October 11, 2022

What caught my attention…

Letters from an American, October 10, 2022

… Russia is loosing the Ukraine war… badly…

According to Deborah Haynes, a security and defense editor at _Sky News_ in the United Kingdom, Sir Jeremy Fleming, who is the director of the U.K.’s intelligence and security agency, will say in a speech tomorrow that the Ukrainian forces are “turning the tide” against Russia. “The costs to Russia…in people and equipment are staggering. We know—and Russian commanders on the ground know—that their supplies and munitions are running out…. Russia’s forces are exhausted. The use of prisoners to reinforce, and now the mobilisation of tens of thousands of inexperienced conscripts, speaks of a desperate situation.”

… two things to consider…

… what will happen to the House and Senate in November is a question and Putin is surely waiting to see, probably also planning to try to put his finger on the scales…

… and…

… what is the end game?… what is Russia’s off ramp short of nuclear war?… it may be clear to intelligence officials but it certainly isn’t clear to me…

Tschabalala Self’s Poetic New Paintings Explore the Meaning of Home

… i love this painting…

https://anotherimg-dazedgroup.netdna-ssl.com/614/azure/another-prod/420/6/426784.jpg Red Room, 2022

With this playful, poetic simplicity, Self explores a plethora of social implications. What does a home symbolise? What is the role of the home in our collective consciousness? What does it mean to take a seat at the table, or to bring the domestic setting into the public sphere? “The home has two realities,” says Self. “An aspirational reality – a place of comfort, interiority and true self-expression. Then in reality it’s a place full of expectations, where people have to take on roles.”

20 new books to get you through the week.

… i stop on this one… initially i was going to blow by it because the thought of 20 books i should read in this week was ridiculously impossible… but then i stopped… because the idea was ridiculously impossible… i have so many books to read and i am not at all making progress on reading them…

On Affirmative Action, Clarence Thomas Took a Page From Malcolm X

… i looked at the headline and photograph of Justice Thomas for this article… thought about clicking on it… scrolled by… clicked… read a little… scrolled some more… returned… read the full article… the author is white… hmmm… white man explaining black man… in a favorable way in this case… still… can he be trusted?… i don’t know… at any rate… affirmative-action vs. meritocracy… well, we all know racism isn’t dead and that it informs admissions decisions and hiring practices… we all should know that racism is endemic to our culture and has systematically suppressed people of color in all kinds of ways… how do we compensate?… if not affirmative action, what other mechanism?… i understand the argument that it stigmatizes the success of an individual for it to be thought that there but for the grace of affirmative action go they… the implication being who ever they were did not deserve the success… they didn’t merit it but for the color of their skin… how do we train institutions and corporations to be color blind?… i understand the arguments against affirmative action… but… what is the better solution?… then there is the whole thing about Justice Thomas himself… even if you explain to me that he comes by his views on AA honestly, through Malcom X, how am i to overlook the anger i have with this man and his wife Ginny and the whole Roe v. Wade thing?… and the threat to undo gay marriage, the right to birth control, etc. etc. etc.?… is this a man i can look up to?… can i entertain the thought that he might be right on AA?…

Pop Goes the Weasel?

… Nick Catoggio, writing for The Dispatch, ponders the question of Putin deploying nukes… will he or won’t he… there is no rational basis to… Russia will loose far more than it will gain… the question is… will this reach the point of being an existential threat to Putin in which he and his fellow countrymen who agree with him decide that if they can’t have empire the world can’t have life… or will someone in Russia take him out?… and if they did, would the world be safe in the chaos that followed?… so… it remains a question of the end game… how do we get to checkmate and the toppling of the king without Armageddon?…

The Inevitable Indictment of Donald Trump

… as bad as i know it will be if 45 is indicted, i simply can’t imaging having any faith in the system if he isn’t… sadly, a large part of the country will have their loss of faith confirmed if he is… according to the article, we should know by next spring… fasten your seatbelts…

There’s a date on the calendar when excessive meticulousness potentially precludes holding Trump to account. On January 20, 2025, Merrick Garland might not have a job. His post could be occupied by an avatar of the hard right. And any plausible Republican president will drop the case against Donald Trump on their first day in office.

The excruciating conundrum that Garland faces is also a liberating one. He can’t win politically. He will either antagonize the right or disappoint the left. Whatever he decides, he will become deeply unpopular. He will unavoidably damage the reputation of the institution he loves so dearly with a significant portion of the populace.

Faced with so unpalatable a choice, he doesn’t really have one. Because he can’t avoid tearing America further apart, he’ll decide based on the evidence—and on whether that evidence can persuade a jury. As someone who has an almost metaphysical belief in the rule book, he can allow himself to apply his canonical texts.

