myself, preferring the fiction.

Cashless society is a virus that spreads surveillance, censorship, systems failure, exclusion, gentrification and centralization of power.

Noticing Something New  🎁

• On stylistic influences: Donna Haraway was assigned to read Thomas Aquinas by a confessor in her early teens 😄 🦑

Donna Haraway in The Haraway Reader says:

I like layered meanings … I am deeply formed by Roman Catholicism … I learned it. I studied it. It is deep in my bones. … Theological tradition is a very deep inheritance for me, and I think it affects my style very deeply. (pp. 333, 334)

I was surprised by this discovery. She was quoted in Pope Francis’ 2023 exhortation, “Laudate Deum”. Why not? Nice to have a few wise women included (for a change).

A noteworthy both/and should be mentioned:

Well, you know, I am, of course, a committed atheist and anti-Catholic, anyway, at some level. I cannot live in ‘Christian’, right-wing U.S. culture and not be anti-Christian. (my emphasis)

• Word 🪺 

In the last two centuries, there has been a growing awareness of loss, of disconnection. The rise of modern natural science, recognizing only efficient causality, and ratified by the control it enables over nature (what Scheler calls “Leistungswissen” – science which gets things done) has undermined the traditional vision.  … so writes Charles Taylor here