Yay! This is post 100 of 100 for my arbitrarily assigned 100 Days of Blogging. Thank all of you who have followed along. I sincerely appreciate you taking time out of your day to check in on this tiny corner of the internet.
My gift to you for playing along is the following mantra. Print it out, write it down, tape it next to your monitor, next to a mirror, tack it to a corkboard, scrawl it on a whiteboard, use a magnet to attach it to the fridge. It is your mantra to recite to yourself.
Today I choose not to criticize myself. I am enough.
This isn’t the end of blogging, just the end of the daily challenge. I have lots more to post. Thanks for sticking around.
“In Analogia, technology historian George Dyson presents a startling look back at the analog age and life before the digital revolution—and an unsettling vision of what comes next.”
“As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on ‘a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise.'”
Cued up next is Spear by Nicola Griffith, and Weather by Jennifer Offill.
“One of my reading wheelhouses, Gentle Reader, is queer comfort. These are books, mostly romances, featuring queer characters where trials might happen but things all turn out okay in the end. One of the reasons I like these books is because I see them as writing into existence the future we all want.”
Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques – I love all these characters, and am amazed at the prolificity and quality Jeph Jacques brings every day.
Therapy Comics by Mardou – Mardou’s therapy comics help me feel less alone. I don’t think the RSS is updated anymore, but I read new comics on Instagram.
Jem Bendell is the author of Deep Adaptation, which I have not read. The following essay, however, has prompted me to get it through the library’s interlibrary loan. I share his critique of ecomodernism, but I have no opinion on his solutions.
“…it can be helpful when those of us freeing ourselves from capitalism’s diminishing ideologies also try to influence public understanding and public policies.”
Bandcamp Daily – If you watch “What We Do in the Shadows” you’ve heard Norma Tanega. If you’re unfamiliar with her work, Bandcamp has you covered.
“Tanega, who had a single hit in 1966 with her song “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog,” was unwilling to bow down to the pressure of the music industry. She dropped off the scene after releasing two records (in 1966 and 1971) and spent the rest of her life as a visual artist and ESL teacher in California, where she grew up.”
Yikes! The day slipped away. Have some Kenneth Fearing.
Aphrodite Metropolis
Harry loves Myrtle—He has strong arms, from the warehouse, And on Sunday when they take the bus to emerald meadows he doesn’t say: “What will your chastity amount to when your flesh withers in a little while?” No, On Sunday, when they picnic in emerald meadows they look at the Sunday paper: GIRL SLAYS BANKER-BETRAYER They spread it around on the grass BATH-TUB STIRS JERSEY ROW And then they sit down on it, nice. Harry doesn’t say “Ziggin’s Ointment for withered flesh, Cures thousands of men and women of motes, warts, red veins, flabby throat, scalp and hair diseases, Not expensive, and fully guaranteed.” No, Harry says nothing at all, He smiles, And they kiss in the emerald meadows on the Sunday paper.
So many typos! Every time I post I see a whole slew of typos. I’m not sure if I’m making more than I used to, or if I just didn’t notice before.
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Here’s a bit of a deep dive into Led Zep fandom. John Coulthart uncovers the source for some fonts used on the fourth album. Coulthart isn’t always about Zep. He’s mostly about art and design.
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I didn’t know Birds Aren’t Real was a thing. It is a thing. The Guardian explains where it came from.
McIndoe made a placard, and went out to join the march. “It’s not like I sat down and thought I’m going to make a satire. I just thought: ‘I should write a sign that has nothing to do with what is going on.’ An absurdist statement to bring to the equation.”
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“The purpose of education is to teach each of us to defend ourselves against the seductions of eloquence.” –Bertrand Russell (in Harper’s, March 1991, p. 47) [source]
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Terrific (albeit brief) interview with Josh Glenn. I’ve been a fan of Glenn’s since reading Hermenaut in the 1990s. Hermenaut was an awesome and influential zine, and Glenn’s current website is HiLoBrow. He also has the best ‘generation’ definitions around.
A reminder of my 250-year generational periodization scheme:
I don’t follow any traditional religious practices, so I’ve decided to create my own. In this new personal religion I’m creating I observe eight Solar Sabbaths (a term I just made up). The eight solar sabbaths are the two solstices, the two equinoxes, and the four cross-quarter days. And today happens to be the point between the spring equinox, and the summer solstice.
I’ve also created four new seasons that overlap with the tradition seasons. These cover the time between the cross-quarter dates, and are:
Spummer (spring/summer)
Sutumn (summer/autumn)
Finter (fall/winter)
Winring (winter/spring)
That means today is the first day of Spummer.
Today’s also the first day of my Screenless Spummer challenge. I’ve been good at reducing my social media time, now it’s time to reduce the amount of time I spend in front of screens. I can’t completely eradicate screens from my life because I’m expected to use them for my job, and I use screens for creative expression, learning new things, and recreation. Nonetheless, I’m certain my life will be enriched by diminishing the amount of time I focus my attention on glowing glass. I won’t truly be screenless, but my intent is to be more mindful of how much time I spend in front of a screen, and shut them down more often than I have in the recent past.
