What's coming, April-June 2023
Your plan for Thursday reading for a couple of months.
Read time: about 5 minutes. This week: What’s up for the next quarter. Next week: I’m taking a week off, maybe. I might be inspired in the next week, but there’s a decent chance a post from me won’t appear in your inbox next Thursday. I have to spend some time in the university archive, after all.
The Boulangerie offers glimpses of what’s in a warm place rising or already in the bakery oven. This past week, great tiles. I only announce when something happens in the Boulangerie with my Mastodon loudspeaker: @mrdelong@mastodon.online.
Share this one with someone, please. If you got this from a friend who shared it, how about getting your own copy? A subscription is free, and it’s only another email.
The Squirrel-Zombies of Rougemont. A horror story.
Fuel spray from the Yaris. Ten gallons of diesel from the truck. Chewed wires. THEY ARE TAKING OVER! Ruined fuel filters. Incinerated humans (I wouldn’t put it past the little grey creatures).
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I like them, sometimes. Cute. Scampering. Amusing. But mostly … NOT! Will mothballs work? Is a gun too much?
Hold Still, Populuxe, Hanging Out, All the Beauty in the World — Book reviews (for the year)
My book review of John G. Zimmerman’s car photography got good reviews from readers, and so I am going to do a book review at least once a quarter. I plan alternating reviews: new books in winter and summer, old books in spring and fall. The Zimmerman book was new, so the next book will be “old.”
What do I mean by old? Anything published before three years ago. I think that’s a decent cut off, though some might quibble about the oldness of three years. By the way, if I review it, it’s because I like the book. Otherwise, what’s the point of reading the review?
The Oldies on the docket for the spring: I’m shifting between Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann (2015) and Populuxe by Thomas Hine (1987). On down the road, I’m eyeing Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart, edited by Krista Halverson (2016). What could be more interesting than a “socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore”?
The Newbies for summer: Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time by Shiela Liming (2023) and All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley (2023). If it is what I think it is, Hanging Out might just make it to my fall seminar’s reading list.
By the way, if you have a book I should be paying attention to, let me know in the comments.
“Hunny-Do” Over. A glance back at January 2021.
I began 2021 with a month-long project that echoed Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, a poetry and photography project that she did in July 1971. The fifty years that separated Mayer’s month-long project and mine of course meant that much had changed. Photography had shifted from chemistry to electronics, and the writing tasks that Mayer committed to paper gave way to keyboarding and “word processing.” I strove to match Mayer’s thirty-six 35mm-film pictures a day, but the ease of digital photography didn’t help me much — neither did the fact of Covid. Mayer’s July 1971 was free from that scourge and its entrapments and social distancing.
I did finish putting in a new floor in the kitchen in March 2023. Finally. Two years behind the optimistic schedule I set in 2021.
I’m going to look back at January 2021. I had to do some fixing of the website I created back then, and as I repaired the site I thought it might be worth a reconsideration. (If you visit the old site, don’t expect much marvelous from the photos and daily entries from the rainy pandemic month in 2021. A user-friendly web morsel it is not, and it’s quite boring as a primary text, I’m afraid. I didn’t aim to scintillate, anyway.)
Reprise of Empathy and AI
I’ve looked at machine “empathy” and the convoluted knots of human emotions when it comes to robots. ChatGPT and the chat-oriented front ends of AI warrant another look at empathy with AI. I’ll probably explore empathy and touch on using AI in the classroom, though I might have to split the discussions into two posts. Both are complicated.
Data and imagery. Conversation with a data artist. (Podcast)
If the stars all align and schedules and desires can come together, the quarterly podcast will be a chat between friends and colleagues. I’m interested in the mix of data, landscape, migration, and art. The first podcast I count as a success, and I think this one will be more engaging, mainly because it’ll be a dialogue. The great thing about doing a podcast or running a seminar or “salon” is that you get to talk with smart and fascinating people!
Uh. A recipe. How about duck?
I actually published one already, back when I examined bakers and automation. One of my readers was quite enthusiastic about the bread-making video I put together, though I don’t know if she tried it. Cooking and baking is a bit off the usual track for my newsletter, I realize. And yet, I do a lot of it in our kitchen, and I have some foods that are just simply delicious and are fun to make.
I’ve roasted duck a few times, and the process is unlike what I’ve usually run into with birds. A bit involved, but nothing particularly tough and requiring special chef magic.
Fathers
I mentioned this one last quarter, but never got to it. Over the period, the story has shifted slightly, and I think become richer. I’ve let it steep a while, and it may be close to writing. What happens when fathers leave us? What happens when they die, and we children are left behind?
And, of course, Catch-up
It’s become a late-quarter tradition to offer links to articles relating to previous posts like this one, this one, this one, and this one.
Got a comment?
All sounds good, but that podcast has tweaked my interest in particular!
I was reading your commentary about fathers, and the effect upon us when they leave us: perhaps, not too surprising, I tend to think of that particular milieu in terms of song. I have a couple that you may be interested in, and if you are, I will link you to the videos.