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"Experiments with Dailiness," an exercise from The Art of Science Writing by Dale Worsley and Bernadette Mayer, via Common Books.
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Fairfield Porter, Interior by electric light, 1966.
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Soldered house, ca. 1900s, via tihngs.
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Sarah Holloway's Apple Powered Computer, 2023. Gleaned Macintosh Plus computer (circa 1987) powered by crab apples housed in a cabinet made of repurposed hog-feed crates. For Mold, Holloway writes:
It took a lot of apples to run the computer and it didn’t last for long but the point still was there, that all our systems are connected and our food and ecological systems are either directly or indirectly tied to our computers and digital technologies. Data centers take up space like mono crops and they take insane amounts of energy. The project is meant to be a fun way of wondering how our food and tech systems make strange bedfellows. A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend who told me about a farm her friend manages. It is owned by a tech company based in Vancouver, Canada. They have a farm that tech workers are allowed to go to for “rejuvenation.”(Think therapy horses but like pulling carrots).
The world is a weird place where technology and industry are flowing into all other sectors.
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I was once driven in a taxi by a man who had no room for a piano in his house and had moved it under an apple tree. He told me he liked to hear the rain falling on the keys or sometimes fruit, and often the wind would arrive at night and bang branches on the broken lid.That was 10 years ago. I imagine it is worn down now to a skeleton of wires. I imagine on windless nights, the moon moves over the wires, playing silence. There are wonderful tunes composed of a piano, but if, like me, you are interested in the edge where the mind gives up and matter begins to describe itself, then these weather tunes, these erosions, unpredictably composed by time itself, are worth celebrating. Perhaps, as Bergsten said, there is a mathematical order inherent in matter, and we have only to stop speaking—we have only to stop composing and performing and singing and thinking to hear it.
Alice Oswald, from her lecture, "The Art of Erosion," given on 9/12/2019 at the University of Oxford.
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Many scientists have been upset because Barbara McClintock characterized herself as a mystic. But to her, mystic did not mean someone who mystifies ... Instead, for Barbara McClintock, a mystic was someone with a deep awareness of the mysteries posed by natural phenomena. Mystification came, in her view, when we tried to use our current concepts to explain phenomena that demanded new ways of thinking.
James Shapiro, quoted by Alexis Madrigal in his Oakland Garden Club essay, "What Was Barbara McClintock's Mysticism?" I keep re-reading the ending:
We are assemblages of cooperating cells and tissues, each unit of life competent within the spaces our body creates. Trillions of brilliant little cells each doing its thing to make … me. I’m held together by bioelectric fields and metabolic processes and the convenient sense that I am a single being. At my own scale, I am a galaxy of sorts, hiding in plain sight, obscured by the bright sun of consciousness. And so are you.Or, as McClintock told her biographer, “Basically, everything is one. There is no way in which you draw a line between things.”
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Not everything she tried worked, and some critics complained about the too-muchness of it all, her books like an overstuffed shopping bag, full of odd characters and clever lines that should have been left on the shelf ... in the end none of those blemishes really matters. What does matter is the ever-continuing ambition, the steady professionalism, the fact that [Zadie] Smith hasn’t frittered away her early success into unproductive stardom. What matters is that it’s a long time since she’s sounded like anyone else. She’s made her world ...
Michael Gorra, "Playing with the Past." The New York Review, 9/21/2023.
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At a time when revolution gripped the country, the Whole Earth Catalog reflected [Stewart Brand's] right-wing thought by omission. After one young staffer suggested ways to make the catalog more political, Stewart vetoed the notion with a surprising set of rules: “No politics, no religion, and no art.” What was left? Computers and shopping. As a futurist, he had that much right.
Malcolm Harris, "The Zen Playboy: The Life and Times of Stewart Brand." The Nation, 6/13/2022.
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