by
Anne Lamott
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Annie Dillard has said that day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more. This is a radical proposition that runs so contrary to human nature, or at least to my nature, that I personally keep trying to find loopholes in it. But it is only when I go ahead and decide to shoot my literary, creative wad on a daily basis that I get any sense of full presence [...]
Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of almost everyone with whom I come into contact as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world’s an orphan’s home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communion.
The other is to think of the writers who have given a book to me, and then to write a book back to them. This gift they have given us, which we pass on to those around us, was fashioned out of their lives. You wouldn’t be a writer if reading hadn’t enriched your soul more than other pursuits. So write a book back to V. S. Naipaul or Margaret Atwood or Wendell Berry or whoever it is who most made you want to write, whose work you most love to read. Make it as good as you can. It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.
All that I know about the relationship between publication and mental health was summed up in one line of the movie Cool Runnings, which is about the first Jamaican bobsled team. The coach is a four-hundred-pound man who had won a gold in Olympic bobsledding twenty years before but has been a complete loser ever since. The men on his team are desperate to win an Olympic medal, just as half the people in my classes are desperate to get published. But the coach says, "If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it." You may want to tape this to the wall near your desk.
[...] I said that I was all over the place, up and down, scattered, high, withdrawing, lost, and in the midst of it all trying to find some elusive sense of serenity. "The world can’t give that serenity," he said. "The world can’t give us peace. We can only find it in our hearts."
"I hate that," I said.
"I know. But the good news is that by the same token, the world can’t take it away."
'"Never. We ain't never bringing them back. That's it, man. New system, no need for these old machines. They redundant."
"But I just brought these all the way over from Brooklyn ... How am I going to get my money for them? I need some cash! There's like two hundred bucks here!"
"No cash," the guy says, as he jumps up onto the truck's front platform, where its cab should be. "No cash for recycling, just credit. You gotta get the app now."
this is heartbreaking. teh homeless guy who collects cans from recycling
think about the implications of having such a big part of your life (your very means of survival) being completely out of your control , subject to the whims of a massive corporation you can never interact with
[...] "This is a MESH network, it's completely decentralised. Instead of connecting to a router or a central server to access it, you connect directly to other Flex users over Bluetooth, and through them to everybody else on the network. It's very localised - in order to connect you have to be within fifty or so meters or someone else that's connected. But if you are then you can potentially reach everyone else in the network. So even though it's hyperlocal there's no limit to how many people can join, or how big the network can grow - this is networking on a community scale."
[...] "There are no servers here, no data centres or cloud storage. The file-sharing system is pretty sophisticated but very easy to use - you can share pretty much anything, from web pages to streaming video and full VR environments, but it has to be stored locally on your spex or another device running Flex. We've just set this up and let users do what they want with it. We've spontaneously ended up with dozens of photo-sharing groups, radio stations, and mixed reality gaming campaigns. And it's all come from within the community."
damn this is cool
[...] Half the crowd here are finance bros of every gender, the other half their partners, all with the kinds of jobs you can do in NYC these days only if your other half is a millionaire hedge fund manager. Meatpacking District gallery curators. Life coaches. Personal stylists. Social-media brand managers. Artisan cupcake distributors. Food bloggers. Lots of food bloggers.
hahaha
At Rush's insistence both he and Scott have got their scarves and hoods up to try to mask their faces from the police drones that float constantly above their heads. Most of the rest of the marchers have done the same: if not hoodies or scarves then actual masks - 3D-printed re-creations of too many other black men and women slain by the police, to keep their memories alive as much as to hide identities, as if vengeful ghosts have been summoned to march with them.
holy shit this is brilliant
"[...] I've been on Pride, and I went on the Women's March ... but this ... They were different, right? Like it felt like people were there to have fun. Like the signs all had jokes on them, people were partying, taking selfies. This, this feels like it's about something. Like I said, focused. Urgent. Angry. But with good reason. You know what I mean?"
[...]
"Plus, on those marches, there was never this many cops."
the protest against cops (and Prescience, the MIT-incubated data analytics company that started as a Cambridge Analytica stand-in and is now doing predictive policing)
Then that footage had leaked, the clearing of the homeless camp near Google's HQ in California. Next thing, their campus in Mountain View was swamped by thousands of protestors. The leaked video had brought them down, but it felt like most of them had some other reason to be there: that unshakable feeling that they'd been fucked over, that they'd been denied something, that they'd had too much control taken away from them and put into the hands of unseen algorithms. They cut some data lines, blocked the driverless staff buses from getting in. Called it a "real-life DDOS." It was peaceful enough, looked almost fun at first, like some kind of music festival. Until someone started messing around with homemade EMP grenades. and Google's security team of PTSD-shaken ex-vets got trigger happy. For twelve hours it was nothing but screaming and chaos, footer of hipster kids bleeding out into the streets while Google hemorrhaged money on the markets, until the police finally rolled in with armored cars and drones and shut it all down. Thirty-six dead, 68 percent burned off Google's share value.
holy shit