July 23, 2022

…232.2 lbs…

… the dogs get me up at 3:30 AM… wanted to stay in bed till 4 but… Fiona pacing the room… i think an animal was passing through our neighbor’s yard… the other day we saw a skunk family pass through… we seem to finally have secured the perimeter of our fence so Fiona isn’t getting out and animals aren’t getting in… except for squirrels…

… H has become determined to attract humming birds to the yard… we’ve had many sightings of them this year… we have flowers in the garden they are attracted to… she wants them to come to the feeders… so far, not much activity there… we have many feeders now… she is trying to find the perfect one… i hope they come to her feeders…

… we made pizza on the green egg last night… tending a fire more bearable than i would have thought in this heat… today and tomorrow are the peak of the heat wave… high 90’s… 100 predicted for tomorrow…

a story in Hyperallergic about a mural in Queens defaced by Sony Spider Man additions and now restored

… the mural, “Queens is the Future,” created by Eve Biddle and Joshua Frankel…

https://i0.wp.com/hyperallergic-newspack.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/07/QITF-After-restoration-in-2022_Photo-by-Eve-Biddle_Courtesy-of-Eve-Biddle-and-Joshua-Frankel-scaled.jpg?resize=1568%2C1176&quality=100&ssl=1

an article about Abby Manzella, a micro fiction writer and host of Micro, a podcast… her 400 word piece, Lepidoptera, mentioned… a story about a little girl in the midst of a pandemic… she wakes up with butterfly wings one day… a paragraph about how she writes into her phone at night to get ideas off her mind… how this one emerged almost fully formed… i think, yes, i write into my phone… i have been trying to write more… this will be inspiration…

… this from Maria Popova in the Marginalian this morning…

By the time we can even begin answering for ourselves the question of whether or not is worth living, myriad things have been answered for us by the fundamental forces that have conspired into the confluence of chance that is our self. None of us choose the bodies or brains or neurochemistries we are born with, the time and place we are deposited into, the parents we are raised by, the culture we are cultured in. Any sense of choice we might have is already saturated with these chance inheritances and is therefore, as James Baldwin so astutely observed, part illusion and part vanity.1

… the post is about Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, To The Young Who Want To Die… wait another day… see what’s coming around the corner… wait another day…

… i, myself, have never been suicidal… depression is not frequent with me and never very deep… i once played with suicide, as a kid, in the basement of my parents home… i made a noose… attached it to the steel beam supporting the joists of the house and carefully lowered myself to feel the noose tighten around my neck… i had no intention of swinging from the beam… i only wanted to know what it felt like… when i think back on it, i think… what if i had slipped and hung myself… the world would have thought i was sad… there would have been no clue as to why… i would have seemed a generally happy boy… i don’t think my troubles with my father had started by then, beyond his being a strict disciplinarian… there is a short story in this… i should try to write it… something involving Schrodinger’s cat… am i alive or dead?…

an article in Mother Jones about an article in Axios that H told me about yesterday… it’s about how the MAGA group plan to remake government when they get in office… fill it with cronies… and then leave the subsequent administration with the choice of doing their own cronies make over or returning to the bureaucratic state of olden times… i think, what makes them think there will be another administration if that plan is successfully carried out?… this would be the mostly white patriarchy taking over and never letting go… this would be the end of the multiarchy… oh god, why must we contend with this shit?… 45 must never be responsible for anything in government again…

an article about Pelosi’s planned trip to Taiwan and China’s threat to retaliate “forcefully.”… there seem to be so many ways the world could go sideways right now…

another review of Nope further reinforces that i want to see it… H feels the same way…

Ukraine is winning… i read the article… i nod to its arguments… it lightens my mood a bit, but, i wonder, i still don’t see the end game where Putin retreats with tail between legs… another one that could easily go sideways…

a Jonathan Blaustein review of the photobook Kyanite Miners… i don’t share his opinion of the book… it’s slick, corporate, meant to promote the mining company… it’s competent… i don’t think it is pushing any boundaries…


… Kitchen and Coffee… the handsome bleach blond dude barista… he is less personable than the women… i wonder how women customers respond to his handsomeness?… he reminds me of a young Paul Hollywood…

… as i walk down Main Street i am thinking about writing a short story about a boy toying with a noose… i am thinking that i will write multiple stories within a story, one where the boy toys with the noose, satisfies his curiosity and then takes the noose apart and goes on with his life… another in which he slips and accidentally hangs himself… others in which various plausible scenarios play out, including that he wishes to die, is not only playing with the idea of death… could be a very interesting story…

