… on this last day before BI it’s the sultry waterfront for my walk… i haven’t done this one in a while… not sure i have done it since the new iPhone… an older man exercising, a young woman with a baby in a stroller, two young women having breakfast together, assorted birds chattering and whistling, traffic over the Hamilton Fish bridge distantly… i contemplate the book Superintelligent, Sam Harris book recommendation… should i get it, read it?… it is about AI getting smarter than we are, will they be kind to us when they do?… i was obsessed about this topic a few years back… H got tired of it so i let go of it, would reading this book bring the obsession back?…

… Sam Harris provides this list, Maria Popova shares it after asking if he would add some works by women to the list to correct for it’s initial exclusive focus on works by Men…

… i have read one book on the list, so perhaps my summer project will be to read the other eleven…

People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.¹

… the idea of saying yes to life immediately takes my mind to Camu’s Myth of Sisyphus, in which the opening salvo is a meditation on the most fundamental philosophical question of them all, To Be, Or Not To Be… that being the question… most of us say yes to life, but i read Sylvia Plath, who did not, and look at the photos of Francesca Woodman, who did not… i look poised to stay with life to the end, bitter or otherwise… my bigger question at the moment is whether i am happy, and if i am not, what i will do to be happier…

… Maria Popova sends me down this RH this morning… a post on James Baldwin quickly links to another post on Sam Harris talking about free will… she quotes this from his book on the subject…

The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment — most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high.¹

… the thought leaps through my mind, i wonder if the troubles we cause ourselves are all because so many of us believe we are free agents in the cosmos?…

… last night H told me L might come out while we are on BI, something about seeing M, a friend, who will be on the island too… H told me about an evening out with the two of them and feeling like a third wheel… it got me to thinking that we need to find ways to have adventures, do some actual planning and execution… i don’t mind my and our daily routines, but one needs to break out of them now and again, do something non routine, confirm you are alive… the reason we don’t is that they always seem to require planning that neither H nor I can overcome inertia to do, except in certain circumstances, like picking up a new dog… that was our last adventure, Fiona at the start of the pandemic…

… Buddy Willard proposes, Esther demurs… well, so far, the chapter jumps oddly to skiing and a broken leg, Buddy plays the part of fatherly ski instructor then doctor… does this mean she will un-demure?… i find the scene descriptions a little forced, overwrought… H said it is depressing, i am wondering when i will get to the depressing bits, unless you count hurtling towards a life of wifely banality depressing, which it could be… if that is what we are heading for, it is uncertain at present…

… last night we watched a newish series, The Underground… it depicted in the most horrific way, the brutality of slave owners towards slaves, including the whipping and burning of one slave while the slave owners partied and danced… i did not watch the first episode to the end and it is doubtful i will watch another one… i just don’t want that sort of brutality seared on my brain, though i am sure that was the intent of the creators, that we know what the experience of slaves was, that we experience the appropriate amount of guilt and shame… i believe black and brown people were horrifically mistreated then and continue to be mistreated today… i believe it is wrong to treat black and brown people as anything less than equals… i am on board with reparations… i have little interest in being bludgeoned with a truth that changes little in the way i think, because i am already mostly there… and those who might need to shift their thinking on race in big ways are unlikely to watch it or change if they do… what is the point?…

…seen along the way…

… the day is already hot though humidity is low, a blessing… i will put the AC units in their windows and we will crank them up…

… i read a thread about a divisive keynote speach at the Red Hook, NY VFW on Memorial day… it is horrible… curiously, in the comments there is a Jon Galt commenting a lot… i know that name i think to myself… oh yeah, Who Is John Galt? of Atlas Shrugged fame… i look at his facebook page, pretty left wing… odd…

… an article on why every statue should be taken down…

This statue obsession mistakes adulation for history, history for heritage and heritage for memory. It attempts to detach the past from the present, the present from morality, and morality from responsibility. In short, it attempts to set our understanding of what has happened in stone, beyond interpretation, investigation or critique.¹

… i like monuments and, as the article suggests, i don’t so much like them for the history they may or may not teach me, i like having landmarks in the landscape to navigate by… every monument is one group of individuals idea of what or who is important to remember and given that there are all kinds of groups of individuals that have different ideas about what is memorable, there seems actually to be a lack of monuments in the landscape…

… given that we are entering an era where we can virtually place monuments in the landscape, perhaps we could have a program that corrects the deficiency… one could personalize their monument landscape, just as one makes a play list for a trip, one would make a monument list for their journeys, daily or otherwise… there could be a monument top 100, identifying the relevant monument the most people preferred for a given site… we could then take down all the old analog monuments and do something else with the space…

As American As Apple Pie – Amy Sherald © Amy Sherald, Hauser & Wirth Photo: Joseph Hyde

… an article on Amy Sherald, Michelle Obama portrait artist, painting the American lives of black people…

Each person’s identity is revealed only through visual cues and objects familiar to contemporary American life, for instance, the Barbie logo, denim, surfboards, a picket fence, and – in one case – a convertible. It’s all to “reinforce their inseparable connection to the nation’s historical and cultural fabric, and to reconstruct conceived notions and reinforce the multiplicities of Black American life”.¹

… the tension of growing up Black and Brown American, having dreams of an American life that any of the rest of us have, but knowing that for a large section of white America, you are not entitled to the realization of those dreams…

