Jeremy

Love a good door

When people don’t encounter anything different, they can’t know any better.

This week I’m being low-key subversive by finishing only the work I need to finish then passing the rest of my day offline, reading, writing, and sitting outside being quiet rather than going somewhere to spend money. It’s certainly no sacrifice.

The question is not ‘Where is the truth?’ It is: ‘Who is being truthful?’

On the epistemological crisis of the modern (and from my perspective, particularly the American) world:

Our epistemic crisis is essentially ethical and so are its solutions

Summer Saturday evenings with Osmer

These loooong summer evenings still fly by

📍 Now I’m in… Columbus, OH

Ohio River Scene, Jeffersonville, IN

Crossing the Ohio River at Louisville

📍 Across the Ohio we go! Big Four Station, Jeffersonville, IN

🍺 Friday at my favorite Arkansas brewery… Lost Forty Brewing, Little Rock, AR

Summer days only look empty and quiet

Now I’m in… 📍 Maumelle, AR

Today I learned about mautâm, a cyclic ecological phenomenon occuring every ~50 years, when vast bamboo forests in northeastern India flower simultaneously, resulting in abundant seed, a boom in the rat population, then a famine when the rats run out of seeds and turn to crops.

Finished At the Lucky Hand: aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers by Goran Petrović last night. Wonderful little story about love and literature, and to me the best novel about reading since Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. Looking forward to re-reading one day. 📚

Finished The Dreamed Part by Rodrigo Fresán (sequel to The Invented Part). I love when reading a book is (and here’s Fresán, succinctly explaining my tastes) “a work, a labor, a challenge parallel to that of writing it.” Impatient for the translation of La Parte Recordada!📚

Ghost and zombie urbanism: a symptom of 21st century capitalism.

A history of the filing cabinet and information infrastructure in the 20th century.

The possibility that accompanies the approach of an unfamiliar car along a quiet road, then fades as it passes by with the whisper of a incompleted journey; parentheses around a moment on a saturday afternoon with the windows open

Cathexis (n) - investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea.

Just finished Portraits without Frames by Lev Ozerov. Picked it up after reading this review. A beautiful, tragic, and tenderly inspirational collection of poems caturing the spirits of a wide swath of Soviet artists, written by their contemporary. 📚

I have recently realized that no other work of literature has shaped me more than Calvin & Hobbes.

Today I learned that turkey vultures’ sense of smell has been used to locate leaks in an oil pipeline: ethyl mercaptan, a chemical redolent of rotting meat, was pumped through a 42-mile pipeline, and the maintenance crew just looked for the vultures to find the leaks.

On this day in 1958, Ben Carlin became the first (and only) person to circumnavigate the Earth by amphibious vehicle, traveling 17,000 km by sea and 62,000 km by land. It took him ten years and seems to have been quite the odyssey, as could be expected.

I’ve always loved having a library and perusing the libraries of others. When I started travelling, I had to give up my personal library and move to ebooks in the name of portability. But now, visitors to my website can peruse my virtual library!

Here’s a fun short read: Berliner Maqama, or the Hitchiker from Heidelberg by Haytham el-Wardany, translated from the Arabic by Katharine Halls

Today I learned that euhemerism is an approach to the interpretation of mythology in which mythological accounts are presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages.

Today I learned that in the second century BCE, Eratosthenes developed an algorithm used to this day to find primes, drew perhaps the first ‘scientific’ map, and calculated the circumference of the Earth to within about 2%. His work was lost with the Great Library of Alexandria.

One of the strangest parts about aging for me has been the discovery that I love birds, hate Twitter, and am therefore turning into Jonathan Franzen.

Every simple post I try to write always ends up super long because I want it to be perfect, but it also (counterintuitively) ends up too inchoate to share. So I post nothing, but at least the notebook keeps growing. How do you decide when a peice of writing says enough?

Along the James River, VA

It’s funny, the difference between a wise guy and a wise man…

Today after lunch I discovered the UT-Austin Perry Castañeda Library Map Collection Army Map Service Topographic Map Series online. There’s some gorgeous cartography here. I haven’t gotten a thing done all afternoon.

On this day…did you remember the Maine?

Gathered in before the freeze

You’ve lived somewhere a while when you subconsciously apply exactly the right amount of force to swing the bathroom door to a silent close

If you’re more interested in learning about current events than hand-wringing about current events, I recommend The Conversation, which brings an academic approach to journalism that (in my opinion) is sorely lacking in the modern media landscape.

Sesquipedalian (adj) - Long and ponderous; polysyllabic. From the Latin sēsquipedālis, of a foot and a half in length.

Reading requires time, patience, openness, and attention to create a sacred space in which your mind can exist among words. Live like you are reading the world.

My grandfather, 1945, Germany.

Today’s amazing word is “gallimaufry” (n) - A jumble or hodgepodge.

Pisgah National Forest

For many years now, I’ve observed Black Friday by spending zero money.

A hero is a goddam stupid thing to have in the first place and a general block to anything you might wanta accomplish on your own.

• Lester Bangs, Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, 1975

Sitting damp on the porch and drinking beer, watching Hurricane Zeta arrive here in southeast Louisiana. Inhabiting “the now” because everything else clamoring for my attention is irrelevant against the wind and rain. Hurricane is all there is; a strange but welcome respite.

Inquiline (n) - An animal that characteristically lives commensally in the nest, burrow, or dwelling place of an animal of another species.

I like living on the edge of the world.

Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the internet or watch too much television lose it.

Werner Herzog

On this day in 1940, Polish underground resistance soldier Witold Pilecki was voluntarily captured by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz to gather and smuggle out information on the camp. He escaped 30 months later, and was executed by the Soviet-backed Polish government in 1948.

Pleonasm (n): The use of more words than are required to express an idea; redundancy. As in the man he said.

It’s a one-horse two-bit third-rate town with just a four way stop and a five and dime

Today I learned about diglossia, a situation in which two dialects or languages are used by a single language community. Examples include Arabic, Chinese, and ancient Latin communities.

I often find myself in a Tom Waits mood, the world feeling strange, dark, and beautiful.

Today I learned about Müllerian mimicry, “in which species with strong defences evolve to resemble one another. By mimicking similarly coloured species, the warning signal to predators is shared, causing them to learn more quickly at less of a cost to each of the species.”

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

Fernando Pessoa

Today I learned about Henry Wickham, an “explorer” and braggart who, in 1876, smuggled rubber seeds out of Brazil to Kew Gardens in England, who in turn used them to grow rubber in Asia, collapsing the Brazilian economy: “The greatest act of biopiracy…maybe in history.”

That sad feeling I get when the person I‘m talking to has nothing to say that isn’t in the news? I’m finally understanding it as a call to compassion: we’re all so addled, trying so hard in the face of all this. If you have any mental/emotional space, please lend it to others.

At the wind’s mercy, \ Alone, each leaf will tremble; \ Together, they roar.

What if the highway is not an entitlement or a competition, but a joint agreement to facilitate the risky and trying business of travel, the way roads of all kinds tend to be?

Paul Simon: Late in the Evening, 1980. pandora.app.link/9cPOt3LPu…

Prolepsis (n) - The representing of a thing as existing before it actually does or did so. As in he was a dead man before he entered.

It is decidedly difficult to tell a lie when you don’t know the truth.

Péter Esterházy, from this article full of his amazing sentences

My favorite six word story was written by Kurt Cobain:

Here we are now entertain us.