💬 Quotes
💬 Ten pages into Christmas Memory by Truman Capote and absolutely captured by this man’s prose:
Dollar bills, tightly rolled and green as May buds. Somber fifty-cent pieces, heavy enough to weight a dead man’s eyes. Lovely dimes, the loveliest coin, the one that really jingles. Nickels and quarters, worn smooth as creek pebbles. But mostly a hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies. Last summer others in the house contracted to pay us a penny for every twenty-five flies we killed. Oh, the carnage of August: the flies that flew to heaven! Yet it was not work in which we took pride.
💬 Christmas is such a generous season, which always makes me think of one of my favorite passages in Paradise Lost:
Well we may afford Our givers their own gifts, and large bestow From large bestowd, where Nature multiplies Her fertil growth, and by disburd’ning grows More fruitful, which instructs us not to spare.
💬 From Dorothy Day:
What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words—we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.
💬 An observation from Ivan Illich in Right To Useful Unemployment (1978) which feels especially pertinent in the age of LLMs:
Fifty years ago, most of the words heard by an American were personally spoken to him as an individual, or to someone standing nearby. Only occasionally did words reach him as the undifferentiated member of a crowd - in the classroom or church, at a rally or circus. Words were mostly like handwritten, sealed letters, and not like the junk that now pollutes our mail. Today, words that are directed to one’s person’s attention have become rare… This replacement of convivial means by manipulative industrial ware is truly universal, and is relentlessly making the New York teacher, the Chinese commune member, the Bantu schoolboy, and the Brazilian sergeant alike.
💬 My coworker dropping some accidental wisdom this AM:
“Remember, as strange as it sounds, a dull knife is the most dangerous kind of knife.”
MAINTENANCE is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going. Every living thing spends a great deal of time and toil in maintaining its own life and the life of the systems it depends on… But so much of doing maintenance is tiresome. The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. It it easy to put off, and yet it has to be done…. When you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it. If it’s a child, to keep it fed. If it’s a knife, to keep it sharp.
Thanks to @snarfed for the discovery. I recommend the full passage.
💬 Prodigal Son by James Weldon Johnson (1927)
💬 Found in Cas Holman’s Playful, which I am enjoying immensely:
“You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun.” — Steven Johnson
💬 Marshall Mcluhan on his pioneering work in media ecology:
“It is now perfectly plain to me that all media are environments, all media have the effects that geographers and biologists have in the past associated with environments. The medium is the message because the environment transforms our perceptions governing the areas of attention and neglect alike… All of my recommendations, therefore, can be reduced to this one: study the modes of the media, in order to hoick all assumptions out of the subliminal, non-verbal realms for scrutiny and for prediction and control of human purpose."
💬 A classic zinger from the incomparable Peter Drucker:
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence. It is to act with yesterday’s logic.”
💬 Thinking a lot on Phillip Larkin’s poem Aubade lately and taking comfort from it. May write on it soon. Here is one glorious snippet:
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.
💬 From Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.”
💬 From Orwell, in As I Please:
But the claim that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ is one of the stock arguments of intelligent reactionaries… It is not very difficult to see that this idea is rooted in the fear of progress. If there is nothing new under the sun, if the past in some shape or another always returns, then the future when it comes will be something familiar. At any rate what will never come — since it has never come before — is that hated, dreaded thing, a world of free and equal human beings… Particularly comforting to reactionary thinkers is the idea of a cyclical universe, in which the same chain of events happens over and over again. In such a universe every seeming advance towards democracy simply means that the coming age of tyranny and privilege is a little bit nearer. This belief, obviously superstitious though it is, is widely held nowadays, and is common among Fascists and near-Fascists.
💬 A reminder from Friedrich Hölderlin:
But where the danger is, also grows the saving power
💬 From Anais Nin:
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
💬 From Down and Out in Paris and London:
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. [This fear] is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and poor are differentiated by their income and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor know this quite well.
🗞️ From Dispatch #002 of Mercury’s Playbook:
Indeed—of all the marketplaces and industries in the world, luxury is perhaps the most intriguing when it comes to consumer psychology, simply because it proves that utility and functionality are not the end-all-be-all of product appeal. It provides a rich study into one of humanity’s most fundamental desires—the need to feel special, superior, and set apart. When it comes to crafting desirable products, no one does it better than the luxury industry because luxury is product charged with meaning to the utmost degree.
💬 Brooklyn-based band Geese talking about their creative process. I relate heavily:
“Well, it kind of starts with someone else’s pre-existing song most of the time, honestly. We’re pretty referential in what we do. Even if we try not to be, we can’t help it. So we find something we want to filter through ourselves, and then we sort of have to work backwards to try and un-plagiarize it. And that’s the part that requires the creativity.
💬 Prof Glenn Okun in my class tonight:
”All genius is just someone else’s undisclosed process.”
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