20220130-01

230.0 lbs

… as much as i laid around and did nothing yesterday… as much as i snacked… still a little bit of weight is lost… my fears not realized…

… yesterday started off ok, some good reading and thinking… but somewhere in the early afternoon it drove off a cliff… i just sat around and did nothing… but watch some tv… i don’t do nothing well… i need to be occupied…

… we did get a number of episodes of Foundation out of the way… good series… except… can i just say that i am growing really tired of the current fashion of story telling?… which is not to tell stories in linear fashion but to jump backwards and forwards in time leaving one to pick up the threads and weave them together…

… is it a device to cloak a weak story line?…

… the story telling fashion of the moment?…

… the result of a massively confused society?…

Alright, sci-fi fans… Foundation on Apple TV!

Reading: The Greeks by H.D.F. Kitto 📚 … just finished reading the sixth chapter… this book is so well written and completely engrossing… the sixth chapter concerns early Classical Greece and focuses on the Ionians, Spartans and Athenians… Athens is especially interesting for the way in which its widely admired culture came about… … if i have any complaint, and this might be more appropriate to direct to Greek culture of the time than to the author of this book, it’s that women are mostly absent from the history… i am about half way through the book, so i suppose it is possible a woman or two will figure into the picture somewhere… … even so, it is a fascinating book, easy to read, and has much to ponder in relation to the current political and cultural churning in the United States and around the World…

Walked over the Beacon/Newburgh bridge this AM…

On Boxing a Statue of Columbus

… this from Hyperallergic…

Hiding in plain sight, the box obscures a vast legacy of inequality without undoing it. It removes the most visible source of conflict without addressing the root causes. (The court order for the box to remain in place even cited its necessity for public safety reasons.) The box covers up the past without directly addressing it.

… more here

From The Greeks, Kitto, H

… i have been reading this book to follow up on thoughts developed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance… the principal idea of ZAMM is that there was a time when the Greeks were centered on “Quality,” as Pirsig would put it, or “Virtue,” as we might phrase it, or “Excellence,” as the Greeks put it through their word Aretê… Pirsig argues that there was a place in time when the Greeks stopped striving for Aretê… this was when the Sophists came on the scene… Pirsig, i think, believes the Sophists were the last to honor and teach Quality, Virtue, Excellence… reading ahead, i currently believe that Kitto thinks the Sophists were the ones who robbed the Greeks of their commonly understood and expressed sense of Aretê… they did this because they were itinerant teachers for hire, and the wealthy hired them to give themselves and their children an advantage in the world, which began to separate the Polis into those who could afford ‘higher’ education and those who could not and the commonly held concept of Aretê was lost… in this passage, Kitto speculates what might be if our Polis had something akin to Homer, The Iliad, and The Odyssey to base their common understanding of Virtue, Excellence and Quality on…

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

… on this point, i think Pirsig is in agreement…

Recent additions to Flattened Cans… more here…

Cass Corridor

Brenda Goodman, “Tomorrow Promise” (2017) on view at Simone DeSousa Gallery in Detroit (image courtesy Simone DeSousa Gallery)

… this article on the Cass Corridor movement out of Detroit is very interesting… i especially like the work of Brenda Goodman…

Dom Marker…

… really like this photographer… channels Nathan Lyons, Saul Leiter, and Lee Friedlander… i think his photographs are a little too obvious sometimes, some staged in awkward ways… but overall, a very interesting eye… see his work here and here…

Recent addition to my flattened can series…

Fiona

We had a major upset last night.

While we were eating dinner, our dog Fiona got hold of one of my wife’s cabled knitting needles. By the time we discovered it she had done quite a bit of damage to said needle, including having chewed the cable up into little pieces. My wife gathered up all the pieces she could find and couldn’t account for what she estimated to be about 4" of cable.

Uh-oh… this was a worry worthy situation. One of my wife’s worst fears is that one of our dogs would ingest something that causes a bowl obstruction. A doggie life threatening situation.

