PicoBlog

When I run into systems that get in my way relative to systems that I remember having decades ago… What I want the webpage to look like: In order to get this up onto Berkeley’s bCourses website—which I am returning to after a fall sabbatical semester—I would prefer to use John Gruber’s wonderful Markdown <https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/>, and type: But I can’t. So I type into bCourses’s WYSIWYG editor and punch some formatting buttons.

It feels apt that the day I finished re-reading The Rings of Saturn was the day a new hard lockdown was announced. The Rings of Saturn, to the extent that it has a through-line at all, is about a walking trip through Suffolk, which preceded a mental breakdown that required a hospital stay. The breakdown happened to a narrator who is very much like Sebald, but this is not important. The narrator is telling us the story a year out from the hospital stay, and we never learn much about it, really.

I first read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property in the mid-eighties. I began to breathe again, I began to write to live—and I don’t mean support myself. Or is that what I mean? For I did support my soul. I began writing with my life’s breath in 1987 when my first piece, an elegiac tribute to my mother, was published in The New York Jewish Week—between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—the time of self-reflection for Jews.

One summery evening in 2021, the writer Caroline O’Donoghue and I went out for dinner on the publication day of her YA novel All Our Hidden Gifts. We were still in the midst of Covid-19 confusion and she was visibly nervous about her book’s release — the publishing circuit still felt a bit haphazard and it was the first in a (now fully published) trilogy. She needn't have worried of course, as the book later went on to become a New York Times Bestseller.

A few years ago, 4chan users began a brilliant psyop targeting the Islamic State. ISIS fighters— often depicted as powerful monsters with AK-47s in hand—looked different after the Internet came for them. 4chan waged its misinformation war against terror by superimposing yellow rubber duck heads on the faces of ISIS fighters, replacing their Kalashnikovs with toilet bowl brushes.  Terrorists are serious people. Anyone willing to strap a bomb on their chest and walk into a crowded restaurant believes something so profoundly that you and I can’t fathom.

(Second of two parts; read part one, including Pfizer’s history of lawbreaking, here) On Sunday, Pfizer - the drugmaker most associated with the mRNA Covid jabs - took a $14 million shot (so to speak) at burnishing its image. It worked about as well as the Covid vaccines have. Halfway through the Super Bowl, the company dropped a minute-long ad linking itself with history’s greatest scientists. The ad felt like nothing so much as a corporate version of Dr.

When you drive through the heart of the eastern seaboard—as I do on trips to and from my hometown, mostly on holidays—there are miles upon miles of nondescript highway among ever-changing climates and topography: flat, droning interstates of Ohio, Pennsylvania roads that wind through the fog-enveloped Alleghenies, dense and slow regional freeways of Maryland. It’s all the same to me, except for one stark point that stands out among the crowd and draws increasing rage out of me with each passing trip: the Breezewood interchange.

Four days ago, I and the rest of the Portland jazz community got word that The 1905, our city’s primary jazz club for the past several years, was closing its doors effective immediately. This, despite being recognized by Downbeat Magazine as “one of the world's top venues for live jazz in 2023," and recent public and private campaigns to save it. The unceremonious shuttering of one more jazz haven in an American city is almost cliche by now.

I will start with a confession: I find today’s era of reality shows tedious. Maybe it’s because I’m an adult now, and when I was 10 and too young to be as obsessed as I was with The Real World and Flavor of Love, I wasn’t as hyper-aware of how heavy-handed producers and editors are, and I was naive enough to believe falling in love on camera was something possible for anybody casting decided on.