the louvre;

so i think i’ve tried substack, reading.supply, blogspot, wordpress, endless iterations of the same thing, revisited. here’s an attempt at going back to the origins of it all, tumblr.

today, i will be sharing a link to joan didion’s “on keeping a notebook,” but the marginalian version, for reading this essay yesterday was one of the most pleasurable parts of my saturday. as someone with a goldfish brain (a concept revisited in today’s inaugural radio show with anh-ton), i find deep beauty — and relief — in the idea that accuracy is not all that’s important to memory. accuracy is better for pragmatism, sure, but for story? for depth, for texture, for wonder, or for simple fun? (or for covering for my goldfish sensibilitites) i can’t recommend distorting the truth slightly enough. our histories are subjective, and we can remake, reify, anything we’d like.

i also had the thought today that i’d like to study the classics, the ancients, learn all the lore. rich, sweeping stories of empires, kingdoms, their rises and falls.... but not just european western colonialist histories, of course. i actually deprioritize those. what i’d really like to study is the lore of asian borderlands (manchuria? okinawa?) for example, or nomenclature, or linguistic origins, or anything that begs me for critical thinking and concrete thoughts. i’m quite afraid i’m losing it all... STEM at this liberal arts institution is... a world of perplexities and contradictions and constant dissonances. i suppose i am never enough. but at least with humanities, i’d feel alive...

there are so many realms i’d love to dive into the field of — studio art (tactility, working with hands, creative flow, back to the basics, real Concrete Creation), linguistics (not as interested in the science as i am in the anthropologies and cultural contexts, all the crazy fun facts and interesting stories inherent to language quirks, how naming has such immense power), understanding MACHINES (the only reason i attempt engineering now, as well as to prepare for the apocalypse when the only ones who can man the machines ARE the mechanics and engineers, also to be a good one not let the military industrial complex ones win, except it’s causing much suffering and not much overall benefit but i suppose we’ll see, also speculative technofuturism and such is very cool), and so much more... i get ideas every minute i think.