02023-08-27 | Book
I think I found my next book although it will probably by next, next book. They are all lined up and waiting. The Marginalian has a great write-up about his book: Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness and Being.
Maybe this will wet your appetite too, or go to the link below and read the whole article.
The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime… Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a single vast body that is life on Earth. From this point of view, the passing of human generations, in peace or turmoil, is nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.
Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being – The Marginalian
02023-08-19 | Book, Reading, Video
I watched those guys beat each other up. It’s what passes for entertainment in the mountains. :-)
I did read a little bit every day. Novelist as a Vocation by Murakami is excellent. He writes much that seems to match with my experience. I also started to read The White Album by Joan Didion. She has a wonderful writing style. I am really enjoying this book so far.
There are so many great quotes in the Murakami book that I highlighted. Here are just a few:
The narrower and more specialized the field, I have found, the prouder the authorities tend to be and the stronger their antipathy to outsiders.
Don’t I know it!
But since I do happen to have a bit of ability to write novels, and have had some good luck on my side, plus a stubborn streak (or, to put it more nicely, a consistency) that’s proved helpful, I’ve been able, over thirty-five years, to write novels as a profession.
I am quite stubborn myself and I have had some good luck. And it’s been just about 35 years, since 1989.
A writer’s greatest responsibility is to his readers, to keep providing them with the best work that he is capable of turning out. I am an active writer, which is to say, someone whose work is still in progress. A writer perpetually groping to discover what to do next, inching forward through the perils of the literary battlefield. The task set before me is to survive, and to try and keep moving ahead.
Yes!
The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert had this to say: “To reach the source, you have to swim against the current. Only trash swims downstream.”
Smile.
02023-07-16 | Book
There’s Selma Özgün the psychogeographer. She’s interested in how over centuries city architecture affects the social and mental spaces people inhabit.
Psychogeographer! Two sentences fromThe Dervish House by Ian McDonald. I find that subject truly fascinating.
02023-07-12 | Book, Poetry
Books are carefully folded forests.
–Saul Williams
Read a few of his poems yesterday. So good.
02023-07-11 | Book, Lx, Photos, Walking
Hers was a walking discipline, like the practices of the peripatetic dervishes. It proceeded at the speed of footsteps, which is the speed of history, and at that speed, on those long walks which are the science’s method, connections and correspondences appear. Strange symmetries appear between separated buildings as if some urban continental drift has taken place. Streets follow ancient, atavistic needs.
from The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
Of course I am going to love that… 😄
Connections and correspondences indeed appear at the speed of footsteps. Anything faster than footsteps and we might miss this door mat, so thin that it looks like a red filter hovering above the stones. Everything lines up and it is clear that the mat has not been moved in a very long time.
I think I should put together a slideshow that contains only the most basic and mundane subject matter. No grand vista, nothing amazing… just simple things that caught my eye.
02023-07-05 | Art, Book, Food
The novel The Dervish House by Ian McDonald features a hunt for a mellified man.
Mellified man – Wikipedia
I finished Hopeland a while ago and enjoyed it very much. So I started reading an older novel by McDonald, from 2010, called The Dervish House. I am digging this one, too, and learned about the Mellified Man. The book describes the process at length, but the above linked entry in Wikipedia will tell you enough. What a wild and crazy idea? Did anyone actually do this?
Staying with the honey theme, here is something I saw on Colossal: Honeycomb Swells Across Ava Roth’s Embroidered Works Made in Collaboration with Bees
And I remember seeing this vase at the MoMA years ago:
The Honeycomb Vase “Made by Bees”:
Libertíny constructed vase-shaped beehive scaffolds (removed at the end of the process) and then let nature take its course: a group of bees went to work building a hive, layer by layer, in the same shape as the scaffold. The work took from two to ten days, depending on the weather, the season, the size of the colony, and its need to expand. It took one week and approximately forty thousand bees to complete this particular Honeycomb Vase. The process, which the designer calls “slow prototyping” in an ironic counterpoint to today’s rapid manufacturing technologies, poetically brings a natural phenomenon full circle, starting with flowers, which nourish bees and enabled them to produce the vase, and ending with a vessel that is meant to contain flowers.