… i am liking my return to routine and structured workflow… for so many weeks things were moving all about… i was making pictures, writing, but not in the routine and rhythmic way i am now… i have started posting titled journal entries on a daily basis… each day i publish the previous day’s entry… they are Notes On Attention Paid… each day i am posting a selection of photographs taken that day… they are also Notes On Attention Paid… it’s that simple…

… on the way here, a bunch of male sexual performance enhancement packaging on the ground… i photograph all of them… one has the words “rock hard” on it… i don’t know, sounds painful to me… anyway, i am thinking today’s image post will include a number of them, may be only them…

The starting point of infinity is always at the center, where mind resides. Behind an image there’s an image. Nothingness is Being’s foundation, put on stage by poetry, which makes the erotic and the intellect meet. It’s not life, it’s alive.2



  1. To the Young Who Want to Die: Roxane Gay Reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Lifeline of a Poem ↩︎

  2. Sea and Fog, Etel Adnan ↩︎

Using Spatial Reconstruction to Investigate Russia’s War Crimes

Spatial recognition technology is being used to investigate Russian war crimes and has been able to identify the exact site of the 1941 Babyn Yar mass executions.

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Interesting streaming if you can stand watching it with full knowledge of the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine…

Servant of the People

Netflix is now streaming two seasons of “Servant of the People,” the 2015-2018 Ukrainian comedy series created and produced by (and starring) Volodmyr Zelensky as Vasily Goloborodko, a high-school history teacher who is catapulted to the presidency of Ukraine after his profane rant against government corruption and incompetence is filmed by one of his students and goes viral on social media. This is the show, as everyone knows by now, that catapulted Zelensky himself to the presidency of Ukraine in real life.

Bullies with Nuclear Sticks

I have been struggling with depression for much of the past week and probably for much longer than that if I am honest with myself. It’s not a debilitating depression. I can get out of bed. I can pursue my routines of reading, writing, walking, picture making, picture editing, and more. Still it’s a bit like I am moving through a viscous solution as I try to do these things.

Relative to Ukrainians, I have little to be depressed or anxious about, except, I feel deeply that their existential struggle is mine too. The loss of freedom they are threatened with is a loss I am being threatened with.

One of my prime thoughts this week is that the last seven years has been a firehose-shit-stream of angering, worrisome and depressing news. The most salient feature of this news has been the steady decline of Liberalism and Democracy and the steady rise of illiberal Authoritarian tendencies within the United States and around the globe. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it put an exclamation point on this trend towards Authoritarianism.

A vast struggle has broken out into the open in a dramatic way. There is no guarantee of the outcome, though, if we can avoid World War III, I am hopeful that Putin’s aggression will end with his loss of power and serve as a rebuke to Authoritarianism everywhere.

Among the many other thoughts revolving in my head these days:

  • Will it ever be possible to have a world free of nuclear sticks?
  • Is it possible to construct a world in which bullies don’t exist or can never acquire big sticks?

In The Greeks, H. D. F. Kitto describes the golden age of the Greek Polis, the pinnacle of which occurred in Athens towards the end of the 5th century BCE and lasted for a little more than 100 years. The Polis was a reasonably well balanced democratic organization of society where everyman’s opinion mattered, everyman’s participation was expected and status depended on the “excellence” of a man, not as determined by his wealth, but as determined by his character. One cannot overlook that there was slavery, limitations on the rights of foreign citizens and that women had no rights. But among the male citizens there was a relatively small (by today’s standards) distance between the wealthiest and poorest citizen, a common education around the principles of good character as illuminated by the Homeric epics and decision making by consensus. This is the foundational example of democracy, a more inclusive form of which Liberalism pursues today.

H. D. F. Kitto writes this in The Greeks:

It is an interesting, though idle, speculation, what would be the effect on us if all our reformers, revolutionaries, planners, politicians and life-arrangers in general were soaked in Homer from their youth up, like the Greeks. They might realize that on the happy day when there is a refrigerator in every home, and two in none, when we all have the opportunity of working for the common good (whatever that is), when Common Man (whoever he is) is triumphant, though not improved – that men will still come and go like the generations of leaves in the forest; that he will still be weak, and the gods strong and incalculable; that the quality of a man matters more than his achievement; that violence and recklessness will still lead to disaster, and that this will fall on the innocent as well as on the guilty. The Greeks were fortunate in possessing Homer, and wise in using him as they did.1

The truth is that humans get enough right about how to arrange and conduct themselves such that golden ages happen now and again, but, so far, only for brief periods of time. We seem only ever to glimpse utopia, never fully achieve it.

