my mom would take every holiday, no matter how minor, as an opportunity to remind me how important i was to her. we were close, i was a certifiable momma’s boy (still am), and so mothers day was one occasion i always made an effort at marking in some way. not a day goes by that i don’t think of her, of course, but some days it’s more present than others, and this is one of them.
she was also a gifted writer, which obviously had an influence on me as well.
i think “there are weeks where decades happen” has been the motto of my spring so far. not pictured is coffee with one of my favorite authors who proceeded to tell me all about his sex life
yesterday’s moon mission brought to mind the prologue of Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition”
(nvm the highlights i was on a spree while reading this book)
i somehow missed the five year anniversary of this thing last week. hard to believe how much has changed since it came out, for me it has become something of a personal artifact, but i so deeply appreciate the life experience it represents and the opportunities it provided.
also very much looking forward to the next book, more about that soon
Sharing some excerpts from recent readings for the next issue of Posit—the theme is about the future (of course) and the world ending, for better and worse. Pictures are mostly just there to separate the excerpts, sources listed below:
slide 2: from Filippo Marinetti’s 1909 ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ (dark, very much proto-fascist stuff, worth comparing to Marc Andreessen’s more recent ‘Techno Optimist Manifesto’)
slides 4-5: from the ‘Basic Call to Consciousness’, a document submitted to the UN by members of the Iroquois Confederation in 1977
slides 7-8: from an article titled ‘Indigenous Stories of Apocalypse and Flourishing Futures’ by Sharon Arnold
slide 10: from an article titled ‘Walking Backwards Into the Future’ by Patty Krawec
slides 12-13: from an article titled ‘Bright Futurism: Who’s in charge of imagining a better future for humanity?’ by Thom Waite (I have some issues with the framing in this article, but I liked these sections)
slides 15-17: from an article titled ‘The Quest for Clean Cargo’ by Julian Sayarer
slides 19-20: from an interview with author Alyssa Battistoni, titled ‘How to Understand Nature From a Marxist Perspective’
finally getting this Wes Montgomery solo under my fingers, one of the hardest things i’ve learned in a long time (the octaves in the last half are insane). still a lot to dial in on the phrasing, tried once to play it with my thumb like he does and got a blister
