cleaning out my email incrementally from the last few years, found this from 2017

lmao

David Mitchell, Ghostwritten:

We create models to explain nature, but the model winds up gatecrashing nature and driving away the original inhabitants. In my lecturing days most of my students believed that atoms really are solid little stellar nuclei orbited by electrons. When I tell them that nobody knows what an electron is, they look at me like I’ve told them that the sun is a watermelon. One of the better-read-up ones might put their hand up and say, “But Dr. Muntervary, isn’t an electron a charged probability wave?”

“Suppose now,” I am fond of saying, “I prefer to think of it as a dance.”

There’s comfort and trouble in having too-solid a model of reality. Some people’s politics are corroded by having too clear a sense that reality is like this, and any deviation from that model must be corrected, rather than observed and adapted to. On the other hand, we can be dimmed by resignation to things as they are; we may not know all the answers, but we know it can be better than this… but it doesn’t seem like it’ll really happen.

It’s important, I think, to recognize that the models describing political and material “realities” of the last half-century have been discarded or disproven. We don’t know what will happen right now; that’s terrifying, but it also leaves room for optimism. We think we know what electrons are, but nobody does. We think we can predict political outcomes, but we can’t.

I’m choosing to be slightly optimistic, today. I voted for Biden and every available leftist/leftish candidate, and I know a lot of other people will, too. Trump and Co only have a foothold because they’ve worked tirelessly to create and promote an alternate model of reality. An unfortunate number of people have bought in, and I don’t know what we’re going to do about it in the long run. But it’s not fated for the present state to continue. The future is not yet foreclosed.

I’ve cut off my access to twitter for the day. I voted, I’m reading a good book, and I’m going to work in a bit. Tomorrow I’m supposed to start a new job; I’ll tell you more about it if it works out. The foundations of my life shifted radically this year, and I know yours did too, in different ways. They’re going to shift again. I’m going to tell myself we’ll find a way through it!

Helena Deland — Someone New

When I post a song, I try not to dwell on it too long; if I think of something to say, I will, but usually I just recommend it. This is a great record; it wends and stalks tiger-style through bass-string grasslands, drumstick raindrops drawing lines into the distance.

...That's the first thing that came to mind, anyway!

"so that I, too, can feel like someone new"

annuals — blue ridge

"the sun's coming up; here I am again."

"now, I don't mind this thirst all the time..."

"to be cursed; it might be fun!"

"I forgot where I went in your heart."

and this record. jeeeezus. "All Is Illusory" into "The Giving In" is SO. GOOD.

"oh. i thought you were...
someone else"

Four perfect songs from my favorite band. I've probably posted about this EP before, but The Velvet Teen's No Star still feels perfectly-fresh to me every time I listen to it, even though — oh god — it came out in........ 2010???????????

☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️

Well, as the poet says, "Don't blame me, Apollo, for how little light is left to borrow!"

when this song gets in my head, "don't give in to callous ritual" turns into, "don't give in to california," but I disagree!!

I really disliked the movie when I saw it in the theater, but I'm not going into that! If you liked it, neat. I tried reading the book a while back but couldn't get into it. Revisiting last week was easy; I read it in just a few evenings. Here are some sentences I marked; almost entirely devoid of plot, don't worry, the story is so much weirder and quieter than the movie, dry and angular and brittle and bright.

Inevitably my focus netted from my parents useless lectures of worry over my chronic introversion, as if by doing so they could convince me they were still in charge.

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.

I was adapting to it, but at times like this, I remembered that just a day ago I had been someone else.

Nothing we brought with us is from the present. Not our clothes, not our shoes. It’s all old junk. Restored crap. We’ve been living in the past this whole time. In some sort of reenactment.

But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan. I had to leave it there, compartmentalized, until I could write it all down, and seeing it on the page, begin to divine the true meaning.

I had the unsettling thought that the natural world around me had become a kind of camouflage.

That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

The meandering paths of crabs and worms continued to be written into its surface.

Part of my husband’s life had been defined by nightmares he’d had as a child. These debilitating experiences had sent him to a psychiatrist. They involved a house and a basement and the awful crimes that had occurred there. But the psychiatrist had ruled out suppressed memory, and he was left at the end with just trying to draw the poison by keeping a diary about them. Then, as an adult at university, a few months before he’d joined the navy, he had gone to a classic film festival … and there, up on the big screen, my future husband had seen his nightmares acted out. It was only then that he realized the television set must have been left on at some point when he was only a couple of years old, with that horror movie playing. The splinter in his mind, never fully dislodged, disintegrated into nothing. He said that was the moment he knew he was free, that it was from then on that he left behind the shadows of his childhood … because it had all been an illusion, a fake, a forgery, a scrawling across his mind that had falsely made him go in one direction when he had been meant to go in another.

Damn.

I have never done well in cities, even though I lived in one by necessity—because my husband needed to be there, because the best jobs for me were there, because I had self-destructed when I’d had opportunities in the field. But I was not a domesticated animal.

I really wanted to lose myself. People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.

Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.

wow this album just karate-chopped the seam between my cerebra

what a voice!

David Mitchell, Ghostwritten, p 155:

“One of the things that my years of wandering have taught me is, the more impotent the country, the more dangerous its customs officials.”

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