I arrive at an American address. Over the last couple of months, I've suggested hubski, Amazon, and Abebooks send mail to me here.
The outdoor mailbox has been emptied by others and stored for me. I look on every counter and in every cupboard and finally find the bounty in a bottom desk drawer.
Whoowhee! humanodon and _refugee_ both sent copies of Poetry Magazine. One of these is "The Q & A Issue." It seems that most of the poems are followed by questions by the editors and answers by the poets. One poem is called "Lark & Merlin." I had to look up the merlin. It is a hawk-like bird that mostly feeds on other birds. This surprises me. It shouldn't. Big fish eat small fish. The poem is about love with lines like this:
my lover, the assassin
is beautiful she has come to kill me
and I concur If you can't feel love in life you won't feel it in death, nor
Will you feel the tulip's skin, nor the soft gravel Of childhood under cheek, You will have writhed
Across the page for a hard couplet, a firm rhyme, ass High as any downward dog . . . I was so eager to get the poetry books out, I forgot to look in the envelopes for a note. I do that now.
humanodon sent a "fond, not fondling" greeting and refugee sent a note of her current state of mind-time capsule.
There was also an envelope from wasoxygen containing what seems to be the scraps of paper from the top of his desk for my contemplation, complete with highlighting, math, and dog drawing; and a postcard of happier times on the Titanic, before it sank.
But would we be remembering happier times on the Titanic at all - if it hadn't sank? If I were the Titanic, how would I want to be remembered?
This contemplation of powerful ships that sink too soon led me here. Scroll down to paragraph 7.
The upside of actual tangible artifacts is that they have a presence. Their tangibility means that I will pick them up, carry them, hold them. They will find their way to me more randomly. I don't have to consciously seek them out. The postcards can be put up on the wall or fridge, the books will find their way to a shelf where others will be exposed to them.
The downside of tangible artifacts is that they have a bulk and weight. Like all things, they will eventually be tossed into time's tunnel as will this electronic note sent out to the hubskiverse.
Aside from bills and flyers, what have you received in the mail so far this week, month, year?
So there's an object that has haunted my life. My father bought my mother a calculator in 1980. Many an hour was spent in the back of a volkswagen, waiting in parking lots (back when you could do that shit without a criminal record), messing with this calculator. Because, you see, "by pressing on this special key it played a little melody." Casio made a line of "melody" calculators that had major notes assigned to the number keys. It was far and away the most awesome thing in my mom's purse from 1980 until 1985, when she lent it to one of her burnout hitch hiker friends who stole it, the fucktard. And ever since, it has haunted my dreams. It's no exaggeration that my taste in music is largely due to the effects of running square roots of random eight-digit numbers until you were left with 1.00000whatever, as evidenced at about a minute 30: Anyway. It took me about six months to figure out what the model number of that ancient, 34-year-old calculator happened to be, and to wait patiently on eBay for one to show up for less than three hundred dollars. Last week, I bought one out of Turkey for $35. Unfortunately, that was only five months and three weeks into my six month journey, because the one I bought was a UC-365, not an ML-80, which doesn't have the aggro square wave synth on it and DOES NOT DO SQUARE ROOTS. Yeah, it's still a cool little gadget but my quest must now continue. If nothing else, I now know that one of the most formative pieces of my youth was "tarantella napoletana."
The two most recent pieces of snail mail that I received were: - A letter from leer10; we're keeping up our Hubski pen pal correspondence. I really look forward to receiving and reading his letters. There's something extraordinarily pleasant about reading what someone has taken the time to actually write about their life, their hobbies, and their ideas. Not to mention establishing a personal connection through a medium so rarely used these days. - A copy of G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire by Katherine Frank, an anthropologist. I have yet to start reading it, as I'm just under halfway through Tolstoy's War and Peace (with Stephen King's The Dark Tower Volume II on hold in the background). Well said! The aforementioned War and Peace is a physical copy I got at a car boot sale for €1; I downloaded the copy of The Dark Tower Volume II to my laptop from Library Genesis. I think it's telling that I put the latter on hold and started reading the former.The upside of actual tangible artifacts is that they have a presence. Their tangibility means that I will pick them up, carry them, hold them. They will find their way to me more randomly. I don't have to consciously seek them out. The postcards can be put up on the wall or fridge, the books will find their way to a shelf where others will be exposed to them.
