Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.

​-Chuck Palahniuk

A beautiful idea from Tyler Cowen:

At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.

Finished reading: Queen of the Abyss by Mike Ashley 📚

Highlights

from The Sculptor’s Angel by Marie Corelli

“Love is the only miracle!” went on the Voice. “It cannot die—it is immortal!

from Island of the Hands by Margaret St Clair

When a man loves a woman, he cannot detach her enough from him to see her clearly. His love for her makes a mist. Joan was not a woman for you, but a climate within which you could feel and think.

Finished reading: Evil Roots by D. Butcher 📚

Who knew botanical gothic was a genre, let alone my kind of genre. Not terribly surprising, nature’s revenge is a trope I enjoy.

Highlights

from The Guardian of Mystery Island by Edmond Nolcini

This action served to reveal what had at one time been a path, but now, like every other effort of man here, indicated a contention with, and partial subjection to, the native wildness of the woodland.

Now, however, the sharp tooth of time had gnawed into the vitals of the old place,

when two have a secret it becomes public matter.

from The Ash Tree by M. R. James

I wish to have one of these houses, and enough money to keep it together and entertain my friends in it modestly.

I’m not entirely sure what my thoughts are on this book. I enjoyed the craft of the writing and am interested in the nature of fandom, but it also started losing me towards the end.

The ending itself felt abrupt, but I’m also not sure how else you’d end a narrative like this.

Another discovery via Sonia’s Poem of the Week email.

Highlights from Y/N by Esther Yi 📚

What I feared most wasn’t death or global cataclysm but the everyday capitulations that chipped away at the monument of seriousness that was a soul

is perfection just the massive accumulation of small errors?

Culture amounted to a collection of agreed-upon values that made it possible for large groups of people to live beside each other in relative peace.

They confused their navigation through the stunning variety of meaningless choices as an expression of their individuality. True individuality, however, was indistinguishable from the evacuation of the self in service of a higher purpose, she claimed.

The towers of the cathedral were a fistful of magic flames in the light of the setting sun.

Like reading one side of a series of conversations from a Great Gatsby party guest. A great book of poetry for someone who “doesn’t like poetry” (which I mean as a compliment).

Discovered via Sonia’s Poem of the Week email

Some Verses From Baby, I Don’t Care by Chelsey Minnis 📚

from Bargaining
Yes, the loathsome groove of money!

Let me tell you about love.
We’ll be paying installments for the rest of our lives.

from Business
There’s a pretty good chance I love you,
but I’ll have to take it up with my board of directors.

from Philosophizing
Don’t kill someone with a paperweight.
Kill them with a paper
that has a heavy poem on it.

from Greatness
The only real disgrace is the refusal to believe in or listen to your fellow man! Somebody better kiss me when I say that.

Finished reading: Y/N by Esther Yi 📚

Finished reading: Baby, I Don’t Care by Chelsey Minnis 📚

Finished reading: One Minute Nonsense by Anthony De Mello 📚

Finished reading: Trip Trap by Jack Kerouac 📚

read in a cabin in the woods

Finished reading: The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves & China Miéville 📚

What An Opening Line

A room, full of violence to come.

Highlights

Insubordination’s a lesser evil than independence, I guess.

Something and its opposite can both be true.

You will only perceive your tools when they are broken.

Or he simply had not noticed. No matter.
He listened.

But only an idiot thinks the ways they were trained are automatically the best.

I’ve told you that the usual story is bullshit.

Nothing that’s happened hasn’t happened before.

You’re the one who still thinks you can figure out whats and whys. You’ll be disappointed.

Only broken tools know they are tools.

Secrets beget and attract secrets.

Gods and monsters. Aliens and avatars. Entropy versus change. Death versus life. Ideals, ideas, and dumb luck.

All gods are disappointments. Nothing more thrilling than a god that keeps its distance, right? A hidden god. So faith can become a wager.

Nothing but the quotidian propagandas of cultures in which some command the many

What I’m saying is pattern recognition is what got monkeys signifying. And it’s also what gives you paranoia and psychosis.

Humans have to die. But even is so, that doesn’t mean we should be in a hurry on our way, does it?

On becoming a metaphor: At times it feels insulting. As if it only matters what we are insofar as we mean other things.

We all make rituals of our lives, and for them.

Just because he did not know what it meant, just because it was contradictory, opaque, did not mean metaphor failed. Such moments might be its vindication.

It’s not life versus death, it’s change versus entropy. Motion against Thowless.

Memory is a labyrinth.

Found Poems

I know the period, that little watching eye. And I know the comma, which to me has always looked like a beckoning finger. What word is that? I asked once, of one such curling little inkworm. Asked it of he of whom I’ll tell you.
No word, said he. It is a pause. As if for breath.

and begins the pointless business of failing to breathe

Had I been grown perhaps I would have asked myself whether I had slept and dreamed. As a child I knew I had not.

Finished reading: The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves 📚

Currently reading: The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves 📚

Can’t wait to get into this.

It seems the louder one yells about free speech, the more they mean

freedom of my speech

or

freedom of speech I agree with

Finished reading: American Flagg! by Howard V. Chaykin 📚

Found via Disquiet, feels timely.

Finished reading: Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Octavia E. Butler 📚

A glimpse into a not-too-alternate feeling universe.

Some Passages I Liked

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation…When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.

All successful life is
Adaptable
Opportunistic
Tenacious
Interconnected, and
Fecund.

From what I’ve read, the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is surviving until it turns sane again.

Humans are good at creating hells. Even out of riches.

“God is pliable—trickster, teacher, chaos, clay.

Art is the thing nobody asked you to do.

-Babak Ganjei

I love this quote I found via Dan’s Daily Blog.

Art is what you do because you have to. Because there is something that needs to be expressed. Because you can’t sit still until it’s done.

Everything else is work.

Finished reading: Plainchant by Eamon Grennan 📚

and gone, gone again as on a raw electric current of aliveness: but gone

I’m starting Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Octavia E. Butler today because—as Kottke says:

The action in Octavia Butler’s novel The Parable of the Sower begins on July 20, 2024

Been on my list for a minute and now the timing seems fitting.

Doing the graphic novel version because that’s what was available at the library (& it’s about time I read another comic).

Finished reading: Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel 📚

Barbados

Finished reading: Secrets from the Center of the World by Joy Harjo 📚

Finished reading: The Bear by Andrew Krivak 📚

Like if The Road was written by a nature poet.

Some Passages I Liked

I miss whom I once could touch, as all must do when we make our way through whatever fires or wood it is in which we travel or are raised.

You need to be hungry for more than food. More than sleep. We all go to sleep and will be asleep for a long time. Be hungry for what you have yet to do while you’re awake.

Her father told her once that all animals were creatures of habit and so, too, were they. The difference was she could choose to change her habits. Animals changed when they were afraid. Change before fear has had a chance to overcome you, he said, or after you have overcome it and like a storm it has moved on.

Found Poetry

Snow in late fall, fish, too, gone from the weir.

the sky beginning to pale behind him like the world itself being born

Finished reading: A Book of Uncommon Prayer by Brian Doyle 📚

Finished perusing: High on Life by David J. P. Phillips 📚