Heraclitus came closest to an accurate description of humankind’s condition, proclaiming fire to be the foundational element of the universe and that flux is the norm. He thought wars (fire) inevitable and even necessary as a change agent. History is a churning beast and nothing lasts for very long. What is good eventually becomes bad which eventually becomes good again.

I don’t know what Heraclitus would have though if nuclear weapons existed in his day. Would he still champion fire? What do we do with a bully carrying a nuclear stick? My deepest fear and sadness at the moment is that it is conceivable to me that the nuclear stick will get used. If not this time, then sooner or later.

Bertrand Russell2 points out in The History of Western Philosophy that since the time of the pre-socratic philosophers a main endeavor of religion and philosophy in the western world has been to establish something, anything, eternal and relevant to the condition of humankind. The nuclear stick is a definitive refutation that anything eternal for humankind exists.

Enter my sadness.


  1. Kitto, H.. The Greeks (Penguin History) (p. 64). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. ↩︎

  2. It is interesting to note that Russell and Kitto both published their books in the aftermath of the Second World War and they are both, to an extent, nostalgic lamentations through the vehicle of history. ↩︎

At War with Russia

The past week has been horrid. I can barely watch the news it’s so upsetting.

My wife, on the other hand, is a news junkie. She keeps it running all day long. I suspect it is the ICU nurse in her. She is used to monitoring situations that could easily go sideways in minutes. She is used to knowing what to do if they do. I don’t think she would know what to do if the US, Nato and Russia started shooting at each other. Back in the day, when I was a kid, the advice was to duck and cover.

My wife is kindly wearing earphones during the day so I don’t have to overhear the news. At 4 PM, I emerge from my studio and we watch Nicole Wallace together on MSNBC. I can handle the news if Nicole delivers it and I have a martini in my hand.

I am very frightened. Some part of me believes it is quite possible I am going to die soon.

While on Block Island, during the first few days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I was taking sunrise walks along a stretch of beach that looked out over the Atlantic to the east. I couldn’t keep myself from imagining cruise missiles streaking past on their way to annihilating my country. So much for soothing ocean vibes.

The older I get, the more afraid of dying I am. I try not to be. I tell myself to live the moments as they come; enjoy them; revel in them. It is the better way to think of things, but of course, that is not easy.

Every night I watch interviews with brave, confident, terrified, and/or desperate Ukrainians. Some of them have been on TV successive nights. Each time I see them, I wonder, will I see them tomorrow? Or will the Russians have caught up with them? It is traumatizing to watch, even from such a distance, the horrors being inflicted on the Ukrainian people. More than a million refuges. Cities being reduced to rubble. How many dead?

A great part of my despair comes from not knowing how the world exits this situation without blowing itself up. The US and NATO have been clear and consistent in saying they will not put troops on the ground or planes in the air to help Ukraine. Everyone understands that direct combat with Russia is World War III and nobody imagines that would end well for either side or humanity in general.

But, if one arms one country against another; if one organizes the collapse of that other country’s economy; if one supplies intelligence, even if it stops short of targeting that other country’s assets; if one is doing everything one can to bring that other country to its knees; isn’t one at war with them?

Nightly, the punditry asks, what is the end game? Where is the off ramp? To date, none of them has been able to give me hope there is one.

I go on being afraid.

What Volodymyr Zelensky’s Courage Says About the West - The Atlantic

There can be something a little distasteful about Western onlookers (myself included) cheering on Ukrainians for a cause that our countries are not willing to join, a stance that risks raising the price of a peace that will be paid only with Ukrainian blood. Nevertheless, it is possible to recognize this, to be inspired by what Zelensky represents, and then to be shamed by his example.

Here is a nation and a leader willing to sacrifice so much for the principle of independence and the right to join the Western world. And yet, much of the West is jaded and cynical, apparently devoid of any such mission, cause, or sense of idealism anymore. What is it that the West believes in now? When you think of the great liberal heroes of our age, Angela Merkel and Barack Obama, say, they are actually deeply pragmatic conservatives, constantly hedging, calculating, and balancing interests with little grand vision or cause to pull their policies together. There is much to be said for this type of governance: As Helmut Schmidt, the former chancellor of West Germany, once quipped, “Whoever has visions should go to the doctor.” Visions led to the Iraq War, for example. Yet conservative pragmatism is also deeply limited, allowing adversaries like Vladimir Putin to take advantage, exploiting caution and shortsighted selfishness.

What Changed Germany’s Mind - The Bulwark

Putin’s blatant and unprovoked assault on Ukraine changed that calculus. Now, no one in their right mind could possibly blame Germany, so it is finally safe to act. Germany can play a key role as a supporter of Ukraine, both by sending arms to help the poor people in Kyiv and throughout the country and by rearming itself, as Scholz has promised to do, to meet the obvious threat from Russia.

