Today I remembered this post I made on January 2nd of last year:

With white supremacists successfully bullying the first Black (+ 2nd female) president of Harvard into stepping down just six months into her tenure on the pretense that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, 2024, America’s decision year on whether or not to turn towards fascism, is hard out of the gates.

The rest of the year did end up having as two of its big themes “Black women: should they lead?” and “Criticizing Israel: antisemitic?” And of course, the turn towards fascism has been something to behold! The richest man on earth sieg heiling at the inauguration!

One takeaway for me: people are still in denial of how much hatred Black women face in our society. The intersection of sexism and racism—talk about meeting the devil at the crossroads.

I knew we were in trouble when in the spring someone I love texted me a picture of a barn in Virginia, the side of which had been painted in ten foot tall letters with the slogan, JOE AND THE HO. Despite being basically liberal, they thought it was pretty funny, really. They struggled to understand why I flinched in horror.

I don’t know what the way forward is. I do believe that the work we have to do is heart work.

Who doesn’t love a book with a cover like this?

Energy Secrets of Glastonbury Tor by Nicholas R. Mann (“in Moscow”) is a surprisingly good read, for the genre. The genre being, I guess, self-published-looking New Age books. Often too full with mumbo jumbo, this one has a long disquisition on the hydrogeology of the tor and the sources of the red and white springs that I found lucid and rather convincing. Still, the book’s third appendix, “Dragons,” has no right at all to be this good:

Dragons are alluded to in several places in this book and it is helpful to briefly describe them here. A dragon is the name given to a multi-dimensional being that exists, transforms and moves in vortex formations. Dragons are the energy ‘behind’ forms in much the same manner as the Devas described for example, by W. Tudor Pole, Dorothy Maclean and by other writers from Findhorn. Dragons are at once visible and invisible through their ability to be present in the elements yet command the energy vortices that form those elements. They can ‘shed their skin’ to move through the many dimensions of the universe, the limits of which for us are determined by the speed of light. Dragons are therefore masters of the time, space and matter continuum. They are capricious, humorous, benign, malevolent and indifferent. They can be seen with the non-localised vision of the soul, but they will not willingly admit to it, preferring to remain in mime. Magicians have learnt to recognise and command them, but as dragons prefer to command themselves the practice is inadvisable. However, gardeners, foresters, acupuncturists, hydrologists and sailors, for example, work with them all the time. Animals are also acutely aware of their presence and will adjust their actions accordingly. Observation of the in-turning and out-turning nodes in air, fire and, best of all, in moving water, provide excellent reference points for deeper meditation on the nature of dragons. Acquiring an understanding of the nature of dragons is extremely useful in developing the practices necessary for the enhancement of energy vortices.

As an avid reader of Kottke.org, I appreciate that he’s added in comments sections for some posts, though I rarely feel called to leave one of my own. One post from earlier today got my goat, though. Here’s Jason Kottke’s brief post and my reaction:

The post

Provocative from Tim Carmody: David Lynch was America’s greatest conservative filmmaker. “There is an assumption that great artists, especially subversive ones, live radical lives and embrace progressive politics. But Lynch…”

My comment

I also found this unsatisfying—less a provocation than a swing and a miss. I think it would have been useful for Carmody to define what “conservative” means to him. Instead he mostly gives definition by subtraction. For instance:

And though he clearly had a great sense of humor, there’s very little that’s insincere or campy about Lynch’s attitudes toward either his country or his films’ subjects.

I think his definition of a liberal/progressive artist is… John Waters? I just don’t see how insincerity and campiness neatly track onto politics. What’s campier than a MAGA hat?

Ultimately, Carmody seems to be arguing that having a strong sense of morality makes you a conservative, which just seems wrong. Here’s his line on this:

For all his comfort with ambiguity and fascination with evil, Lynch turns out to be a profound moralist. In one of Lynch’s last acting roles, his character Gordon Cole in 2017’s revival of “Twin Peaks” half-shouts, “Fix [your] hearts or die.”

