I’m really looking forward to summer this year. At the old job, I was consumed with audit work from July through September. At the new job, however, the audit is much smaller, and I have very few tasks related to it. I’ll be able to help Rachel more with the garden!
Experience and argument
Tara Couture, writing about a place near her farm: There’s something mysterious there, attractive to animals of every ilk, but unknowable, too. The feeling of the ridge transcends the logical ‘glacier dropped it off’ explanation. If someone told me it was a stone dropped from a dragon’s mouth many eons ago, I would be more likely to believe them. When I was young, a Holiness preacher said, “A man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument.
In negotiations with the US military, Anthropic is attempting to limit the uses of its technology. Too late. Genies cannot be put back into bottles and yet these tech bros keep rubbing every damn lamp they can get their hands on.
The more I listen to Cat Clyde the more I like her. 🎵 Her album with Jeremie Albino has been on repeat for days. Today I’ve started listening to her album “Down Rounder.”
Tara Couture: “We always lived in a peaceful home, something I think of as the most important element in a home.”
As someone who has lived in both a contentious home as a child and a peaceful home as an adult, I can tell you it is very important. I’m so grateful for what Rachel and I have built.
Wiped away
Tara Couture, Radiance of the Ordinary: We douse the meat in chemicals to make it look vibrant and fresh, then wrap it in cellophane. We wash the eggs and dip them in chlorine to ride them of the gift of a feather from the soft underbelly of the mother hen. We remove all trace of connection—a leaf, hair, bones, hide, crumbs of soil. And in every little thing wiped away, so too the wiping of our awareness.
David Bentley Hart has a translation of the Tao Te Ching coming out in May. I may have to add that to my collection of translations. Interview with Hart about the book here.
One evening, several days ago, a squirrel was eating at the feeder outside the window, the golden light on its fur. I decided against photographing it because I knew squirrels don’t stay anywhere long. Now I sit here remembering it. The image isn’t as clear as a photograph but the feeling remains.
What is a writer?
After coming across that “writers against AI” image, I decided to put it into my micro.blog newsletter’s footer. Then, inevitably, I wondered “is that presumptuous to consider myself a writer?” I quickly concluded, “Who cares? You’re being tiresome.” That’s the proper response and I am satisfied with it. Later, though, I came across this line from Caspar David Friedrich quoted in The Romantic Revolution: bring to the light of day what you have seen in the darkness, so that it can work on others, from the outside inwards
Kingsnorth: Writers against AI
