How an Angry Woman In Baltimore Almost Killed the Jazz Age
Young women who dance to jazz, eventually move on to other pursuits—where “automobiles are used as ‘apartments on wheels’.” But that was hardly necessary, because the female jazz fan, “letting the desire of the moment sway her,” soon “takes a visit to a man’s apartment or hotel room.”
It turns out that the malfunction of the Ego string trimmer I returned last week was the universe telling me I’d rather have the Makita string trimmer I replaced it with. I like it better in every way.
From yesterday…
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
… in the past couple of years, there have been emergent family issues, my father’s death, your mother’s struggling heart, my mother’s move… in these times, one or both of us packs up the habits and carries them to the place of need…
My wife loves the label… she liked the wine too…
Apparently, with ChatGPT, they have succeeded in replicating the left hemisphere of the brain…
It is the left hemisphere, which does not understand narrative, not the right, that wholly makes up ‘stories’ to fit circumstances it does not understand. Michael Gazzaniga calls it the interpreter precisely because of this propensity confidently to make up something, plausible or not, to explain a set of circumstances it cannot account for.
— The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist a.co/hm9ywoP
In Praise of the Dancing Body — RITONA // A Beautiful Resistance
In our time, models for the body are the computer and the genetic code, crafting a dematerialized, dis-aggregated body, imagined as a conglomerate of cells and genes each with her own program, indifferent to the rest and to the good of the body as a whole.
In Praise of the Dancing Body — RITONA // A Beautiful Resistance
Daily contact with nature was the source of a great amount of knowledge reflected in the food revolution that took place especially in the Americas prior to colonization or in the revolution in sailing techniques. We know now, for instance, that the Polynesian populations used to travel the high seas at night with only their body as their compass, as they could tell from the vibrations of the waves the different ways to direct their boats to the shore.
In Praise of the Dancing Body — RITONA // A Beautiful Resistance
Capitalism was born from the separation of people from the land and its first task was to make work independent of the seasons and to lengthen the workday beyond the limits of our endurance… we stress the economic aspect of this process, the economic dependence capitalism has created on monetary relations, and its role in the formation of a wage proletariat. What we have not always seen is what the separation from the land and nature has meant for our body…
In Praise of the Dancing Body — RITONA // A Beautiful Resistance
Capitalism was not the first system based on the exploitation of human labor. But more than any other system in history, it has tried to create an economic world where labor is the most essential principle of accumulation. As such it was the first to make the regimentation and mechanization of the body a key premise of the accumulation of wealth. Indeed, one of capitalism’s main social tasks from its beginning to the present has been the transformation of our energies and corporeal powers into labor-powers.
And, tomato and watermelon salad…
Small Is Beautiful is divided into four parts: “The Modern World”, “Resources”, “The Third World”, and “Organization and Ownership”.
In the first chapter, “The Problem of Production”, Schumacher argues that the modern economy is unsustainable. Natural resources (like fossil fuels), are treated as expendable income, when in fact they should be treated as capital, since they are not renewable, and thus subject to eventual depletion. He further argues that nature’s resistance to pollution is limited as well.
Growing one’s own food and not being reliant on capitalist exchange are exactly the conditions peasants were in before being forced off the land and into the factories. Of course, not everyone’s got a family farm to return to (I don’t), but a revolutionary politics urging for land return and redistribution is exactly what resistance to capitalism initially looked like. Maybe it can again.
For Arendt, the case of Rahel is also exemplary of an entire age in that two forms of necessary courage collide in her situation. On the one hand there is the progressive courage to use one’s own intelligence, and so to define oneself as a creature of reason. But there is also the courage required to acknowledge that this attempt at self-creation is always contingent on historical and cultural conditions, from which no individual can fully escape.
Making pesto in a mortar and pestle… it’s a little work but the flavor is more intense…
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
… there is, of course, the occasional afternoon or evening trip to the movie house, friends for dinner, the odd cultural event… these things splash into the lake of our habits, compressing, expanding, canceling, here and there and there… the ripples shape and mold the time and space and matter around us… it takes time for attenuation to settle things back into the placid calm of the habitual…
Importantly, Evans insists – along with Marx – that the only class that could actually affect any real revolution is the proletariat. When the petite bourgeoisie agitate for change, they always stop short of revolution because they have too much to lose. The proletariat, on the other hand, by definition has nothing to lose and everything to gain. However, since the only class allied with them currently is a generally conservative class (the old petite bourgeoisie), any revolution that would happen would not be a leftist one.
From this morning’s walk…
Modern society has a lot in common with a schizophrenic patient…
As people become more like machines, machines become more like people–both in the modern world and in schizophrenia. Schizophrenic individuals often seem to inhabit the ‘uncanny valley’–a term that virtual reality and video game designers use to refer to that unsettling, liminal realm in which one is uncertain whether something or someone is alive or dead, real or unreal.
— The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist a.co/aU3khC6
Apparently it’s time to start thinking about my Halloween decorations…
From Caliban and the Witch I learned that capitalism reorganized peasant labor away from a more egalitarian split amongst men and women to one that emphasized men as laborers and women as the producers (through the womb) and caretakers of laborers. This system has prevailed since that time. Today, laborers are not exclusively men, as strength is no longer a job requirement in large swaths of the job market, and the womb is no longer required to produce laborers (think robotics and AI). This is a massive shift in the dynamics of the system. — Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
… this is how we dance, you and i, moving from solo to duet to solo again, in a continuous flow of the habitual…
From today…
… this article kind of blew me away… i think i saved half of it in quotes to Drafts…
Dark forces in society were intentionally “making men weak.” Transgender people lived in a “delusion.” The fight for gay rights was “corrupting the minds of youth.” It could all be summed up in a catchphrase: “reject degeneracy, embrace masculinity.”
About Habit :: Essays On Attention Paid
… we sit and eat, sometimes wrapped in our thoughts, sometimes in steady conversation… some days, you tell me you had a bad dream… i have learned not to ask for the details… i find your bad dreams too disturbing…