This had me tearing out my hair! How can you bring up that line WITHOUT MENTIONING THAT IT’S DIRECTED AT ANTI-TRANS BIGOTRY! That’s not just argumentative malpractice; the elision totally distorts what’s going on here. Gordon Cole’s line is about morality, for sure—but in our society it’s a decidedly progressive take on the moral. Not Reaganite “family values” but a vision of bodily autonomy and freedom of self-expression that would put Lynch to the left of not just today’s Republicans but also many “centrist Democrats.”

The biggest problem with this take, though, is that I just can’t see how it’s useful or expands our understanding of the man or his work.

But where liberals look for solutions and progress, Lynch finds ambiguous fragments of dead futures.

Man, that’s not a difference between liberals and conservatives—that’s the difference between a politician or pundit and an artist. Lynch was always tight-lipped about what his work meant, and he also didn’t go out and get involved in political campaigns. That was a choice he made, and for me at least it’s more than a touch sacrilegious to try to pin him on a 2-d political spectrum when he spent decades exploring territory that was so far beyond such fantasies.

I really enjoyed Amy Kurzweil’s interview with the comics artist Gene Luen Yang from the Fall 2023 Believer. (I read it in print but here it is online.) I loved the bits about the physical effects of being a cartoonist, plus I just loved Yang’s sensibility and sense of humor. Here’s a favorite exchange:

BLVR: What was the family dynamic? Did both you and your brother feel the pressure from your father to, like the Level Up character, become a doctor or something?

GLY: The Level Up character is loosely based on my brother. My brother is a doctor. He’s four years younger than me and he was always better at video games than me. He just had better hand-eye coordination. I remember him telling me all these crazy stories about the stuff he would have to do in med school, like dissecting human cadavers and labeling hemisected human heads. The way video games and medicine connected for me was him telling me that for one of his assignments, he had to do a colonoscopy on somebody. And after that, he decided to be a gastroenterologist. When he was a kid, he was super squeamish. So I was like, “You used to feel like throwing up when you saw dog poop on the street. Why would you want to be a gastroenterologist?” And he said, “Because a colonoscopy is like playing video games up somebody’s ass.”

BLVR: [Laughs]

GLY: I was like, “That’s a graphic novel.”

Gotta read it.

Why isn’t all chocolate sold as gelt? What happy Scrooges we become as we listen to a handful’s muted clinking, carefully pick out the first one to eat, find the foil seam, peel one side back, then peel back the other, see each bas relief twice—always first in metallic gold, then in chocolate—place the coin in our mouths, bite down, chew, swallow. Economists call this deflation; I call it bliss. Edible coins are the only currency I trust.

Rachel Aviv’s latest, “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice,” should not be missed. In her book Strangers to Ourselves and in her many New Yorker pieces Aviv often explores how different-minded people experience the world, and her preternatural technique is to do so without pathologizing or psychologizing but just observing and accumulating fine details and contradictions until the subject’s way of being almost gleams. Here she takes the vexing question of how Alice Munro could create such powerful and emotionally perceptive works of fiction while also defending and living with the man (her second husband) who had raped and abused her daughter Andrea, starting when Andrea was nine. By the end of the piece, the contradiction has emulsified. And the reader’s understanding Munro’s work has been transformed.

Also: Aviv writes so strongly herself. I particularly love the way she ends to each section, with some detail or story or quoted dialogue that sets all that has come before to ringing.

Take, for one example, this section, which my partner had warned me about before I even read this piece. “Wait till you get to the section where she quotes Margaret Atwood,” she said. “It’s like a whole Margaret Atwood novel, in one paragraph.” And it is:

The writer Margaret Atwood, who had been friends with Alice since the late sixties, told me that she didn’t know about Andrea’s abuse, though she was aware that Alice had unexpectedly ended up in Comox. At the time, Atwood said, few men would put up with a middle-aged woman who was an accomplished writer. But Andrea’s revelation would have changed the power dynamics in the relationship. “After Alice found out,” Atwood wrote me, “she had the moral upper hand.” She now had an “ace-in-the-hole ‘You-have-been-a-bad-person’ card.” She added, “I’m not saying it’s a good thing—I’m just saying it’s a fact. For somebody of her generation who had been brought up to believe that women were lesser and that their opinions and feelings and desires did not count, it would be quite something.”