… an article on the sensual photography of men and sculptures of men by Magnum photographer Herbert List… i am not into the depiction of the male body sexually, so i view the images with a certain detachment that i don’t have when viewing depictions of female bodies, where viewing is always sexually charged… List photographed during the Second World War… he had little opportunity to exhibit or publish during his lifetime… looking at the images, i imagines him traveling through the Greek Isles and surrounding himself with youthful, heavenly bodies wherever he went…

… i think about writing the character of a woman and whether i could do it or not and something inside me suggests to myself that i could… probably a delusional something inside me, after all, how can a man write a woman without the experience of having been one?…

… about Constantine taking her to lunch and her own inadequacies, which are legion… this chapter all about what nice girls do and don’t do, while she decides not to be a nice girl anymore… this chapter is about the place of women in the lives of men and our heroine does not like it… to wit…

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.¹

… sadly, she never has sex with Constantine… if SP lived in the current time, there would have been sex… and our heroine would not have been a virgin either…

… called R yesterday for their birthday, they were very happy i did, i resolved to call more often…

… the heat wave has begun, we slept without AC last night, probably the last time till the end of summer… dogs were restless, i think they were too hot, me too…

… Heather Cox Richardson with a rare full Sunday post… apparently there is definitive proof that 45 tried to get the Justice Department to intervene in the election… kind of knew that, but i guess proof is proof… i remember hoping, as we came down the stretch to the election, that his efforts to infiltrate and subvert every branch of government would fall short… barely, as it turned out… there is still reason to worry unfortunately…

… prep for departure will intensify today, need to set up the checkoff list today…

… birds singing madly… i remember one summer between years at college, i worked at the Ford assembly plant in Mahwah, NJ… i was on day shift… i had to be up with the birds… i hated the dawn chorus that summer…

… on C-SPAN? i said, having no idea why i might be on C-SPAN… i looked it up and sure enough, i appear twice… this was during the time i was President of the New York Society for Ethical Culture… we donated the auditorium to groups conducting programs in tune with our mission, and the President (me) got to introduce NYSEC to the (hopefully) large audience… here is a program put on by The Nation Magazine on Scott Ritter’s then new book Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change…

… another stop along the way…

… Fishkill Creek and the Roundhouse… when we got here 15 years ago, the building was unused and deteriorated… it is now a high end restaurant and hotel… Beacon has held its own during the pandemic…

… walked to Bob’s Corner Store… there are benches in shade, hikers arrive in the parking lot to climb Mt. Beacon… this is the more arduous approach, i use the Pocket Road trail approach mostly known to locals… nicer walk, fewer people… an image of Mt. Beacon i made earlier on the walk…

…photographs by Peter Hujar and Moyra Davey… review by Jorg Colberg… i have seen a number of reviews of this book, all of them good…

Jena Westra, from Afternoons

… Brad Feuerhelm gives this book a highest recommendation, stating that it is as near perfect a photobook as could be… i recognize the name of the artist which makes it likely i’ve run across the work before…

In the case Jenna Westra’s Afternoons (Hassla, 2020), several factors within the book suggest a return to the body as an act less of political dialogue, but more as an act of balance. Westra employs gesture and a number of interesting sculptural tactics to create a world where the feminine is embraced without men involved at all and unlike Girl Pictures, the emphasis is not on fantasy, but on reality, collaboration, and intimacy.¹

… the book is about the shape and form of women… young women… it feeds my rabbit hole… i ordered it…

… just reviewed the last day or two of my Notes On Attention Paid blog… i like everything i wrote… i am encouraged to continue, and maybe share occasionally on other SM platforms…

… a long post by JB on going home… lots of pics, lots of quick stories, family, friends, food, a travelog… riffing with pictures, none of it trying to be too, or even at all, profound, just normal shit that people do when they visit home in NJ… his low craft post made me think a little about this blog… what am i doing with it?… why am i doing it at all?… it feels right, i like doing it, but there is very little notice paid… JB has a group of fans like me that will look at what he writes every week… i keep trying to not want fans, but don’t succeed… we all want fans, don’t we?… even when we pretend we don’t… anyone so secure in their skin that they can say they don’t need or want fans probably has lots of them…

… morning flow not as i prefer, kitchen not clean, coffee not set up, urgent bathroom needs…

… desire for new desk pad because my new mouse sticks to the desk surface, making it frustrating to use… i order a new one from Amazon, will be here tomorrow, near instant gratification… while i am at it, i order a birthday gift card for R, now have to think about something for C too… still a million things to do before leaving for BI…

… been feeling exhausted lately, not unable to function, but kind of spent… been feeling very much like the pollen in the air is getting to me, draining me with histamine reaction… not usually much of an allergy sufferer, the occasional bad year though… this seems to be one of those…

… hot today, the window ACs will have to be hauled up from the basement… we got a long way without needing them… the first heat wave of the season on its way…

… train horns in the distance, freight train coming through… this side of the river?, it seems so close… happens sometimes, usually other side of river… this is the commuting train side…

… doing our civic duty by doing an absentee ballot…

…transwoman trainee, training staff struggling with appropriate pronoun… i am wondering about how she/they are being received…

… as i am walking i remember in this morning’s chapter of The Bell Jar, a picture of a woman is described, a black spot on her face, four months later she is dead it is explained… we are not told what it was but i know and i hurried on and tried to forget… i need a skin exam to be scheduled with my doctor, i am way overdue…

… i also thought that i need to rearrange my Z meeting with J, as we need to absentee vote today so it is done…

… i think that the expected rain has not materialized and the garden will need tending… i am glad we are setting up a watering system…

… the sounds of Fishkill Creek burble gurgle by… birds calling back and forth… i am alive in this moment…