Resurveying the West
Every year the New York-based photographer Victoria Sambunaris takes extended road trips across America with a large-format 5×7 view camera. Although by now she has photographed nearly every part of the country, she devotes special attention to the West, focusing not only on the easy natural splendors but also on resource extraction and the vast infrastructure and transit networks that have enabled restless national expansion. In the portfolios that result, an image of an enormous strip mine might be followed by a spectacular view of a light-filled canyon and then a panorama of a truck yard filled with multi-colored shipping containers. The photographs evoke a sense of wonder at the scale of the landscape and an ambivalent awe at the scope of our presence in it.
Victoria Sambunaris is one of the few photographers that seems to share my love of the American West.
Not the capital-B Beautiful parts of it — the Yosemites, the Yellowstones, the Redwoods — but the "flyover" West. Interstitial Wyoming, middling Montana, eastern Oregon. The scale and scope of the American West is unlike anything else, if only for our species' ability to imprint itself onto land at sheer scale. Strip mines, earthen dams, river diversions, nuclear testing facilities, irrigation canals.
Leave behind the cities and you begin to see another side of human nature laid bare. It's deeply unsettling, but it's honest.
Marina Abramovic Thinks the Pain of Love Is Hell on Earth
…it feels strange to be happy? Yes! We are living in the strangest period of human history. We are ending this year with two wars: in Ukraine and Israel. Then there are natural disasters. Things are not getting better. We have to understand that the only reality we have is living every day as if it’s the last. Which is also the philosophy of performance: to be in the moment. How important are we? We are dust. I was also thinking how interesting it is that in war, when everybody was making art that reflected what happened, Henri Matisse was painting flowers. I finally understand that. The way to fight is not to reflect horror and put your spirit down. It’s to create something with beauty that gives you hope.
You don’t think any good art comes from happiness? Louis Armstrong or Stevie Wonder — Ah! Music is a whole different issue because singing, in general, you have to sing from your heart and open your heart. I’m talking about visual art. I’m talking about literature. Especially writers. You think Beckett is happy? You think Kafka is happy? Do you think Dostoyevsky is happy? Is Proust happy?
“Especially writers.”
Marina, more than any other artist aside from Prince or Daniel Quinn, has been a central, singular inspiration. Her work has changed my life. The Artist is Present found me at just the right time, and it’s not an understatement to say that her work helped me persist at a time when I felt lost and alone, not far from suicide.
Her sentiments on writing echo something you hear often, especially in the halls of a creative writing MFA, from which I’m currently on a, well, let’s call it a ‘sabbatical.’ Pointedly, pain is art.
I’ve long suspected this to be true, and it once filled me with insecurity. I’m no stranger to pain, sure, but in our current moment, when trauma is traded as cultural currency, I have no interest in doing so.
What a funny thing to have been insecure about, eh? Not having enough trauma? It must be as obnoxious to read that sentence as it feels to write it.
I can’t say I’m still insecure about this, but I’ve largely given up on any dream of writing in hopes of getting paid to do so. Or in hopes of getting much validation at all.
Funny — in my MFA, a person who enjoys writing for the sake of writing is…rare. You probably wouldn’t be shocked at how often someone utters “I’m going to start a Substack,” then proceeds to spill five thousand words on the why of it. It’s all a bit much, a little through-the-looking-glass.
This is why, it seems, that I feel most at home here. I’ve received precious little feedback about my website. After deciding to no longer write anonymously (about six months ago), I’ve sent this page to at least a hundred people. You know how often someone I know has made a comment about something I’ve written?
Twice.
I may as well be screaming into the void. I can’t be accused of selling out or writing for attention. After all, I can’t monetize here (at least not as far as I’m aware).
And it’s precisely for this reason that I’m more excited about writing than I have been in years.
Think in analog, capture in digital
To be a frustrating centrist I would say, “why not both?”. Analog is the better choice for thinking and note-taking 90% of the time. But its usefulness ends when all those insights are trapped in notebooks. Gathering dust and requiring overly obtuse ways of organisation like BuJo.
This is where we can supplement with digital methods of storage. We can review what we’ve written and decide if it’s worth capturing. What we’re left with is a digital archive of our pursuits. Whether they’re intellectual, creative or personal. They are kept safe for generations to come to discover. Especially if they’re captured in a universal format like TXT or Markdown. Even more so if they are stored publicly.
We may not know now whether our insights and thoughts are useful. But they may be useful for those that come after us. By leaving them in an easy to access, long lasting, public format we can ensure our contributions to society last longer than us.
I write on a typewriter, then scan the pages with my iPhone camera or portable scanner. They are then keyword-searchable, copy-and-paste-able just like a document created on a computer.
I write on typewriters because they physically slow me down. My thoughts cannot fly out of my mind at the speed of a computer keyboard or dictated voice memo.
This slowness creates space for introspection.
Why and how to write things on the Internet
In my opinion, the strongest reason for any random person to start a blog is that you will have more awesome friendships—both in the sense that you will meet new awesome people as a result of your blog, but also in the sense that writing will cause you to have more interesting ideas, which will make your existing friendships more awesome because you’ll have better stuff to talk about.
Most other important things in life, like job opportunities and romantic relationships, are downstream of the quality of your friends, so this is pretty great.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been writing on the internet for much of my adult life, here and there, anonymously and, at least recently, not. The power of the internet is in finding connection, and I’ve made friends or acquaintances via my online presence that make my life far more rewarding. In “real life,” I know at most one person that’s interested in iOS app development, another one person that might appreciate (yet doesn’t love) Star Wars action figures, and maybe two or three that are interested in technology in general. “Real life” is bounded far more by geography and circumstance, but online, people with similar interests flock to each other like moths to a flame.
Thing is, none of this has happened on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok… These companies that tout their “we’re all about connecting people” bonafides are advertising companies and nothing more. Don’t be fooled. The only site that has a semblance of camaraderie (in my experience) is Reddit, and even that has started to undergo some unpleasant changes.
The real fun lies in the small web. What started back on uJournal and LiveJournal back in the late 90s and early 2000s led me here to Micro.Blog twenty years later. It’s the joy of hunting for great writing, for righteous opinions, for scathing dissents, for unique voices, all unfiltered by the cruft of advertising. It’s the human internet.
I am, as ever, torn. I both love my corner of the internet and hate The Internet. But I have to remember: I’m an anomaly. I pay for my search engine so I’m able to tweak my personal search algorithm. How many people do you know pay for a search engine? How many people spend a good deal each year on bespoke software for their iPhones and Macs so that they might use them to their fullest potential? My internet is not most people’s internet, and that’s easy to forget.
But I am, at heart, in love with my internet. I am so immeasurably grateful for the opportunity to have connected with so many people over the years. After all, what else is there?
The small web is beautiful
Summary: I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it. Also, a bonus rant about microservices.
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Kagi Small Web via mjtsai
How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City
As we said our goodbyes, it felt like we’d just emerged from one of Delany’s late novels. Their pastoral pornotopias, conjured as though from the homoerotic subtext of “Huckleberry Finn,” had more of a basis in reality than I’d suspected, one hidden by the shopworn map that divides the country into poor rural traditionalists and libertine city folk. Delany hadn’t abandoned science fiction to wallow in pornography, as some contended; he’d stopped imagining faraway worlds to describe queer lives deemed unreal in this one.
May the Force always be with you via Kottke
In 1977, when Star Wars took the “domestic film rentals” crown from Jaws, Steven Spielberg wrote a congratulatory letter to George Lucas and had it printed full page in Variety—a charming move, tastefully done, that kickstarted a tradition amongst filmmakers and studios that continues to this day.