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 …
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For inscriptions to take place, witnesses are needed. Brighenti, A. M. (2010). At the wall: Graffiti writers, urban territoriality, and the public domain. _Space and Culture_, 13(3), 315-332. doi: 10.1177/1206331210365283 On the northbound morning Rail Runner out of Albuquerque’s downtown station, it’s best to sit on the left side of the train to see the …
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Work to avoid being somebody who discourages others from sharing their thoughts. – Simon Willison
It’s red sidewalk crack poppy season in Albuquerque. It’s a weird ecological niche, but Papaver rhoeas, the common corn poppy (it has a bunch of other names) seems to have mastered the sidewalk cracks in my neighborhood. Sciency people call it an archeophyte, a species that arose in its modern form in an evolutionary dance with humans. …
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It is an accident that my new bicycle is named after a 1960s cartoon superhero who fought supervillains in outer space with a sidekick named Blip. Blip was a monkey. I was on my own Saturday, no help from Blip, when my Space Ghost led me up a “trail” on the west side of the …
There was a playful glee, like he knew he was getting away with something, something frowned upon yet worth doing, with Richard Parker’s “development days.” Richard and I were youngsters, 30-something kids who had been handed the keys to a metaphorical roadster, and we wanted to see how fast it would go. I looked up …
“We get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.” – Hanif Abdurraqib I’m obsessed with this quote from the poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib in a New Yorker piece last month. He somehow packed doom, hope, and obligation into those twelve words. Abdurraqib is riffing on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, …
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