Jeremy

Reading requires time, patience, openness, and attention to create a sacred space in which your mind can exist among words. Live like you are reading the world.

My grandfather, 1945, Germany.

Today’s amazing word is “gallimaufry” (n) - A jumble or hodgepodge.

Pisgah National Forest

For many years now, I’ve observed Black Friday by spending zero money.

A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.

• Lester Bangs, Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, 1975

Sitting damp on the porch and drinking beer, watching Hurricane Zeta arrive here in southeast Louisiana. Inhabiting “the now” because everything else clamoring for my attention is irrelevant against the wind and rain. Hurricane is all there is; a strange but welcome respite.

Inquiline (n) - An animal that characteristically lives commensally in the nest, burrow, or dwelling place of an animal of another species.

I like living on the edge of the world.

Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the internet or watch too much television lose it.

Werner Herzog

On this day in 1940, Polish underground resistance soldier Witold Pilecki was voluntarily captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz to gather and smuggle out information on the camp. He escaped 30 months later, and was executed by the Soviet-backed Polish government in 1948.

Pleonasm (n): The use of more words than are required to express an idea; redundancy. As in the man he said.

It’s a one-horse two-bit third-rate town with just a four way stop and a five and dime

Today I learned about diglossia, a situation in which two dialects or languages are used by a single language community. Examples include Arabic, Chinese, and ancient Latin communities.

I often find myself in a Tom Waits mood, the world feeling strange, dark, and beautiful.

Today I learned about Müllerian mimicry, “in which species with strong defences evolve to resemble one another. By mimicking similarly coloured species, the warning signal to predators is shared, causing them to learn more quickly at less of a cost to each of the species.”

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Fernando Pessoa

Today I learned about Henry Wickham, an “explorer” and braggart who, in 1876, smuggled rubber seeds out of Brazil to Kew Gardens in England, who in turn used them to grow rubber in Asia, collapsing the Brazilian economy: “The greatest act of biopiracy…maybe in history.”

That sad feeling I get when the person I‘m talking to has nothing to say that isn’t in the news? I’m finally understanding it as a call to compassion: we’re all so addled, trying so hard in the face of all this. If you have any mental/emotional space, please lend it to others.

At the wind’s mercy, \ Alone, each leaf will tremble; \ Together, they roar.

What if the highway is not an entitlement or a competition, but a joint agreement to facilitate the risky and trying business of travel, the way roads of all kinds tend to be?

Paul Simon: Late in the Evening, 1980. pandora.app.link/9cPOt3LPu…

Prolepsis (n) - The representing of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so. As in he was a dead man before he entered.

It is decidedly difficult to tell a lie when you don’t know the truth.

Péter Esterházy, from this article full of his amazing sentences

My favorite six word story was written by Kurt Cobain:

Here we are now entertain us.

Today, after hearing Journey’s “Faithfully” on the radio, I went into my old mp3 library and rediscovered Girl Talk’s amazing album “Feed the Animals,” which is just…wow. For extra fun, follow along with the sample list on the wiki.

Sometimes I like to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and imagine what Indiana Jones would have passed the time thinking about on that long, wet trip across the Mediterranean, clinging to the conning tower of a U-boat.

I can’t be the only one who frequently confuses Maynard James Keenan and John Maynard Keynes, right? I mean… it’s understandable. Right?

A Public Space has long (and patiently) kindled my engagement with the human experience, and this is no exception: lets read #tolstoytogether. Yes, of course I’m doing it.

My fidget spinner is actually a rocking chair, a beer, and a book.

This is a great summary of New York Apartment, an online art project commissioned by The Whitney that just absorbed a surprising portion of my evening.

What if one day wearing a face mask in public becomes so common that facial recognition is abandoned as a surveillance technology? Dystopias are jealous, after all.

Sitting at my kitchen table drinking beer and looking up all the different Cajun words for “drunk” in my trusty Dictionary of Louisiana French. Happy Mardi Gras from South Louisiana, where people have been tchaquéed for days now!

On this day in 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, clearing the way for the incarceration of 112,000 Japanese Americans in prison camps.

In a world where everyone shouts as loudly as they can every last thing that crosses their minds, the most radical thing one can do is be quiet and listen and do the work without stopping to advertise it.

(I find I’m reading for shorter stretches of time these days because I keep getting distracted by new words)

Check out this fantastic word: autochthonous au·toch·tho·nous (ô-tŏk′thə-nəs) adjective: 1. Originating or formed in the place where found; indigenous: autochthonous rocks; an autochthonous people; autochthonous folk tales. (American Heritage Dictionary App)

They call it a remote control cause it’s always far away from wherever you are.

Sometimes I’m upset that I didn’t grow up to be a lexicologist, not in the least because¹ the idea has only recently occurred to me.

I Don’t Need Anything From Here

Pro tip: Everyone might seem afraid of everyone else but most everybody is actually super nice.

Today while researching ways to get oil out of an old wood chest, I ran across this helpful thread on the Practical Machinist forums and fell down an amazing rabbit hole over there. Reminded me of this: My Safe Space in a Polarized Internet Is an Off-Road Truck Community Forum.

Today I learned that oropolitics is the use and abuse of mountaineering for political purposes. The most notable example of which culminated in the Siachen conflict.

In case you, like me, are not at all interested in getting any work done for the rest of the day, check out the British Library’s Georeferencer, which overlays historical maps onto a zoomable, pannable modern world map. You know, for comparison.

Events in themselves are not so interesting to me as the conditions that led to the events. These conditions are often quite commonplace, and yet full of what is imminent. Immanent and imminent.

David Goldblatt, from this Places Journal article

In true reality, there is nothing but relationships.

• Piet Mondrian (via a MoMA placard)

One of my favorite acts of early technoanarchy, the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion, occurred on this day in 1987. The perpatrators were never identified.

The movers and shakers depend on the visions of the dreamers: those for whom the world is real are nothing without the others for whom the world is an idea: the two have to work together to reshape the chaos into a world we can live in.

• Gregor von Rezzori, in Abel and Cain

On this day in 1907, railroad engineer Jesús García saved the entire town of Nacozari de García by driving a burning train full of dynamite six kilometers away before it could explode. Hence the town’s name.

Autumn thing

Today I also learned that Standard Oil founders John D Rockefeller and William Rockefeller Jr. were sons of snake oil salesman William A Rockefeller Sr. aka Dr. Bill Levingston.

Today I learned about Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire

Advertisements do not exist to inform you, they exist to sell you something. They are carefully designed to short circuit the parts of your brain that evaluate information; ads are form of propaganda. NEVER let an advertisement tell you what to think. Be mindful, be vigilant!

Today I learned that Waylon Jennings gave up his seat on the flight that crashed and killed Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens in 1959.

You know, people say that things move faster nowadays, but Napoleon’s empire only existed for ten years.

When dogs wake up do they know they were dreaming?

Today I learned about…Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity