Posts in: Short posts

Robinson Jeffers, standing beside Tor House and Hawk Tower, his handmade stone outpost on the Pacific Ocean. (Image source)

“I am building a thick stone pillar upon this shore, the very turn of the world, the long migration’s / End” (Jeffers, “The Torch-Bearers’ Race”)



Austin Kleon’s latest (subscriber-only) newsletter issue is about the creative seasons. Two things:

  1. It contains a pdf version of a zine he wrote on the subject. I know some people around micro.blog have recently been talking about zines and other ideas for analog delivery of writing. This is an interesting way of doing that: digitally delivering a pdf of something meant to be printed and folded.
  2. I am definitely a person who goes through creative seasons. In the past, late-winter and early-spring are when I’ve started more creative projects. This latest round has been a bit of an anomaly since it started in early winter - but I think that was driven in large part by my attempt to resist Big Tech and seeking out other ways of communicating.



This article on the yin-yang role of gorse in the ecological concept of succession reminded me of this video showing that process in action. Essentially, leave the land the hell alone and it will “manage” itself into a complex, wonderful ecosystem. “Land management” as it is currently practiced in state DNRs and US National Forests is management toward the end of profit maximization. (In case you didn’t know, in the United States logging is permitted in national forests. In order to be fully protected, an area has to be declared a national park. This seems to me to be some deceptive nomenclature.)




Useful distinctions from Erich Fromm’s book On Disobedience


Fascinating piece by Nicholas Carr on GPT-3, an AI tool for generating text. It has been fed mountains of human-written text and, in turn, has generated some startling text of its own. Carr:

It is drawing on a vast corpus of human expression and, through a quasi-mystical statistical procedure (no one can explain exactly what it is doing), synthesizing all those old words into something new, something intelligible to and requiring interpretation by its interlocutor. When we talk to GPT-3, we are, in a way, communing with the dead.