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At times, she wondered if she meant to destroy her marriage. But most often she went out of excitement or curiosity—to see again what it was to go to his house, to undress, to have an affair. But to approach an affair so lovelessly was perhaps not to really understand what one was at all.
There was something of the quality of a miracle about it. Like atonement or forgiveness, a life given to her that she didn’t deserve. She and Peter found a new apartment so as to have more room. And she finally relented—they bought a house on Cabot Lake. It made more sense to her now, to have this house. Idyllic—children swimming in the lake or running through the woods.
We slept one either side of him in the huge bed, in most of our clothes. He was in gray jersey shorts. He smelled expensive; I remember that. I remember the expensive-feeling hotel room darkness, too, and thinking that I was there on false pretenses, really, that it was like being thrown forward in life. There was a lot I had to do before he and I could really be friends. He was twenty-nine and successful. I’d done nothing. I looked like nothing. I had to finish my exams, do my A-levels; I had to leave home, get my degree, become a person in the world.
ick!!
There’s a real closeness between imagination and forgiveness. I mean that in a phenomenological way. If you notice where you go when you have to forgive someone, it’s the place of supply, the place of extra. I think it’s worth spending a lot of time attending to that, so that when chance or fate or whatever it is knocks a poem your way, you’re ready. That’s why I’m quite often driven to say that it’s more important to do the work on one’s character than on the words. Don’t surround yourself with dictionaries. What really is nauseating in a poem is when you smell somebody trying to be a poet, and when it’s yourself, that’s just the worst of all. But a voice is such an incredible thing. When you think of how each person resonates differently and their physical voice comes out of this space that is tuned by tension and confidence and generosity—that’s the best thing you have.
So Joe came over after the show. We talked, smoked, drank, drank, drank, smoked, and it was bigger than both of us. Joe, being from a liberal family from Berkeley and an arch radical, suffered from typical Catholic schoolboy pangs of guilt, and had some superstition in his mind that if he didn’t actually “sleep” with me, it was not so bad. So he slept on the couch, awaking me in the morning with more caresses, and then saying, “How can you do this and say you’re a friend of Robin’s? Poor Robin, sitting at home with the kid!”
By this time I was laughing my head off it was so hilarious, and asked him if he knew Michael Lydon, whom I didn’t want to discover our adventure. He said not personally but that Michael’s former old lady was living with him and Robin since apparently some “other woman” groupie slicky had [lured] him away. When I told him I was that [groupie slicky], he held his head in his hands and moaned. I explained to him that these things happen, especially with nice people, since they’re bound to know and like each other. That wasn’t much solace, and he begged me not to come to San Francisco for a while and please never to let either Robin or Michael get wind of l’affaire extraordinaire.
omg lol how did i miss this the first time
[the page number is approximate]
This giving-up-smoking stuff is really fantastic. I can do everything except make a collage, go to the Troubadour, and lose weight. Although today I’ve decided not to eat anything outrageous, at least till I get back to 130 lbs. Trying to hold yourself together when you’re falling apart all over the place is extraordinarily weird, and most of the time, I feel like I’m about to topple over or faint. My mother says this feeling only lasts for 4 days. Since my mother, [my aunt] Tiby, and Carol gave up [smoking], I figure I can stop too. Before that, the only people I knew who stopped were men. All I’m going to smoke are joints and hash. I won’t have to lug a big purse with me—I can use my little beaded purses. At any rate—I have the feeling I’ll never smoke again. I hate the idea of going to a doctor and having him tell me I’ve got lung cancer. But my favorite thing is that it’s such a novelty to deny myself something. The discipline is really marvelous. Discipline is really great—I love it.
<3
[approximate page numbers]
[...] The online sphere inspires incessant talk of gift economies and public-spiritedness and democracy, but commercialism and privatization and inequality lurk beneath the surface.
This contradiction is captured in a single word: “open,” a concept capacious enough to contain both the communal and capitalistic impulses central to Web 2.0 while being thankfully free of any socialist connotations. New-media thinkers have claimed openness as the appropriate utopian ideal for our time, and the concept has caught on. The term is now applied to everything from education to culture to politics and government. Broadly speaking, in tech circles, open systems—like the Internet itself—are always good, while closed systems—like the classic broadcast model—are bad. Open is Google and Wi-Fi, decentralization and entrepreneurialism, the United States and Wikipedia. Closed equals Hollywood and cable television, central planning and entrenched industry, China and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However imprecisely the terms are applied, the dichotomy of open versus closed (sometimes presented as freedom versus control) provides the conceptual framework that increasingly underpins much of the current thinking about technology, media, and culture.
While openness has many virtues, it is also undeniably ambiguous. Is open a means or an end? What is open and to whom? Mark Zuckerberg said he designed Facebook because he wanted to make the world more “open and connected,” but his company does everything it can to keep users within its confines and exclusively retains the data they emit. Yet this vagueness is hardly a surprise given the history of the term, which was originally imported from software production: the designation “open source” was invented to rebrand free software as business friendly, foregrounding efficiency and economic benefits (open as in open markets) over ethical concerns (the freedom of free software). In keeping with this transformation, openness is often invoked in a way that evades discussions of ownership and equity, highlighting individual agency over commercial might and ignoring underlying power imbalances.
very similar to what Morozov says in his Baffler piece
(this inspired my open web talk. I swear I didn't actually read it before I wrote my logic piece though, even though it feels eerily similar. i did read that NLR review of it - maybe that's why?)
Open standards, in general, foster a kind of productive chaos, encouraging innovation and invention, experimentation and engagement. But openness alone does not provide the blueprint for a more equitable social order, in part because the “freedom” promoted by the tech community almost always turns out to be of the Darwinian variety. Openness in this context is ultimately about promoting competition, not with protecting equality in any traditional sense; it has little to say about entrenched systems of economic privilege, labor rights, fairness, or income redistribution. Despite enthusiastic commentators and their hosannas to democratization, inequality is not exclusive to closed systems. Networks reflect and exacerbate imbalances of power as much as they improve them.
[...] The cultural field has become increasingly controlled by companies “whose sole contribution to the creative work,” to borrow Cory Doctorow’s biting expression, “is chaining children to factories in China and manufacturing skinny electronics” or developing the most sophisticated methods for selling our data to advertisers.
damn that's brutal
More troublingly, at least for those who believed the Internet upstarts would inevitably vanquish the establishment dinosaurs, are the ways the new and old players have melded. Condé Nast bought Reddit, Fox has a stake in Vice Media, Time Warner bet on Maker Studios (which is behind some of YouTube’s biggest stars), Apple works intimately with Hollywood and AT&T, Facebook joined forces with Microsoft and the major-label-backed Spotify, and Twitter is trumpeting its utility to television programmers. Google, in addition to cozying up to the phone companies that use its Android operating system, has struck partnership deals with entertainment companies including Disney, Paramount, ABC, 20th Century Fox, and Sony Pictures while making numerous overtures to network and cable executives in hopes of negotiating a paid online television service.