Now, we have had doggie companions from the beginning of our relationship a couple of decades ago. As the man says in the Farmer’s Insurance commercials, “we’ve seen a thing or two.” Like the time one of our dogs got into the pill stash of a friend that was staying with us and downed a bunch of anti-depressants. Or the time when another of our dogs became paralyzed in her hind quarters for no apparent reason. Both situations required mad dashes to animal emergency hospitals. Both turned out well in the end. And through both, we managed to keep our heads about us quite well in spite of our worry.

That’s why it was so surprising (in retrospect) that we both proceeded to have complete meltdowns. Me, who’s major super power is the ability to keep a clear head in the most difficult situations, erupting into a fit of rage at my wife for leaving the cabled needle where the dog could get it. She, in ex-ICU nurse fashion assuming the worst and, in non ex-ICU nurse fashion, having a near panic attack about it. Me, completely unable to deal with my wife’s near panic attack. Fiona, sweet dog that she is, wondering what all the fuss was about.

I eventually escaped with the dogs to bed. My wife stayed up and stewed about things. I have no idea when she came to bed.

When we talked this morning we both realized that we had been overwhelmed by the situation in a way that was new and unexpected. We realized that, as well as we think we have been coping with the pandemic and its knock on effects, the horrid Political situation and winter, we aren’t.

Neither one of us has much coping reserve left.

It’s almost 24 hours later. So far, Fiona is just fine. In another 24 hours we can probably stop worrying at all.

As for us? We’ve started to strategize on how to recharge our empty coping reserves.

Week 02 Image Poem

Week 03 Image Poem…

… sitting here procrastinating about going out to walk and make pictures… it’s only 2 degrees F out… going to be like this for the next week… i will, however, persist… just need to get my inner warmth going…

The Disunited States of America: Gripping Photos of a Country in Crisis, Abigail Ronner, AnOther

FXCK July 4th: Rally cultivating change from injustice and police brutality toward women and LGBTQ+, Atlanta, Georgia, 2020

“Was the violence ‘structural’ – the result of an intersecting and overlapping complex of institutional practices: the tradition of armed police; the prevalence of mayhem in the mass media; the refusal of Congress to pass tough gun-control legislation despite the menace of one hundred million privately owned handguns, shotguns and rifles? Finally, was the society by nature violent?”

… hard to believe those words were presented as part of an exhibition in 1969… they are re-presented in a new exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London…

America in Crisis

… i was reading up on the Ancient Greek philosophers this morning… this quote from Heraclitus stood out…

“Although this Word is common, the many live as if they had a private understanding”¹

… the Word is a kind of universal truth that Heraclitus believed all people had access to although he didn’t think most people were capable of seeing it and, as a result, operated according to their personal truths… it seems people have been living in their own private Idahos for some time…

…and since Heraclitus was an influence on Plato, i was thinking this line of thinking might have inspired the famous Cave analogy?…

From my Nikon today…

… for a long time i have been photographing with my iPhone exclusively… the urge to use the Nikon came on me this morning, so i did… it is interesting… the Nikon favors the horizontal image whereas the iPhone favors the vertical image… the effects of your equipment on your production…

A bit of snow today…

Photos from this morning…

… Letters From an American this morning is rich in details on the difference between the MAGA Republican agenda and the Democratic agenda… between the accomplishments of the Biden Administration and the what?… moral depravity of the MAGA Republicans?… it ends with a note that yesterday was the first day of early voting in Georgia… almost twice as many voters voted as in the 2018 election… dare i hope that this favors Democrats?…

… from How to Cherish Your Human Condition: The Poetic Naturalist Loren Eiseley on the Meaning of Life #science #meaning #maria-popova #loren-eiseley #human-condition

Through how many dimensions and how many media will life have to pass? Down how many roads among the stars must man propel himself in search of the final secret? The journey is difficult, immense, at times impossible, yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it… We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.

