Total flow to date on the Rio Grande at Otowi is the lowest since 1964. Otowi is the place where the river leaves the upper valleys and enters the canyons that lie at the head of the valley of Albuquerque, what we in New Mexico call the “Middle Rio Grande.” The graph shows total …
Continue reading ‘The driest year on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande since 1964’ »
A bunch of odds and ends cluttering my brain, blog posts that are half written in my mind that are in the way: Quoting Luis Villa on accessing the open data commons We’ve been talking about open data for a long time, but since using data is hard to consume and manipulate, open data has …
Continue reading ‘“the nearest thing I have seen to being true”’ »
Props to the artists who tagged the vacant Two Park Central Tower at Central and San Mateo in Albuquerque. I like to think Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would approve. I noticed the art today while out on my morning dérive, walking and riding my bike through one of the weirder and more interesting neighborhoods …
Autumnal equinox news briefs: I was on the phone in the front room of our house yesterday evening, facing east, as the setting sun dropped beneath the clouds after a short burst of rain. Rainbow. And the conversation, with the cousin of an old friend who died earlier this year, was rich. The Rio Grande …
Continue reading ‘A rainbow, a river, and the first cranes of fall’ »
And what if it is love one is trying to understand, that strange unmanageable phenomenon or form of life, source at once of illumination and confusion, agony and beauty? Love, in its many varieties, and their tangled relations to the good human life, to aspiration, to general social concern? What parts of oneself, what method, …
Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content. Susan Sontag, Notes on “Camp” Macho Types Wanted. Must Dance and Have a Moustache. Advertisement in the Village Voice, 1978, as quoted in Midgley, Alex. “‘Macho Types Wanted: The Village People, Homophobia, and Representation in the 1970s,” Australasian …
Continue reading ‘The Village People, Barthes, Sontag, MAGA’ »
There is a Hebrew word: “zakhor.” It means both memory and action. To remember, in this tradition, is not to recall a fact. It is to fulfill an ethical obligation. To make the past present through attention. – Joan Westenberg See also: obligations to the past
I wonder what my life would be like if I’d stuck with model trains rather than taking up blogging. Probably less stressful.
I really do feel like blogging is onto its second wind. The amount of influence you can have on the world by consistently blogging about a subject is just as high today as it was back in the 2000s when blogging first started. The best time to start a blog may have been twenty years …
A friend (thanks R!) hipped me to Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, which is what it says on the tin. It is full of charming morsels by a charming writer as he observers his own proclivity for delight. This is a useful life skill. I’m lingering over it a few morsels to start most days …
Continue reading ‘The pink hollyhock by the bike sheds: a delight’ »