They are trees that remind me of a time when I felt invincible. (RK)
AG2023_1870869a or of a time
Category: landscape
AG2024_1133372a or build a cheap model
And from the Journal: “‘It is difficult to know exactly how to make money on AI,’ said Mike Ogborne, founder of Ogborne Capital Management, a hedge-fund firm in San Francisco that oversees a position in Nvidia. ‘This could be the first day of a lot more pain.’” “It is difficult to know exactly how to make money in AI” does seem like an essential aspect of the AI trade; we have talked about OpenAI’s claim that “it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-[artificial general intelligence] world,” and also about a venture capital bet that the way to make money on AI is by buying up homeowners’ association management companies. But the actual answer turns out to be “build a cheap AI model and short Nvidia.” —Matt Levine, Bloomberg Opinion Money Stuff.
AG2025_1520719a or free from the private property of the image
Serious thoughts need different cultivation and time to grow; planted as seeds of living speech in the ground of an appropriate soul, they will take root, ripen, and bear fruit as knowledge in due season
Written texts make available the notion that one knows what one has merely read.
From Plato’s Phaedrus, via Anne Carson’s Eros the bittersweet.
McKenzie Wark (2009): Détournement, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 14:1, 145-153
Détournement attacks a kind of fetishism, where
the products of collective human labour in the
cultural realm become mere property. But what is
distinctive about this fetishism is that it does not
rest directly on the status of the thing as a
commodity. It is, rather, a fetishism of memory.
Not so much commodity fetishism as co-memory
fetishism – collective remembrance as fetish. And
what is distinctive about détournement is that it
can restore to the fragment the status of being a
recognisable part of the process of the collective
production of meaning in the present, through
the combination of the détourned fragment into a
new meaningful ensemble. Détournement frees
the process of creation from the private property
of the image.
AG2025_1110618a or As I walked out one evening
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
‘O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
As I Walked Out One Evening, W. H. Auden
AG2023_1066771a or in repose, distinct, hidden
I like to find
what’s not found
at once, but lies
within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.
Gull feathers of glass, hidden
…
I like the juicy stem of grass that grows
within the coarser leaf folded round,
and the butteryellow glow
in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
opens blue and cool on a hot morning.
Denise Levertov, Pleasures
The Eightfold Fence is the fourth episode of the FX limited series, Shogun. The episode premiered on March 12, 2024. A reference steeped in Japanese mythology and the Shinto faith, handled poetically and with agency by several female characters.
Teresa Gierzynska, Four pictures, 2004. via Mala Gallery.
How to construct a picture that will communicate all the magic of spring: augury of something that will inevitably come – space, innocence?
And what about the quintessence of the rich, ripe autumn?
How to present euphoria and freshness contained in the summer.
And, finally, or perhaps first of all: how to present the depressive winter: its moody and full of harmony aura in a way acceptable to us, allowing us to appreciate its qualities, making us to stop complaining and allowing us to rest – before summer euphoria?
How to present it another way?
We have to keep going back to it, after all, if we wish to maintain contact with the possible.
A plan for social transformation
Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.
Annette Gordon-Reed in NYR, 2018.
Figures like King, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks have now become “safe” in ways they never were when they were operating at the height of their powers. Stripped of their radicalism, they are welcomed as sources of inspiration in the curricula of almost every elementary school in the country.
[…]King started to speak even more openly and insistently about the “second phase,” which would be a “struggle for ‘economic equality,’” with unions as the linchpin of this effort. King, along with his aide Bayard Rustin, had long thought that there should be a “‘convergence’ between unions and the civil rights movement.” Everything was at stake for King here: if the second phase of his plan for social transformation was successful, “everyone could have a well-paying job or a basic level of income, along with decent levels of health care, education, and housing.”
He soon found, however, that “union racial politics remained contradictory and complicated.” The same racism that permeated American society also had a firm grip on the union movement. As had been true throughout American history, many poor and working-class whites had no interest in solidarity with blacks against white elites.
[…]With the Poor People’s Campaign, King hoped to reprise his triumphant 1963 March on Washington by leading thousands of poor people to the nation’s capital to demand a “radical redistribution of economic power.” The effort was fraught from the start, as his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had neither the funds nor the infrastructure to organize the huge event he envisioned. The task was not only physically draining, it was psychologically difficult. For as King crisscrossed the country to promote the effort, “the right-wing hate campaign against him escalated.” While in Miami to speak to a group of ministers, King remained in the conference hotel because the police could not ensure his safety.
Signal, worthwhile and preferred–open source, end to end encryption, cryptographically secure.
AG2020_1880804a or a minutiae
we cheer him on,
winter softened in the tropic of his strength.
Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “Epic” has talismanic importance to older Irish poets who took from the following lines license to write about the minutiae of their own locales:
I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.To be from a small country and to write intimately about your own affairs is to risk making your poetry impenetrable, irrelevant, or both, even when writing in a global language like English. And yet to exclude your own affairs, to eliminate the parochial from your “epic” entirely risks self-censorship or a denial of one’s own truth.
An American poet can mention the film Predator, Henry Kissinger, or the town of Ferguson and an informed and cultured Irish person will know the references. Conversely, if an Irish poet chose to write about Wanderly Wagon, Pádraig Flynn, or the town of Granard even a cultured American reader, unless a specialist in Irish Studies, would be lost.
Patrick Cotter, Introduction, Poetry, September 2015