The Melancholaholic

This is actually great advice for anyone doing creative/generative work who struggles with perfection paralysis, courtesy of the never boring Willem Dafoe:

Willem Dafoe: "...the idea of trying to fail." pic.twitter.com/kFrxCk165j

— Sheet Music Library (PDF) (@LibrarySheet) March 14, 2023

There is very little that is more satisfying than watching your child prepare for something that causes them significant fear, face into it with courage, and succeed. I’m always proud of my daughter, but it’s a joy to watch her stepping into challenges and growing in confidence.

Location check in 🗺 — Home for Work ⚒️

I got a little bit behind on this, but am all caught up and back in the saddle now. Have a listen to my song a day for 2023 playlist.

Freddie deBoer:

I have a niche, a narrow one but big enough for me - a leftist who maintains a commitment to civil liberties and procedural fairness, and who has serious criticisms of social justice politics, who’s nonetheless not willing to follow many “anti-woke” writers down a rabbit hole that leads inevitably to social conservatism. People want critical analysis of social justice politics that’s fair and accurate and which doesn’t presume a rejection of the basic left project of equality and shared prosperity, and that’s what I (intend to) provide.

Yes to “critical analysis of social justice politics that’s fair and accurate and which doesn’t presume a rejection of the basic left project of equality and shared prosperity.” More of this, please.

W. David Marx on what comes next:

In order to figure out what happens after the social media era, we need to break out from the binary of (1) the flavorless cafeteria buffet of online content versus (2) reactionary counterculture revival. The world is primed for a fecund offline culture, but it has to offer something other than retreat.

Emphasis added above. I think there’s real wisdom to rolling back some of the behaviours we’ve developed in response to our smart devices occupying a more and more central place in our lives. Having said that, Marx is mostly correct; we do have to offer more than retreat to an idealized past if we are going to move culture back towards embodiment in any significant way.

Saturday morning feel.

🎵Now Listening: R.E.M - Sweetness Follows

Happy Burns Night, friends!

📚 Robert MacFarlane:

“Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called ‘deep time’ — the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years — crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body.

Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist — as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.”

See also: The vast reaches of the cosmos viewed through the James Webb Space Telescope. The Duino Elegies. This. And this, this, and this.

All things that till the soil of my imagination, allowing me to apprehend the incomprehensible. What does this for you?

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