Is anyone else struggling to feel right now?

I am. The last seven years have been extraordinarily numbing, a relentless march of spiritually draining events. I can’t remember a more difficult stretch of time in my life. Maybe during the Vietnam war? 1969 was a remarkably bad year. I was young and oblivious back then, I don’t remember thinking or feeling much about it.

For the last seven years I have been witness to the rise of populism and the dispiriting and painful march of Donald Trump to the White House. I have been witness to his even more painful and dispiriting administration. I have been witness to his efforts to steal the election, corrupt every branch of government and then conjure the January 6th riot. I have been witness to the manifest inability of our system of checks and balances to actually check and balance. I continue to witness the growing threat of authoritarianism in my country, even as we rally the world to assist the imperfect Ukrainian Democracy and decry Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian thug. And just now, a commentator on MSNBC raising the spectre of Putin spoiling for a direct confrontation with the United States and then what, nuclear war?

Apparently, nature loves to pile it on thick so lets add in the Pandemic. I have witnessed that human tragedy, lived in fear of my fellow human beings and suffered through the resulting social isolation.

As I watch the events unfold in Ukraine I have been finding it hard to generate much emotion about it.

As I pursue my artwork, I have been finding it hard to get very excited about anything I make.

I am exhausted by the times. I am exhausted by the relentless flow of dispiriting and/or threatening events both at home and abroad. I have little emotion left to expend towards anything.

Or so I thought.

And then, this morning, something remarkable happened. Tears filled my eyes as I read accounts of the incredible bravery of the Ukraines, and how the war was not going as smoothly as Russia had planed (and all our military planners and pundits had expected). As I read about how Ukrainian colors are being projected on buildings and displayed in cities around the world in solidarity; about how concerts everywhere are being opened with the Ukrainian National Anthem; about a Ukrainian boy resolutely playing the piano as the bombs fall; about Ukrainian wives, daughters, mothers, grandmothers making molotov cocktails; about 12 Ukrainian soldiers choosing death over subjugation by telling a Russian war ship to “go fuck yourself!” rather than surrender and live. Yes, tears filled my eyes.

It’s too much to hope that this will be a David and Goliath story. But, something seems to have been awakened. For myself, I realized I had begun to give up hope that authoritarianism’s relentless rise around the world was stoppable and that even in the United States we might not be able to turn it back. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine seemed destined to plunge the world into darkness that would outrun my time on the planet.

Yes, it is perhaps too much to hope that David can slay Goliath here, but the Ukrainians have given me hope even so. Their valor has brought tears to my eyes. Their example tells me yes, we can turn back tyranny. It starts by giving it a bloody nose.

In The Bulwark this morning…

… if Donald Trump continues to be enabled by the Republican party, Republican voters, and America’s conservative propaganda machines, then we may very well be led once again by this man, giving him the chance to follow through on his promise to break-up the NATO alliance and put a stake through the heart of our democracy once and for all.

… my wife is concerned about the possibility of nuclear war… i am more concerned about the above… i feel we are heading into a perfect storm of voters preferring a Trumpian alternative to the present administration…

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NATO Unity Is Put to the Test, Natalie Dowzicky, Reason.com

… my expectation is that as soon as the Winter Olympics conclude Russia will pull the trigger… Putin has too much already invested in the effort… but i am no expert…

President Joe Biden met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for the first time today to dissuade American fears that Germany is an “unreliable partner” in the possible Russia-Ukraine conflict. It’s still unclear what role the largest economy in the European Union will play if Russian forces invade Ukraine.

Previously, Germany has received harsh criticism for its “soft treatment” of Russia as its troops gather at the Ukrainian border. Until recently, Chancellor Sholz has been reluctant to clarify what exactly Germany will do if Russia invades Ukraine. Biden attempted to put that doubt to rest in a press conference on Monday by declaring, “Germany is an incredibly reliable ally.”

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The Problem with Permitting Putin’s “Sphere of Influence”, Brian Stewart, The Bulwark

Shrewd observers of U.S. foreign policy have recently claimed that the country is a superpower without a plan, but the truth is much worse: It’s increasingly apparent that America is a superpower without a coherent purpose.

By all appearances, the United States has lost faith in the global vocation it has shouldered since World War II. In the political establishment and among the general public, Americans have come to doubt the necessity of global engagement in defense of the liberal order—or, more astonishingly, even the desirability of a decent world order in the first place. This is a particular shame as well as a grave danger because the present order is very much an American creation, and it serves the national interest better than any alternative order (or disorder) that may follow the Pax Americana.