Testing something.
WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.
The weather evened out for a short period late yesterday afternoon, so I potted the peas I raised from seed in the mini-greenhouses. Once again, the gemination rate on the Kelvedon was terrible. Hopefully this will be the last day I have to run the heater in the office to get my hands moving in the morning. Watching the weather forecast, as I really need to sow more veg before the end of the month. Right now, it’s just high winds and rain again…
OPERATIONS: I need to break out something from the main notebook into its own notebook tonight. I had a project fall apart on me at the top of the month, right at the last second, and then some consulting work got moved up, and then an artist whose work I love came to me to ask to create something, so it’s twelve weeks of Production Mode in a daytime block and then Lab Mode the rest of the time. I set Sunday’s newsletter last night in a bit of a scramble because I have to go out today.
COMMS: Email is a little out of control. If we’re currently in conversation, I’ll be answering email all weekend. Otherwise, ask me for my messaging apps.
LISTENING:
I have just had to order cotton buds in order to make slow-watering containers – basically, ghetto ollas, using old water bottles with the bases chopped off and holes poked in them that are then stuffed with cotton buds so the water leaks out slowly. Bury the pointy end in the pot and fill with water. Trading off microplastic deposits in the soil for water availability for the fruit trees if we get another fiery summer. The tomatoes will be ready for their final big pot in a few weeks, inside the busted mini-greenhouse that is being repurposed as a trellis, and I’ll try the first one in there. People say gardening is relaxing, and, while learning again to live with the seasons is certainly interesting, growing food is basically one long low-level crisis management session.
meditations on the passing apocalypse. meditations on the destruction of hyperfixation. meditations on the augmentation and annihilation of the physical form. an aquapocalyptic narrative. let us become something else. let us release all once we held dear. let us experience the light of the dawn, a black light / green blade revealing our entrails underneath our flawed casing.
a story of ascension told through fractured remnants of virtual dungeons and hyperfictional hymns. a necrotic-rush of vortical [wave]-drifts and abysmal bass. a wave of post-musical electro-thanatoid anti-rhythm production, [void]punk-nihilism updated into an androgynous [xeno]future.
This podcast always makes me feel crazy.
https://www.theringer.com/2024/4/25/24139949/trump-pollster-john-mclaughlin-explains-his-client-lead
Tara is joined by Republican political strategist John McLaughlin to discuss the hot-button issues that are fueling Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s poll numbers and guiding their individual campaigns. They take a deep look at the mood of each key swing state, break down strategic differences between the 2020 and 2024 races, and debate RFK Jr.’s possible impact in November.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n08/terry-eagleton/where-does-culture-come-from
The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work. For Oscar Wilde, who was closer in this respect to Marx than to Morris, communism was the condition in which we would lie around all day in various interesting postures of jouissance, dressed in loose crimson garments, reciting Homer to one another and sipping absinthe. And that was just the working day.
Terry Eagleton
“From the “Big Science” of Bell Laboratories to the esoteric world of séance chambers to university media labs to neighborhood makerspaces, places we call “labs” are everywhere—but how exactly do we account for the wide variety of ways that they produce knowledge? More than imitations of science and engineering labs, many contemporary labs are hybrid forms that require a new methodological and theoretical toolkit to describe. The Lab Book investigates these vital, creative spaces, presenting readers with the concept of the “hybrid lab” and offering an extended—and rare—critical investigation of how labs have proliferated throughout culture.
A game of two halves. The first half of the book is an inspiring synthesis of thought on the subject of inactivity and its necessity to a life well lived. Shot through here and there with the author’s disdain for the internet – nothing you haven’t read a couple of dozen other people write. And, curiously, in its explorations of contemplation, it doesn’t go much farther east than Greece. But it’s good stuff
‘Leisure time’ lacks both intensity of life and contemplation. It is a time that we kill so as not to get bored. It is not free, living time; it is dead time.
Inactivity constitutes the human. The inactivity involved in any doing is what makes the doing something genuinely human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. Without calm, a new barbarism emerges.
When life follows the rule of stimulus–response, need–satisfaction and goal–action, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life.
If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that must simply function.
There was a lot to think about in the first half of this book, and I recommend it for the first half alone.
When language is nothing but work and the production of information, it loses its radiance. It becomes worn out, and keeps reproducing the same. The French writer Michel Butor says that the current crisis of literature is a result of communication: ‘For ten or twenty years, almost nothing has happened in literature. There is a flood of publications, but intellectual stasis. The cause is a crisis of communication. The new means of communication are admirable, but they produce an enormous noise.’
It is, I note again, synthesis. It’s a lyric essay. But no less valuable.
The other half… well. The author starts to get, to my eye, sloppy with language and definitions. And then he mounts a rehabilitation of Heidegger, followed by an extended bout of what seems like weirdly personal philosophical score-settling with Hannah Arendt, who has been dead since 1975 and therefore cannot possibly have done anything to merit such spite.
But that first half? Very useful, very thought-provoking.
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With digitalization, availability reaches new heights. By bringing about total producibility, digitalization suspends facticity itself. The digital regime does not acknowledge an unavailable ground of being. Its motto is: being is information. Information makes being fully available. When everything is readily available and consumable, contemplative attention is impossible. Like a hunter, the gaze screens its surroundings.
Well, I had all kinds of plans for this morning, and then one of the chickens died in their sleep – these rescue chickens often don’t last long, the damage is done by the time we get them and they can pop off at any time. It’s a shame, and I thought this one was recovering well. So I was digging a hole first thing today, and I’m waiting for my hands to return to normal after jamming the shovel through clay.