Thought I would try carving some text again: the first lines of Goethe’s “Mailied” (May Song), loosely translated, with the first bars of Fannie Mendelssohn Hensel’s setting of the text. I had a terrible time carving it, and only realized the problem was not me or the knife but the wood after I’d done too much work to want to start over. The chatoyancy, that shimmer at the bottom, is a clue… far too late.
Follow-up on the Second Luddites Congress: The August 1996 issue of the Friends Journal includes an article about the meeting (pp. 16–18) which includes a “summary statement” that may be the same as the “statement of means” referenced here and elsewhere, but I don’t know for sure. (Otherwise, I am fairly convinced that the document is not online, which I suppose means that the Congress was not entirely unsuccessful.)
I can’t say why I’m suddenly so keen to read up on this, except that it feels like a loose thread of old research.
Shot in the dark: Does anybody have a copy of the Statement of Means written at the Second Luddites Congress in 1996? Or know where I can find one? I have found all sorts of writing about the event but only brief quotations from the document.
(Obviously the idea of looking for it on the internet is absurd, but in 2026, what isn’t? And MB is the only place I’d think to ask.)
Seen from afterward the time appears to have been
all of a piece which of course it was but how seldom
it seemed that way when it was still happening
Yesterday seemed like another day of drought-clouds that promised without delivering, but near midnight thunder rolled and a quick storm brought half an inch of rain, after an inch this weekend. It’s a long way back to normal, but hopefully we’re making a start.
Is it too early to start printing “No More Mr. NICE Guy” t-shirts?
I remembered this week that one need not bother with shaker and cocktail glass to enjoy a martini: a rocks glass and a few ice cubes will do, granted the proper gin and a good vermouth. It may not, all things considered, be a good thing that I remembered this, but for the time being I’m enjoying it.
Spring here is not spring as we know it: the cool, wet promise of snowmelt and frozen ground yielding into mud. Here, a sudden heat falls out of the sky one day, and one breathes and moves as if deposited inside a kettle of soup. In response, vegetation shoots out of the ground with irresistible force. Just when the body wishes to slow down and give way to lassitude, it must instead accelerate, for the challenge is to keep human labor on a pace with the work of Nature, or else by overrun by the excesses of her abundance.
—Geraldine Brooks, in March. About as good a description of a Southern spring (for someone still instinctively thinking of the North) as I have read.
Discussions around the human in relation to technology, specifically AI, parallel older debates about science and religion. In that discursive context, there was a form of argument known as “God of the gaps.” The idea was that God was simply a name for the gaps in our scientific understanding of the world. Of course, once those gaps were filled, God would be effectively squeezed out of the metaphysical picture. Similarly, we are operating with a “human of the gaps” model when we try to locate the essence of the human creature by pointing to what cannot yet be accomplished by a machine, whether these be matters of physical prowess, cognitive ability, or creativity. Such an approach to the human is misguided, just as it was when it was applied to God.