Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.

— George Orwell / “Why I Write”

Ten thousand miles away
in a chair at a screen in a box wait can be read
as fire.

— Caitlin Roach / “The Inheritance of Intelligence”

My brain is not unlike the Syracuse grey matter sky, the color of waiting.

There is no school, no work today. The county has run out of rock salt for the roads and a winter storm is coming (so they say). Departments are being dismantled. Paper straws have been banned.

My husband thinks AI is the scariest thing no one is talking about.

Ray Bradbury suggests making a list of ten things you hate, and tearing them down in your art. Then write ten things you love, and celebrate them. 

— Laura Carnes Williams / “Thought Vomit” / Substack

A cool voice giving hourly updates
on the bombing of another city which it called
the conflict

— Margaret Ross / “Evolution”

Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted in time. We have to prevent it from being diluted in order that it should be intolerable.

— Simone Weil / Gravity and Grace

I read that this year’s our copper anniversary

I will ask for a copper penis as a gift, to stir jam

Maybe next year a lot of fruit will grow at the cottage?

— Zan de Parry / “Copper Anniversary”

We are so seldom told the truth. And Hamlet, in Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and the bad news is. And we respond to that.

Thank you, Bill.

— Kurt Vonnegut / “Kurt Vonnegut on Story Construction” / The Memory Hole, Substack

What I’m Listening To:

Where’d you go?
Far far far away
Where’d you go? Ooh
Far far, if all the welders in the world took this pipe and made it right again oh-weh-oh
Dah-doo-dah-dah-doo-dah-dah

— Horsegirl / “Where’d you go?”