The Burnout Socialite

[This was intended to be the report published in 06/06/22, but then Things Happened and I didn’t get it done. I’m publishing it now because I also haven’t had time to write a Report this week. Things Have Continued to Happen. If this post stops abruptly it’s because I’ve plum run out of bandwidth.] Currently reading: Yates, Frances: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition Quite long and very…

[The reader may remember this post, in which I went on a screed against writing like a jackass. This post takes a similar tone initially, but I hesitate to call it a “screed” because I start out being annoyed, but everything turns out ok in the end.] One of the most frustrating things that I encounter in reading modern philosophy is statements of this type: Philosophy since X has only thought…

This week’s reading: Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning (finished)Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint (finished)Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (in progress)Philip K. Dick’s The Man Who Japed (in progress) Reading up next: Jennifer Price’s Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America ???? (Possibly something by Samuel R. Delaney) For a while now I’ve been…

[/spandrel] …I discovered some volunteers in the compost pile! They appear to be tomatoes, surely sprouted from some Roma or cherry tomatoes that I fed the pile some time ago. volunteers in the compost pile (sometime at the beginning of May, 2022) Volunteers interest me because they demonstrate something important: plants want to grow. Given even somewhat right conditions, plants will sprout…

Report: plants, writing, and knowing what happened to you. [Note: this post will consist of slightly more “confessional” material than I would usually publicize. Not baring my soul type stuff, but maybe “meditations” like Descartes (only without my converting to total rationalism).] Earlier this week I received confirmation that when I injured my knee in March I not only completely tore my ACL,…

[/spandrel] …Christian Gnosticism is interesting to me because it posits that the world was not created by a perfect being with perfect omniscience and omnibenevolence, but rather (in some versions of the story) by Yaldabaoth, the misbegotten creation of Sophia, one of the Emanations of God furthest from the perfect Pleroma where God him(it?)self dwells. Yaldabaoth, also called the Demiurge, is…

[Note to the reader: a “spandrel,” in architecture, is the roughly triangular space between one side of an arch and the ceiling above it. In medieval churches, these would often be filled in as decorative elements. In biology, a “spandrel” is a phenotypic trait resulting from some other trait, rather than as a direct product of natural selection. The human chin, for example, is proposed as a…

Essay: Some general principles, part II

[I’ve written this post to stand on its own, but readers curious about why the numbers start with “3” will want to take a look at the first post in this series. ] Make things explicit Make your commitments explicit – at least to the greatest extent possible. That’s where I start these considerations. Most of us, most of the time, run on a kind of autopilot, not really thinking about what we are…

Report from the Workshop: 05/15/2022

Earlier this week I wrote this post about my birthday last month, describing how M got me some cool stamps and offering some ruminations on my mobile Wunderkammer full of personal trinkets and their memories. Also for my birthday, I treated myself to a book I had anxiously awaited for some time: On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence, edited by Wendy K. Pirsig. This slim volume collects some…

Essay: A Belated Birthday Address

On April 26th I turned 34, an age I like because 3 is a prime number and 4 is the square of a prime number. Both digits add up to 7, which is also prime (hell yes), as well as an auspicious number in several schools of esoteric and hermetic thought. Of course, next year is 35, in which both digits are primes (sick) but their sum is not (bummer). However! 8 is two cubed, and that’s still pretty…

Essay: Some General Principles part I

Course adjustments The other day I spent a bit of downtime writing out an attempt at formalizing (or at least making explicit) the general principles from which I tend to operate. I don’t pretend to have listed them all here, not least because I make clear in several of the principles that one doesn’t and can’t have “pure” or “transparent” access to one’s mind (not least because one’s “mind”…

Report from the Workshop: 05/08/2022

I’ve more or less finished my third semester at UNM. I have another week’s worth of stuff for the 8-week logic class I’m auditing as a background requirement, but that’s not a huge deal. The work is also much more interesting than I thought it would be, although it takes a lot of time and work to really understand it. At one point I actually said, while in the throes of trying to finish a test…