Books 📚

“Hold a book in your hands, and you’re a pilgrim at the gates of a new city“ – Anne Michaels

Very much enjoyed and blazed through Panos Karnezis' crack(l)ing read The Convent. The next book, despite the 2BR pile, didn’t float in as quickly as the last one did. After a few days am taken away by Deborah Levy’s Real Estate.

Notes & Quotes 💬

🤔

“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting.”

Jonathan Rowson is thinking about practice … so is Adam Robbert. Or is askesis something different? Alan Jacobs is thinking about it, too, by way of repetition, the tolerance for monotony and the (gradual) shaping of the mind.

It is said that

practice doesn’t make perfect, rather, practice makes permanent …

but I am not sure this holds true in all things (despite the alliterative pith …)

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete,” said Buckminster Fuller. Isn’t this also kind of a homeopathic approach? (Learn more about homeopathy!)

What made me turn around (what kind of turn was it?) and see the plum blossoms that had been sneaking over my bowed head as I trudged up the hill? A fragrant nudge, perhaps?

Wow! ‘O brave, new world that has such people in it!’ 💡 Pere Santamaria strategises for the autoimmune peacekeeping mission … for the body not to be divided and @war with itself … . We are not supposed to say the C (cure) word (though at diagnosis my swashbuckling neurologist swashbuckled it! I took it with more than a grain of salt and forgave him his giddiness.) I was amused to read that ‘there’s a key’s in the liver’ … I assume reference to the organ was intended, but liked the double entendre! Is the liver going to find it? Or are the medics? 😉

It was Bean Day on February 3rd, the traditional start of spring. Pelt those little bastards in the dark corners! Fling open the windows, let in the light! 👹👹👹

Podcasts 🫛

🎧 🐝 From this podcast on honeybees by Green Dreamer (💚), I learn about the resonant terms ‘nectar fidelity’ and ‘dance dialects.'

♾️I am slowly listening to Christiana Figueres interview with Krista Tippet. Transcript is here A connection was sparked between something I’d read earlier that morning by @ayjay quoting Chesterton on joyful living and our ‘tolerance for monotony’ connected for me with Christiana’s remark that

anything can be mundane. Any experience, any interaction, anything can be mundane. And anything can be spiritual. The very same interaction, the very same experience can be either mundane or spiritual. The only difference between the two is how I live it. What quality of presence do I bring to it?

Poetry 💘

• Roque Dalton, Like You … ‘Like you I/ love love …’

• Tricia Dearborn, ‘Lead’

I was blind to my feelings for my friend.

One drunken night recognition bloomed.

Add a drop of lead nitrate to potassium iodide:

a canary bursts forth from a clear sky.

Questions & Open Tabs 🔖

🤔 Rather a cross review on Crooked Timber here on a book called The Algorithm and its self-referencing circularity which makes mention of Vilèm Flusser (& a TED primer that might be interesting), the so-called “Sage of São Paulo,” whose work interests me, and another early media theorist,Stafford Beer- fascinating!

Definite 🔗s between Kingsnorth’s Machine & Flusser’s Apparatus … & for me, also with, Tom Berry’s call for the reinvention of the human, and possibly Teilhard’s noösphere via the field of cybernetics (subterranean sunbeams 🍭)

Noticing Something New 🎁

‘Signature’ & Knots

A plum blossom on the verge of breaking out is a knot of a kind. I am learning how to tie komboskini knots to honour these and other loosening and unfurling springy things. 🪢 🌱

“ … every single action of ours carries our signature” – Figueres. What’s my signature? 🌈