“Work out. Ten laps.
Chin ups. Look good.
Steam room. Dress warm.
Call home. Fresh air.
[…]
Hard nodes. Beware.”
Heartbeats, Melvin Dixon
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Category: landscape
To succeed in life a man must be adaptable.
Claudia Roth Pierpont’s The Florentine, in the New Yorker (2008), came back at the right time. Niccolò Machiavelli’s writings are central to the moral-ethical-effective discourses on power and how to rule.
““The Prince” offered the first major secular shock to the Christianized state in which we still live. Long before Darwin, Machiavelli showed us a credible world without Heaven or Hell, a world of “is” rather than “should be,” in which men were coolly viewed as related to beasts and earthly government was the only hope of bettering our natural plight.
[…]
Erasmus, whose “Education of a Christian Prince” was written two years after Machiavelli’s work—he presented his treatise first to Charles of Aragon and, after it failed to elicit the desired financial result, to Henry VIII—spun his pious counsel around the central thesis “What must be implanted deeply and before all else in the mind of the prince is the best possible understanding of Christ.” Machiavelli, on the other hand, proposed the best possible understanding of the methods of Cesare Borgia.
[…]
To succeed in life a man must be adaptable. This is a prime lesson of “The Prince,” and Machiavelli appears to have been determined to live by it. A republican during the republic, a royal servant when princes rule: “He who conforms his course of action to the quality of the times will fare well.”
[…]
But a corollary, if contradictory, lesson of “The Prince” is that, try as he might, “man cannot deviate from that to which nature inclines him.” In composing his Medici-commissioned history, Machiavelli agonized over how to present the Medici, and the result is anything but the work of a courtier. Recounting how the family’s desire to “wield exclusive power” had led it to crush all political opposition, leaving other parties with no alternative except plots and murderous conspiracies, he concluded bluntly that under the Medici regime “liberty was unknown in Florence.”
change through exchanging with others
Our utopia is about the idea of change–not the thought of the absolute that we impose on ourselves and others. I always sum this up with a saying: “I can change through exchanging with others, without losing or diluting my sense of self” – Glissant.
The Archipelago Conversations, Édouard Glissant & Hans Ulrich Obrist, Emma Ramadan, translator. Isolarii, 2021.
Begin on 32 Street
Atemoya (Annona squamosa x A. cherimola), custard apple, kachiman. Related to soursop (Annona muricata), korosol, guanabana.
AT&T had a data breach (data is considered so sensitive that police need a warrant to access it.) Mozilla advises us to take some precautionary steps–Brush up on the Federal Trade Commission’s tips to avoid getting scammed. Also, request the company delete your personal data frequently.
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Doreen St. Félix on The Critic and Her Publics. Spent times on Awol Erizku’s “Girl with a Bamboo Earring,” 2009.
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“It remains to be seen if there is any leader in these hideous times who is capable of the pained eloquence and reason…” Remnick, New Yorker.
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[Haiti Inter] Papa Doc et le vodou: rituels et sacrifices au palais national
“L’instrumentalisation du vaudou par François Duvalier est à la fois cynique et fascinante. Il a habilement exploité les croyances populaire”
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Shelley Duvall, 20 films (14. Rapunzel (1983) from Faerie Tale Theatre series).
Sustainability and shoe companies. Small is closer to green.
Experts say there’s no real upside for consumers to allow gen AI to be trained on their data and there are risks that are still being studied. CNBC
“Lamar is a master of rap, it can’t be denied, and his hard-won skill has earned him an undammable flood of free expression.” Vinson Cunningham in New Yorker.