A few months back, I started meditating twice a day.

None of my previous meditation practices had ever stuck. I always saw it as a matter of will power. I’d beat myself up: you’re too lazy to stick with something as wholesome as meditation. I rode myself even when I meditated: you’re getting distracted, your mind isn’t blank enough, you should be better at this already. I tried, and I failed.

This time I’ve had a different approach: a method called Natural Stress Relief that emphasizes that it’s okay, that you don’t need to try, that there’s no result you’re trying to get. And the technique could hardly be simpler: eighteen minutes, morning and afternoon, sitting with your eyes closed, silently repeating a syllable. I believe the technique to be much the same as the much more well-known Transcendental Meditation (also known as TM), except that instead of costing $1000+ to get trained you can download the materials for $25 and train yourself.

A few months in, I’ve become curious to learn more about meditation. I’m reading a collection of short essays put out by Shambhala, and my partner got me the classic, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I’m also re-reading David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish. (Lynch is maybe the most famous TM practitioner out there.) Lynch’s book is a bit autobiographical and a bit philosophical, but these qualities are elevated by the format: a sequence of short, pithy essaylets.

Here’s Lynch’s essaylet titled “Los Angeles”:

I came to Los Angeles from Philadelphia, where I had lived for five years, attending art school. Philadelphia is known as the City of Brotherly Love, but when I was there, it was a hellhole. There wasn’t a lot of love in that city.

I arrived in L.A. at night, so it wasn’t until the next morning, when I stepped out of a small apartment on San Vicente Boulevard, that I saw this light. And it thrilled my soul. I feel lucky to live with that light.

I love Los Angeles. I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you’re there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather. And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about that light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don’t know why. It’s different from the light in other places. The light in Philadelphia, even in the summer, is not nearly as bright. It was the light that brought everybody to L.A. to make films in the early days. It’s still a beautiful place.

This captures so much of what I love about L.A. And it shook loose a memory, maybe one of my oldest.

It was before my brother was born, so I was maybe three, maybe a little less. We flew to L.A. to visit my grandma. Since divorcing my grandpa, she lived in a condo with a pool just a few blocks up the street from the Hollywood Bowl. But my memory is from before we made it to her place. We had gotten on the plane in foggy San Francisco. It was probably the first plane ride of my life. And when we landed in L.A. they had us disembark on the tarmac. (They still do for intra-California flights.) It was just after sundown, and we waited for the other passengers to get off. As we came up to the front of the plane, the cockpit door was open and my dad asked if the pilot would show me the controls. I looked on in awe at what must have been over a hundred back-lit buttons, together a gleaming constellation. Then we stepped off the plane.

The sky was pink and pastel blue. The air was warm against my arms. It was a quality of light, but it was also a feeling that thrummed in my small chest. I pressed it between the pages of my memory, only to retrieve it a quarter-century later, as I mark five year as an Angeleno, as my L.A.-born child nears the same age I was when I stepped off that plane.

Spent the evening folding up winter greeting letters and stamping our return address onto envelopes. The letter is four pages of photos and drawings and words—two sheets front and back—all taped up and copied off on my beloved color laser printer. I’m stamping the return address with an old linoprint I made when we moved to this address. Its prints have a pleasing woodblock roughness. There’s more left to do: printing address labels, writing little personal notes on each letter, stamping, mailing. Maybe we’ll finish this weekend.

The experience of slowly assembling this mailing feels opposite to using a Shutterstock template to blast out a little card with some photos and a scrawl of pre-made calligraphy. I’m glad to get those from other people—don’t get me wrong—but I can’t overstate the pleasure of making my own funky thing.