Drama

The problem with drama is the great difficulty of casting the audience.

Quoted on Contrary Brin

During the course of his rebuttal to Peter Watts' essay on how to deal with surveillance, David Brin quotes me from a recent email exchange. Well worth a read (his words, I mean).

Slow cooker ribs

A variation on this recipe.

Always

The first answer is always partial.

Nothing

Nothing is stranger than the once-familiar.

New poems

+6

On change

If you want change,
remember to forget.

On words

It is more accurate to say that words are associations than that they have associations.

On people

People, even though I don't much love them, are necessary for most of the things I love.

Provisos (Kushner)

Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don't look carefully at what isn't acceptable to you.

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

The examined life

By all means, examine life,
but don't forget to live it.

On technology (Stephenson)

The presumption is that the world is static—and basically hospitable—until we do something and thereby disrupt it. Which I don’t agree with at all. We live in an environment almost all aspects of which were engineered by our ancestors. The continents of Australia and the Americas, when discovered by Europeans, had been made over by systematic hunting, burning and gardening over tens of thousands of years, and didn’t exist in anything like a pristine state of nature. We live, and have always lived, in a completely manufactured environment. All we’re left with is the ability to choose between different technological strategies. It’s incoherent to point at one thing and call it a technology in contradistinction to the [implicitly non-technological] status quo ante.

Neal Stephenson

We

Could any but we who recognize beauty
create so much ugliness?

The truth

The truth is not spontaneous.

New poems

+8

Or

You can reconcile or you can relinquish.

On life & death

Life is not what we hope it is,
and death is exactly what we fear it is.

To be a poet (Delacroix)

To be a poet at twenty is to be twenty: to be a poet at forty is to be a poet.

Eugene Delacroix

Most

Most people are too dull to be good.

New poems

+3

Novel themes

I prefer the composite message of today's novels—"The world is mad"—to that of the works of earlier times—"The world is sad."