Category: music

The Dig, 2021, Netflix. Wikipedia.

Music by Stefan Gregory. Gregory’s thoughts on the music tonality.

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Landscape, soil, and belonging — via Richard Smyth on verso blog.

“Soil in this sense may or may not be more than the stuff we happen to be standing on

[…]

“a ‘re-enchanted’ world in which ‘soil and soul [are] venerated together’ in a ‘higher unity of nature”

[…]

“We might also ask … whether in this communion of soul and soil there is a place for those of us who have no concept of a soul, and still less of a god, or for those of us born far from nourishing soil, who have always walked on brick, concrete, tarmac, and have never felt worse off for it, never lacked community, never knew that we were meaningless. ”

[…]

“there are conceptions of place and belonging … where the local outweighs the general, where here means here, us us and this this, as opposed to not-there, not-you, not-that”

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“[John] Clare’s identity – his inner identity, as an artist, yes, but above all as a free man, ‘a soul unshackled like eternity’ – was realised through, and not in spite of, his intense and inescapable personal identification with place.

This is landscape as a personal preoccupation, ‘belonging’ not as a societal good, to be commodified and parcelled out to the worthy, but as a component of a lived experience, idiosyncratic, non-transferrable, perhaps a character trait, perhaps something more like a symptom.”

[…]

“there are politics of borders, races, nations, and there are politics of love, belonging, politics of home. They are different even if they can’t ever be entirely discrete.”

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“describes a hard-earned belonging … [as] what a person and a place can make together, whether they want to or not.”

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“We are shaped by our landscapes. They might be green or grey, wide-open or built-up, they might be here or there or anywhere, we might not have chosen them, we might not love them, we might not even like them, but they shape us, no less than we have shaped them.” […] “there are as many ways of belonging as there are of loving, or of being loved“

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The Data Delusion, Jill Lepore, New Yorker (March 27, 2023).

“…imagine that all the world’s knowledge is stored, and organized, in a single vertical Steelcase filing cabinet. Maybe it’s lima-bean green. It’s got four drawers. Each drawer has one of those little paper-card labels, snug in a metal frame, just above the drawer pull. The drawers are labelled, from top to bottom, “Mysteries,” “Facts,” “Numbers,” and “Data.” Mysteries are things only God knows, like what happens when you’re dead. That’s why they’re in the top drawer, closest to Heaven. A long time ago, this drawer used to be crammed full of folders with names like “Why Stars Exist” and “When Life Begins,” but a few centuries ago, during the scientific revolution, a lot of those folders were moved into the next drawer down, “Facts,” which contains files about things humans can prove by way of observation, detection, and experiment. “Numbers,” second from the bottom, holds censuses, polls, tallies, national averages—the measurement of anything that can be counted, ever since the rise of statistics, around the end of the eighteenth century. Near the floor, the drawer marked “Data” holds knowledge that humans can’t know directly but must be extracted by a computer, or even by an artificial intelligence. It used to be empty, but it started filling up about a century ago, and now it’s so jammed full it’s hard to open.”