… will we ever know what life means?… or is that a silly question?… do we loose the ground we seek to gain by consciously attempting to gain it?… or will we (humans), one day know?…

… Anna May Wong Becomes the First Asian Americn on US Currency…

Beginning next Monday, October 24, the United States Mint will begin making quarters imprinted with the face of Anna May Wong, commonly regarded as Hollywood’s first Chinese-American movie star. She will be the first Asian-American person to be honored on any US currency.

… Why Does the Art World Hate Fat People?… the curator of an art show centered on fat artists dealing with the subject of being fat in a culture that abhors fatness writes about her experience…

Curating this show requires not only urgent and caring attention to artworks and artists but also to the living ecology of communities that exist within the radical fat liberation discourse being created between the artists in the show, between myself and the artists, and between the artworks and the audience.

… as i read the article i wonder about all the identities that are stepping forward to claim space and acknowledgement in the “multiarchy,” as i like to call it… the multiarchy is what is struggling now with the patriarchy for control of the country… and the struggle is in part about the right of marginalized peoples to have a seat at the table… it gets confusing and a little tiresome sometimes to listen to and acknowledge all those voices, but it is much more positive in the long run… and anyway, i am borderline obese, have been for much of my adult life… i don’t think of myself as being almost obese, but there we are… is there a scale running from perfect weight, to overweight to obese to fat?… are we ever happy with ourselves, regardless of our place on the weight spectrum?… do we have a right to be?…

… Why Family Isn’t Everything–And How We Can Create More Liberatory Alternatives…

… who doesn’t wonder if family life is all it is cracked up to be?… the author suggests that the capitalist underpinnings of the ideal family unit should be undone, and that we should opt for intergenerational communities of shared labor and love… why this would be any less complicated and messy than the nuclear family unit, i don’t know… what the author is really attacking is capitalism, and doing so through what she believes is its foundational unit, the nuclear family… her suggested replacement is more akin to a complete socialism, even communism… the broad point is that capitalism makes few of us truly happy… i don’t disagree with that point… perhaps it is time for a new vision… i am not sure she makes a compelling case for an alternative, at least in the excerpt linked which i quote liberally from below… but i am intrigued by the effort to reconsider the situation and wonder if the case made for an alternative is better than the rehashing of socialist/communist tropes that haven worked in the past…

Those who breezily deploy it forget that there is a “whole substructure of sacrifices, repressions, suppressions, choices made or forgone, chances taken or lost, balancings of greater and lesser evils,” at the foundation of familial happiness. They ignore “the tears, the fears, the migraines, the injustices, the censorships, the quarrels, the lies, the angers, the cruelties.”

What if _unhappy_ families are all alike, in a structural sense, because _the_ family is a miserable way to organize care—whereas happy ones are miraculous anomalies?

The family is an ideology of work. In the early twenty-first century, as Oster shamelessly details, its credo has become the optimization (via violin-playing and other forms of so-called human capital investment) of a population of high-earning, flexible entrepreneurs.

Realist and gothic traditions alike view family as a field of howling boredom, aching lack, unhealed trauma, unspeakable secrets, buried hurts, wronged ghosts, “knives out,” torture attics, and peeling wallpaper. Yet in “cli fi” and related representations of national emergencies and the apocalypse, authors insist on family as the core relationship we will _need_ to rely on, when all else is stripped away.

Think of the menacing domestic interiors, hostile kitchen appliances, creepy children, murderous kin, and claustrophobic hellscapes of your favorite horror flick. In slasher, home-invasion, and feminist horror canons, the narrative pretends to worry nationalistically about external threats to the family while, in fact, indulging every conceivable fantasy of dismembering and setting fire to it from within.

Together, we can invent accounts of human “nature,” and ways of organizing social reproduction, that are not just economic contracts with the state, or worker training programs in disguise. Together, we can establish consensus-based modes of transgenerational cohabitation, and large-scale methods for distributing and minimizing the burdens of life’s work.

… that will be it for today… we are off to the mainland and have an early ferry to catch…

From this morning…

Some photos from yesterday…

… all photos taken at or near the shore of the Hudson River in Beacon, NY… the temperature at the time was 0 degrees F… in the parking lot there was a couple having sex in their car…

Some photos from the past week…