For whatever reason, I peeked at an old manual for Eudora, and remembered regularly hitting Command + M to see if there was any new email, back when there wasn’t much email. Remember when there wasn’t much email? When spam email essentially didn’t exist? A golden era of untrammeled possibilities. What glorious fools and dreamers we were.
And just a reminder that Eudora was named for Eudora Welty, which is about as far from the Torment Nexus as a naming exercise might lead. On the other hand, you could argue that as in Welty’s short story, “Why I Live at the P.O.,” we all live at the post office these days.
Maybe a book about communicable diseases isn’t the thing to pick up from the local free little library. And as someone pointed out after I first posted this, right next to that book is a book titled Never Touch a Panda!
I will never not love that if Facebook is loading very slowly on a cell phone’s browser, the top navigation briefly resembles the I Ching in the ambiguous state before the hexagrams have been determined — or, in quantum terms, have collapsed.
Been going through my old records, including my 7″ singles, which I keep in these old purpose-made boxes I’ve picked up at thrift stores, used record shops, and garage sales over the years. I love this one in particular. It’s the most nondescript of the set, but it has this fantastic little tag, which has hung there for many decades, since long before I owned it, maybe before I was born.
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Nice reminiscence — at his Patreon account — by great artist/writer/creator David Lasky about work he did when I edited the comics at Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine. Click through for his full-page Beethoven story (the rough draft of which hangs on my bedroom wall). Meanwhile, here’s a little illustration of Morton Feldman he did for our classical magazine at the time (aka the 1990s).
▰ We don’t get snow in San Francisco, but occasionally we’re allowed to feel like it could snow.
▰ I recognize the original books are more complicated than merely sequences of fragments, and they work because of how they are collectively fine-tuned for internal coherence, but I wish Jennifer Egan had a newsletter where a few times each year she added a new chapter to her A Visit from the Goon Squad / The Candy House universe.
▰ Me, young: When I’m an adult I will face unique challenges.
Me, now: Ooh, can I reconnect my laptop to the project-required VPN before the computer alerts me I’ve been disconnected?
▰ [there is no trombone emoji]
▰ RIP, Tom Noonan (1951–2026)
DeNiro’s Neil McCauley: How do you get this information?
Noonan’s Kelso: Just comes to you. This stuff just flies through the air. They send this information out. I mean it’s just beamed out all over the fucking place. All you have to do is know how to grab it. See, I know how to grab it.
Heat (1995)
▰ Getting some work done at a small library branch. There is nothing like the sheer glee in the voice of a kid who just realized they can take all these books home with them.
▰ Much as there are Reddits that dissect the tracks in live sets and mixes, I wonder if there’s one itemizing the books in Thom Yorke’s Rome apartment. I easily identified several, including ones by Thurston Moore and Kim Stanley Robinson, but many are more difficult, like that one on the top shelf with “GP” (or “F”?) “L FM” on its dark spine. … After I initially posted this, a friend managed to identify that “GP L FM” book as Gilles Peterson’s Lockdown FM: Broadcasting in a Pandemic. (Image from Dezeen, photographed Danilo Scarpati.)
▰ I figured out that the way the librarians at this particular branch signal to everyone that closing time is coming is they start talking really loudly with each other, and with patrons. Their volume speaks volumes amid the volumes.
▰ Finished reading nothing this week. Very close on two novels. One I couldn’t make the book-club date for, so I slowed my pace (also, I’m not really digging it, too flamboyant and showboaty), and the other I’m enjoying so much that I’m finding I’m slowing to linger with each phase of the story.
