Joe

In Praise of Joe

by Marge Piercy

I love you hot
I love you iced and in a pinch
I will even consume you tepid.

Dark brown as wet bark of an apple tree,
dark as the waters flowing out of a spooky swamp
rich with tannin and smelling of thick life—

but you have your own scent that even
rising as steam kicks my brain into gear.
I drink you rancid out of vending machines,

I drink you at coffee bars for $6 a hit,
I drink you dribbling down my chin from a thermos
in cars, in stadiums, on the moonwashed beach.

Mornings you go off in my mouth like an electric
siren, radiating to my fingertips and toes.
You rattle my spine and buzz in my brain.

Whether latte, cappuccino, black or Greek
you keep me cooking, you keep me on line.
Without you, I would never get out of bed

but spend my life pressing the snooze
button. I would creep through wan days
in the form of a large shiny slug.

You waken in me the gift of speech when I 
am dumb as a rock buried in damp earth.
It is you who make me human every dawn.
All my books are written with your ink.

"In Praise of Joe" by Marge Piercy from The Crooked Inheritance. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Reprinted with permission. 

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2008%252F08%252F18.html

William James and I went to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field...

It was a nice dream. We didn't care if we ever got back.

"When my revered friend and teacher William James wrote an essay on “A Moral Equivalent for War,” I suggested to him that baseball already embodied all the moral value of war, so far as war had any moral value. He listened sympathetically and was amused, but he did not take me seriously enough. All great men have their limitations, and William James’s were due to the fact that he lived in Cambridge, a city which, in spite of the fact that it has a population of 100,000 souls (including the professors), is not represented in any baseball league that can be detected without a microscope..." Morris R. Cohen, in The Dial,Vol. 67, p. 57 (July 26, 1919)

Baseball as a National Religion, John Thorn

The Most Human Human

 What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian 2012

• “To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.”
• “When I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity even in my most seemingly fatigued moments, when I slip on ice and gyrate crazily but do not fall, when I unconsciously counter-steer my way into a sharp bicycle turn, taking advantage of physics I do not understand using a technique I am not even aware of using, when I somehow catch the dropped oranges before I know I've dropped them, when my wounds heal in my ignorance, I realize how much bigger I am than I think I am. And how much more important, nine times out of ten, those lower-level processes are to my overall well-being than the higher-level ones that tend to be the ones getting me bent out of shape or making me feel disappointed or proud.”
• “The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves. For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don't let them banalize you. Keep fighting.”
• “What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time.”
• “It’s amazing,” he says, “how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.” And, as far too many can attest, how it halves when you take that responsibility and trust away.”
• “a utopian future where we shed our bodies and upload our minds into computers and live forever, virtual, immortal, disembodied. Heaven for hackers.”
• “the “7-38-55 rule,” first posited in 1971 by UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian: 55 percent of what you convey when you speak comes from your body language, 38 percent from your tone of voice, and a paltry 7 percent from the words you choose.”
• “We go through digital life, in the twenty-first century, with our guards up. All communication is a Turing test. All communication is suspect.” g'r

The outrageous Mitford sisters

 

The series is good, this book fills in crucial details:

  

 

Oliver Burkeman: “Why most scholars worked for only 4 hours a day”

Happy people work to their capacity, but not beyond.

https://youtu.be/gm1OfxhmxEY?si=EhYJkke2YNK62ic9

Was it the vinegar or the beach?

The Origin of Myth

by Ed Ochester

That summer I was drinking 
apple cider vinegar because I read
in an obscure book it was good 
for my health. A tablespoon or two
in a glass of spring water, with a bit 
of honey or raw sugar. Controls weight,
the book said, flushes harmful toxins
from joints, tissues and organs.
"Doctor George Blodgett drank it
every day, and remained vigorous 
until his death at age 94"
One reads
and perhaps believes almost anything
when one has lived alone for a while.
I felt good, doing it, though perhaps
that was because I walked on the beach
every day, swam, then walked again,
collected beach glass smoothed by the waves.
Pale blue and green, like solidified air,
dark green like emeralds, very rarely
sapphire blue and once a tiny piece 
of red round as the pupil of an eye.
No one was on the beach because it was 
September, and I had a white cabin
to myself. I swam and walked and read
and ate sparingly. I had come there
to be alone, and to think things through.
Every morning I drank my vinegar.
I read that the soldier who gave Jesus
vinegar on a sponge did so not in mockery
but in pity, to offer a restorative.
After a week I set the "red eye" on my desk
so we could watch one another. At dusk
the mist far out over the water looked like
distant hills, and I understood how
an earlier inhabitant might have thought
these were mountains that rose at nightfall
and disappeared with the dawn.

"The Origin of Myth" by Ed Ochester from Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New. © Autumn House Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-august-13-2025/

Inside a Poet’s Cozy Tiny Home 📚 Built for Books, Beauty & His Beloved H...

Inspired by Bluegrass…

 

https://youtu.be/R-L_36GTd0g?si=YTkbhC8kqrCxLLHn

The mad peripatetic

"Nature's particular gift to the walker… is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive."

Love walking? This century-old gem is for you https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/01/10/kenneth-grahame-the-fellow-that-goes-alone/

"Zhuzh up"? Shut up!

 More and more I find I have to look up the meaning of unfamiliar language casually tossed off in staid textual sources I've never found alien (-ating) before. There are better older words for this in our native tongue. (And if that makes me sound old, so be it.)

The mere idea of cigarettes is being adopted to zhuzh up* tamer indulgences. Diet Coke has been jokingly renamed the “fridge cigarette”; on TikTok, a viral video of a can being cracked open in the sun is captioned “time for a crispy ciggy in the summer.” “Wow, that’s so real,” one of the more than 1,200 commenters responded. “It just takes the edge off.” nyt

*make something more stylish, lively, or attractive.

Into the Unknown

A good discussion of Something and Nothing, in ch3...

Baloney