The following are selections from the editors’ diaries.

Well it’s not a farmhouse but a church, children running around, fat Georgian men taking selfies, a bride walking with difficulty followed by photographers and her mother holding up her dress. Horses, a rooster tied to a garbage can. Phrases I can catch: a little girl says “Ar minda.” Signs requesting we dress modestly in the church. Women and girls, though not required to, put on headscarves before going in. Some of them look very pretty under their kerchiefs. Candles and incense and icons and rays of white sunlight piercing clearly through openings in the stone walls. Outside: the sun makes me squint and blink. Inside: a guy wearing a Students for Ben Carson 2016 T-shirt. We have dramatically changed the network structure of humanity starting from the globalization era. 

My job is to describe zeitgeisty experiences. I’m on the Don dellilo beat. People love my column —- but I don’t. We talk occasionally around here about ‘everything is securities fraud’ as a sort of alternative to democratic governance…But in the long run, if something is a way around politics, eventually politics will creep into it. A solid footing depends on water, you know. A buff shirtless man in white jeans sitting in a jacuzzi talks to his girlfriend. She says, “I think we should listen to Afonja. He’s the father of mastery.”

TODO:

1. Buy kn95
2. Buy Gerson gift
3. Send money order
4. Meet Afonja at Waldorf Astoria
5. Edit three pieces
6. Call at ten and call at two (prep Q’s for both)
7. Votes
8. Lack of time and budget and clarity
9. Opacity of subcommittees
10. learn who Endymion is
11. read “The Fixer” by Joe Sacco
12. Carol Berge – 2 for the photographs of dorothea lange
13. Go write your mustard mayonnaise poem
14. Enbridge going at “breakneck speed” new to building in winter
15. A worker died
16. Play up fears about implementation 
17. Biofuels
18. Green hydrogen
19. Low carbon standard 
20. Direct action: “create an economic and political crisis”
21. Israel acts as part of a global system of imperialism
22. Israel acts as a sordid little gang
23. Israel is the lab for “war against the people” – Jeff Halper

Strange that we use the word “driven” to describe the strong-willed. An attempt to diminish their enviable self-mastery. They are really subject to something (their own will). Driven is a participle. A horse is driven. What if instead we called such people “riven”? 

Imagine you were a castaway, floating on the open sea. Imagine your prior learning informed you your odds of survival were next to nothing. What would this calculation of probability mean to you? Surely nothing. You know you will either die or survive; the supposed “likelihood” of one or the other is an abstraction so vague and remote it is simply meaningless. A process from post-WWI Vienna up to founding of WTO as a rearguard (?) action, a second line of defense against democracy and national populism. But just read something in “Liberal Currents” about Israel as too nationalist and socialist, low trust etc. So which is it? 

Phone notes from wandering the docks after a bunch of weed-infused lao gan ma: “A few years ago, I went to a solo piano gig at one of London’s trendiest jazz clubs. At the tail end of the evening, the pianist announced that his last number was ‘about regret.’ The audience laughed. ‘It’s about losing the love of your life and it never coming back,’ he continued. The audience laughed again. ‘It’s the only serious regret I have, but it’s a big one,’ he concluded. The audience laughed once more.”

Zeus in the accusative. Jazz in Silhouette. 

tfw there’s nobody in the propane cage

You will always be tired and thirsty, and there will always only be water. Or you may construct imaginary futures simply from the elements of your present: castles, systems, whole cosmos built from water, salt, sun, wind, arranged in layers and moving in unspeakable patterns, inventing new schemes of physics (or intuiting their possibility) and biology which may not even include yourself, your thoughts, your respirations as necessary components. Perhaps in your final moments you begin to enter awareness of the dizzying (or are they steadying, comforting, reassuring?) intricacies of the world you exit, despite its ridiculously simple appearance to the semantically trained (inner) eye, which names the situation in a seven-word sentence and believes it to have been thus encapsulated, as in a snowglobe: “A castaway, floating on the open sea.” 

Money Jungle. Genius of Modern Music. Misterioso. 

Striking faces and fear and fantasy. Lights
Wetly strummed guitars.
Friendless People with interesting clothes
France                     Memories
Fashion                    Drink
Charles Mingus      presents Charles Mingus

How did they gain entry? How did they know about the [location of nuclear warheads]? Was there a leak? Was there inside information? In ‘Swords Into Plowshares’ Dan wrote ‘Of course we had inside information; of course there was a leak. Our informant is otherwise known in the New Testament as Advocate, Friend, Spirit. We had been at prayer for days.’ 

“I have been jailed, prosecuted, and confined. Now that I’m a refugee, I have completed the full résumé of an anti-imperialist, of a leftist who doesn’t give up. These are the consequences [of what such a person does].” 

Don’t erase the undertone of productive aggression that characterizes our relationship in favor of a cloying chumminess that I really oppose. “Let’s all re-assert our humanity by turniing off all ‘autocorrect program! – Richard and Anne”

Management seminars. Of course there’s nothing to teach on management, as with ethics more generally – but in teaching people insane things, thing like compliment sandwiches, we equip them with an alien manner that can become a source of power. In speaking to people who employ management speak, one experiences the fear of encountering another language.

Newspaper poetry is heavy on metonymy (Beijing, Silicon Valley) and avoids the passive voice. This is a kind of modernism or secularism—people do things, they are free. *gestures right* That’s a pipe! *gestures left* And that’s an educated pipe? To be forgiven or saved: phrasings imbued with epistemological humility. 

Pound – Cavalcanti – Guido’s figure (w/ meaning) vs. Petrarch’s ornament. (Pro-body – beyond “athleticism”) We imagine energies now as formless (i.e. waves and currents) “perhaps algebra has queered our geometry” 

She wears bright lipstick and smokes a small red vape, covertly filling the room with the dense scent of strawberries. A life. As charming and self-contained as a goose tucked into its own breast. I’m flattered to be a destination from which my friends may post flirtations. 

Set both my eyes on yours

Incline the hand 

Prop open the window

Come into animal presence 

you are contributing to a struggle to protect the sacred

Today is less conspicuous than yesterday

Don’t be bossed around

Don’t take dumb orders

And if your reading list is normie, keep it to yourself!