I’m going off all social media including even this one, for the time being. Got some work to do.
I’d be very happy to correspond by email or, preferably, real mail;
you can contact me via my Hello page.
Thanks.
A conspiracy theory I can get behind: the Tartarian apocalypse.
(via links in Bonnie Kristian’s Substack).
Reading Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems.
Seconded.
from Austin Kleon’s Newsletter
We watched Wildcat (2024). Very skillfully made. But I wonder what it would mean to anyone not steeped in Flannery O’Connor’s work? And in emphasizing O’Connor’s struggle with illness and other sufferings I thought it left her seeming perpetually sullen, crabby, and possibly “on the spectrum” as we say now – none of which sounds like the picture of her I get from the biographies. Still, if you’re an O’Connor reader you’re bound to appreciate much of it, especially the dramatizations of some of her stories. (But, I have to add, the Jesus tattoo was disappointing.)
September 1 is the Church New Year, celebrated modestly in church with a few extra hymns. Coming at this time, it feels more like the new year to me than the January 1 civil version. I suppose that, to feel as I do, you have to love the arrival of Fall.
Looking up at the hills around our town, I see that the leaves are starting to turn. Time to stop waiting for summer to begin.
Wow, The Plough published [a “poetry comic”](www.plough.com/en/topics… of a favorite of mine by Hopkins.
In Vox, some thoughts on whether change-the-system thinking has derailed us from basic kindness, helpfulness, and self-sacrifice. (e.g. Why should I buy socks or bus passes for homeless people when it won’t solve homelessness?) I need to look at myself in this regard.
Looking forward to watching Perfect Days for the fourth time, with a special focus on the puzzle of Hirayama’s wristwatch.
Reading (finally) Archimandrite Vasileios, Hymn of Entry. Intense. “the Gospel cannot be understood outside the Church, nor dogma outside worship.”
Started reading: Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. Might be eye-opening, might be a bunch of woo-woo. I’ll let you know what I think.
“Screen Apnea”. I was interested, because I think a habit of slow, deep, abdominal breathing is important to wellbeing (to mine at least!)
Extremely niche: I was very grateful to see this article from Notes on Arab Orthodoxy on the awful situation of the Church in Ukraine. One reason I appreciate the site so much is that we’re constantly, if sometimes subtly, told to see the Orthodox world in terms of a power struggle between Constantinople (deeply enmeshed with the US State Dept) and Moscow (at the moment completely absorbed into the Putin regime). It’s good to read voices that can look at these horrors from outside that degrading dichotomy.
Argh.
One of the most outrageous examples in the book involves the lengths to which Apple goes to prevent independent repair of the iPhone. A large chunk of Apple’s profits comes from people replacing broken iPhones that could be easily repaired with replacement parts. To ensure old phones can’t be repaired or harvested for repair parts, Apple uses patent law to prevent the third-party manufacture of replacement parts, and it negotiates deals with recyclers to ensure that used phones are completely destroyed. Most gallingly, it prints a miniscule Apple logo on internal parts so that its lawyers can argue that harvesting replacement parts from discarded phones is a violation of Apple’s trademark. The lawyers claim the logo creates the expectation that these recycled parts have been recertified by Apple.
Happy 8th wedding anniversary to our son & daughter in law! Here’s a shot from the wedding, with their crowns awaiting them.
Reading: Frederica Matthewes-Green, Welcome to the Orthodox Church. It’s a combined invitation and catechism that uses worship and practice in a (fictional) representative parish as a framework for presenting doctrine, history, etc. I’m appreciating it. It’s a bit much to hand out indiscriminately to inquirers or catechumens, but I can picture a priest/catechist finding it really useful as a structure for presenting the Way. The way to learn about Orthodoxy is to come to church; this book I think approximates that as well as a book can.
As a parent and grandparent, I smiled at this:
The reason you see so many little kids on screens in public is because the parents rightly perceive that normal toddler behaviour is unwelcome in the public square (today). You want a kid to learn how to behave on a plane without a screen? Great. It’s not going to be pretty.
via bonnie kristian
Our culture is built on an imaginary foundation of planning and action. We judge civilizations by what they have constructed and the tools and techniques that have been mastered. All the while, the world in which we live goes on as always. The same rain falls (or doesn’t), the same sun shines. The same stars assume their positions in the sky (though, at present, they are harder to see). The lilies still grow and tomorrow still comes whether we take thought or not. And the larger part of our lives operates in the same manner.
Major league composting: My wife composts not only our food scraps and so on, but clothing that’s gone beyond wearability. A pair of denim jeans in the compost pile disappears in a year, leaving a few pieces of metal and a tangle of polyester thread. One time she composted a cotton-polyester blend shirt. Next season the cotton had decomposed, leaving behind a ghostly see-through shirt of plastic mesh.
Ted Gioia [writes](https://www.honest-broker.com/p/10-reasons-why-technological-progress) on “why technological progress is reversing”, i.e. tech changes are reducing rather than enhancing human flourishing. He puts the inflection point at around 2015. Mostly familiar if you read him regularly. I was struck by his pointing at postmodernist thinking as a culprit: the notion that ideas like truth and beauty are only masked expressions of power slowly leaked out of the academy into the culture, especially into the tech subculture.
Niche reading: The Heavenly Gift: the ancient art of liturgical bread-making. A good how-to for traditional prosphora prep. I liked the emphasis on the process as a spiritual/ascetic practice.
Reading: Personal Days by Ed Park. Very funny, I’ve been laughing aloud (LOLing?).
Ripple effects. A snippet from a book I look forward to reading: Frostbite by Nicola Twilley, on the transformative effect of refrigeration.
>The ripple effect of this transformation shapes the geography and economics of American meat to this day. Urban stockyard workers had been unionized since the 1930s; employees of the new rural processing plants were not: they were and are paid much less. With the savings on labor and food costs, the new met-packers could cut beef prices while still making more money, and Americans responded my eating ever more meat.
In some circles I try to keep to myself my belief that many things in modern life cost much less than they should.
(via the great Marion Nestle)
We were in the offices of the little local weekly paper, and my head is full of forgotten terms like “paste-up,” “camera-ready,” and “Letraset,” very much part of my life at one time.