I have LOTS of political opinions, and once upon a time I blogged frequently about politics. One of my favorite moments from the Re/Creating Tampa days was covering local political matters. I did summaries and explainers of city and county issues, and even did a live event giving background info on ballot items relevant only in the region.
In this iteration of my blogging life, however, I expect to keep my political comments to a minimum.
So, how about a poem.
Goodbye to Tolerance
by Denise Levertov
Genial poets, pink-faced earnest wits— you have given the world some choice morsels, gobbets of language presented as one presents T-bone steak and Cherries Jubilee. Goodbye, goodbye, I don’t care if I never taste your fine food again, neutral fellows, seers of every side. Tolerance, what crimes are committed in your name.
And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread, blood donors. Your crumbs choke me, I would not want a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never falter: irresponsive to nightmare reality.
It is my brothers, my sisters, whose blood spurts out and stops forever because you choose to believe it is not your business.
Goodbye, goodbye, your poems shut their little mouths, your loaves grow moldy, a gulf has split the ground between us, and you won’t wave, you’re looking another way. We shan’t meet again— unless you leap it, leaving behind you the cherished worms of your dispassion, your pallid ironies, your jovial, murderous, wry-humored balanced judgment, leap over, un- balanced? … then how our fanatic tears would flow and mingle for joy …
Perhaps ‘remembered’ is a better term. This 100 day blogging challenge reminded me of one reason I turned away from blogging, it takes a lot of my writing time.
There are only so many writing hours in a day. Whatever time I use for writing blog posts is time I’m not using for stories, or non-fiction essays, or writing exercises.
As I conjure up a new self-image I think I’ll be able to strike a better balance. Or care less about the balance (or care differently perhaps). As long as whatever I’m writing contributes to joy, happiness, or a feeling of satisfaction it doesn’t really matter what form it takes.
That said, one of the funnest times I had on the blog was when I posted a story a month in 2017 (the Full Moon Story series). So, while the daily regularity of posts will cease, I expect to start posting a story a month for the rest of 2022 starting mid-June.
I’m not sure what that says about me, or why it’s become such a laughable pasttime, but it suits me well.
Blogging helps me scratch that zine itch. Zines are typically small scale and personal, as is this blog. I loved making (and reading) zines in the 1990s, and blogging allows me the freedom to do all the stuff I enjoyed when making zines. I can opine, and joke, and fantasize to my heart’s content. And I can point to the stuff I think is cool.
One of the things I love most is that people choose to see it. I’m not randomly popping up in some social media feed. If you are reading this post it’s because you choose to read this post, not because I’m a friend of a friend, or an acquaintance of a relative.
For me, one of the early tipping points that moved FB from fun to no fun was when people I didn’t know started chiming in on some jokey or snarky FB post of mine. I have great friends, but some of their friends are… well, they see the world differently. And if I make some off-hand comment about the horribleness of Tim Burton, I don’t need some FoaF explaining to me how many ways I’m wrong.
I started weaning myself off FB four or five years ago, and I started radically reducing my Twitter consumption in 2021. At this point I think I’m ready to let them both go. Though, I suspect I won’t completely shut down my accounts because there are people on each platform where that is the easiest way to get in touch. I’ll probably continue using them as I do now. When some link sends me there I take a minute or two to look around, and then I click away to some other page/site.
So, what I’ve learned is that I like blogging more than social media platforms. It suits my temperament better. These 100 days of blogging have allowed a new blogging habit to start taking root, and I think I’ll probably keep this up, albeit not every day. My guess is that it will end up being 3 or 4 times a week. I will think of it as my virtual, sequential online zine. Frankly, I wish more people embraced wordpress/rss. Or, maybe they’re out there and I just haven’t done a good job of keeping track. Remember blogrolls? I should probably add a blogroll.
Therapy Comics by Mardou – Mardou’s therapy comics help me feel less alone. I don’t think the RSS is updated anymore, but I read new comics on Instagram.
“They say a thing is holy if it makes you hold your tongue,” muses a character in John Crowley’s fantasy novel Engine Summer, speaking of the difference between his culture and another. “But we say a thing is holy if it makes you laugh.”
“The May Pamphlet is a collection of six anarchist essays written and published by Paul Goodman in 1945. Goodman discusses the problems of living in a society that represses individual instinct through coercion. He suggests that individuals resist such conditions by reclaiming their natural instincts and initiative, and by “drawing the line”, an ideological delineation beyond which an individual should refuse to conform or cooperate with social convention. While themes from The May Pamphlet—decentralization, peace, social psychology, youth liberation—would recur throughout his works, Goodman’s later social criticism focused on practical applications rather than theoretical concerns.”
