The weather app keeps promising rain… the skies keep disappointing…
From this morning’s walk…
Day 7 of the 1000 words of summer challenge and I am almost at 7k words… catching up after having missed the first day. Having fun with this!
All five accordion books for an upcoming show now completed. Now for the slipcases…
New addition to the everyday mandala series…
June 21, 2023 - by Heather Cox Richardson
Owen Tucker-Smith of the Los Angeles Times noted that in the past 40 years, the House has censured just five people: Paul Gosar (R-AZ) in 2021 for tweeting a video showing a character with his face killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and attacking President Biden, Charles Rangel (D-NY) in 2010 for finance violations, Gerry Studds (D-MA) and Dan Crane (R-IL) in 1983 for sexual misconduct with House pages, and now Schiff.
June 21, 2023 - by Heather Cox Richardson
Last night’s story got weirder, though, because Alito waded into it to attack ProPublica for their reporting. The reporters had reached out to the justice last week to get his side of the story. Yesterday, Alito’s office told the authors he had no comment and then several hours later–before the ProPublica story dropped–Alito published in the Wall Street Journal an op-ed “prebuttal” of what was to come. It was titled: “ProPublica Misleads Its Readers.”
From this morning’s walk…
The consequence was that the more complex her (Joni Mitchel) albums became, the more they were loved by jazz nerds like myself, but not by the general public. It was a curious paradox: the better her music became, the less popular it was.
My book trimming station…
Smaller Is Beautiful :: Essays On Attention Paid
Presently, there is a crisis among the men and women of the mostly white patriarchy in my country. They are refusing to make room for people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people. They are insisting on extreme restrictions to the rights of women to manage their fertility. They are unwilling to make themselves smaller to be part of something larger.
From this morning’s walk…
There is also a crisis in our global economic system which is incapable of constraining itself to be in a sound relationship with the planet we depend on. A pathological relationship emerges when one part of a whole insists on being bigger at the continuous expense of other parts of the whole.
Apparently I was equal parts productive and creative with my screen time yesterday, and only a little bit distracted by social media…
Smaller Is Beautiful :: Essays On Attention Paid
To be in an intimate relationship, we necessarily have to make ourselves smaller in many ways. We have to make room for that other person. It’s not considerate to leave our clothes strewn all over the bedroom or our dishes undone in the sink, or to expect whatever we want whenever we want it. We have to make ourselves smaller to be in that intimate relationship. But, as most of us have experienced, there is great benefit to being in a good relationship.
Did you know that the two most reliable predictors of intelligence are reaction time and color discernment?
The reality is there’s no justification for today’s extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top. Or for how little people at the bottom are paid.
Are we talking Story of O bad things? Bonnie and Clyde bad things? Or Thelma and Louise bad things?
From this morning’s walk…
I have decided to pursue the 1K Words of Summer Challenge… three straight days of 1K words or more! From this AM’s just do it email.
I am pregnant. I am stuck, against my will but with my consent, in a liminal space between two concrete phases of my life: childfree and childed. And it strikes me how similar this feeling is to being in the big swampy middle of a writing project. Writers talk a lot about beginnings and endings, but 90% of our time is spent in this watery space of creation between nothingness and a completed world. We are gods shaping the clay.
Hmmm…
The scientific world-view, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial people … Today we have no difficulty freeing logic from concrete referents and reasoning about purely hypothetical situations. People were not always thus.
— The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist a.co/jjOzFH9
… the microbiologist Brian Ford writes that ‘to equate such data-rich digital operations with the infinite subtlety of life is absurd’, since intelligence in life operates
”on informational input that is essentially Gestalt and not digital. [Living systems] can construct conceptual structures out of non-digital interactions rather than the obligatory digitized processes to which binary information computing is confined.”
— The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist a.co/41ZasuV
From this morning’s walk…
Smaller Is Beautiful :: Essays On Attention Paid
“So,” she said, “I have to make myself smaller for you? I’ve been making myself smaller for other people my entire life.” Yup, this is not about the jar or the bathing suit. At this point I felt it best to leave things alone for a while. We come to these impasses from time to time. We generally get through them in 24 hours or so, after we’ve had time to cool down and back away from whatever deep-seated trauma was expressing itself in the moment. And that is how it went.
The Paris Review - On Cormac McCarthy - The Paris Review
What connection do I have with the landscapes he conjures? What knowledge do I have of the kind of violence that is the subject and the fabric of many of his books? What place do I find in a world that is, among other things, nearly entirely masculine, hostile, rife with true desperation? The answer is none—unlike with much of my reading, I do not seek a mirror in McCarthy’s worldview—and yet there is something in its aesthetic articulation that has always resonated with me.