Tactility is underrated, and I'm very afraid of losing it at the expense of convenience and expediency. I didn't care one scrap about moving away from CD's in favor of digital files, but I think that's because in the end, the music, the real endpoint, is the same in an experiential sense (putting aside arguments over sound quality of compressed files for a moment). However, there seems to be a quality to holding a book and turning pages that is lost with eBooks. I wouldn't try to articulate why I love books so much, but I'm just not ready to get a Kindle yet. I even love looking at books on my shelf. I recently moved, and I finally decided to give away a bunch of books that I haven't picked up off the shelf in a decade. Even though I probably wouldn't have ever read any of them again, I know I'll miss them sometimes, and FWIW I'm not typically a very sentimental person when it comes to objects. That is, I don't fetishize things, but I'll cry when books are a thing reserved for collectors.I think it's telling that I put the latter on hold and started reading the former.
Our relation to tangible items requires more contemplation. On the one hand you have the unforgettable scenes of mountains of garbage in WALL-E. On the other hand you have Shelley's poem Ozymandias. While ostensibly it's about the folly and arrogance of ambitious all-powerful emperors, it also suggests that the art we build will outlast us. So questions like, What tangible items, if any, should we carry with us through life? What do we lose when we let go of things? What do we gain? have occupied my thoughts for some time.
I'm glad you got it! I think this past year I received more personal, non-junk mail than I have in the last seven years total, but to be fair I was pretty unreachable by post for almost five of those years. So far I've received stickers, books, a few letters, electronic cigarette supplies of various kinds and some tools. I have also received lots of information about law schools and various schools I'm interested in attending for grad programs. The things I've ordered have usually come from small-business owners who typically write little thank-you notes for purchasing their products or using their services. It's nice that for certain markets, big business has yet to penetrate in any meaningful way and I hope it stays that way. All the vendors I've dealt with have been responsive, gracious and kind which has kind of surprised me! As for the school info, the information packages typically have a few glossy photos of multi-ethnic groups of students smiling and holding various academic-looking materials, accompanied by a link to the info page where I requested more information in the first place, which is somewhat dumb in my opinion. I'm looking to go back to school to get out of a cyclical thing, not get stuck in another! As for the penis naming book: I guess someone had to do it. I wonder if there's a vagina version coming out? I have met several people who have taken the time to name their genitals and it strikes me as something kind of odd; sometimes the names are endearments (like the dude that called his dick Paco) and other times the names show the discomfort a person has with using conventional references to genitalia (like my ex-girlfriend who referred to my penis as "your friend"). I get that people are sometimes uncomfortable in/with their bodies, but to refer to one's own genitals as being apart from the self rather than part of the self is alien to me. It's like inviting someone to your house and only allowing them in the shed out back, or something.
I've always loved this XKCD on University pages. Very accurate, imo.I requested more information in the first place, which is somewhat dumb in my opinion.
No. 1 XKCD used to be great. Like...9-10 years ago. It hasn't been anything new, brilliant, clever, or relevant[2] since. [2] I'm lying about relevant, there's evidence that comics still go up that pertain to current events, which could be construed as "relevance."
I get cranky about XKCD because I come from a background of people essentially circlejerking about XCKD. I would say, read the early stuff, if you have time, and want pseudo-insightful/intelligent comics. The problem with XKCD is because it's pseudo-insightful/intelligent a lot of people then use it as a marker of intelligence and insight, aka, "I read XKCD, I'm so great, if you know XKCD you're so great too, we're so smart because we read a comic that is ostensibly smart!"