Some universal questions in this very personal Naomi Klein essay about her morbid fascination with Naomi Wolf, her dark-side doppelgänger:

Even after following Wolf’s antics for years, or rather, after having them follow me, I was taken aback by the decisiveness of this boundary crossing. How did she – a Jewish feminist who wrote a book warning how easily fascism can throttle open societies – rationalize this alliance with Trump and Bannon?

Well, it’s been a good run with the interest+payments suspended on my student loans. I for one savored being free from them. In 2020 I even somehow paid them way down. Then the government announced $10K of forgiveness—seemed things might keep getting better. But no. Tomorrow, boot back on throat!

Delightfully dystopian scene at Home Depot:

• • chaotically parked forklifts in every aisle
• • teenage clerks don’t know the first thing about construction
• • day laborers play cards on overturned cart in parking lot
• • clerk trades $15 off (“damaged”) for real-time filling out of survey (“excellent service”)

Saturday was the closing of the Madam X show at Space Ten in Hawthorne. Thangka-like paintings and intricately-painted sculptures—the long-ignored work of Madam X, visionary painter, mystic, conceptual artist, and LA original. De plus, Madam X herself was interviewed live by co-gallerist Axel Wilhite. And there’s a gorgeous catalog + vibe-y zine!

I’ve never liked the way non-stainless fasteners cause redwood to streak. But these irregular, weeping lines at regular intervals remind me of shou sugi ban, the exterior wood finish where you burn it some. What would normally be a faux pas, lifted into elegance by regularity and intentionality.

A friend recommends an old book. The book is in French. A quick search reveals there are over a dozen translations. Some over 100 years old. Some bowdlerizations. Surely one is accurate and true. But which?

If someone made a Goodreads for comparing translations, now that would be a public service!

Two months away, and within 24hrs of returning home I start rearranging furniture like a psycho: changing where paintings hang, scrubbing dust bunnies under the bed, scaring the cat, building teetering book stacks. It’s important to re-impose your will, lest the domicile get uppity in its solitude.

Noyo, July 2023.

Renaming Twitter to X is yet another move that I myself would have made when I was eleven.

That year I chose a username for abovetopsecret.com, and the best I could come up with was themaster. But that was already taken, so I tried themastermaster.

Shoot me: that was my handle till mid-college.

I’ve been having lots of good ideas for things to blog about, from little tweet-length things to full essays. For the most part I neglect to write them down, and then I forget the ideas entirely, and that’s that.

Found this in a stack of photos my grandma took. On the back it says, “We saw the fireboat.”

I like how the house my dad built kind of looks like a shogun’s keep.

As I listen to more Hermanos Gutiérrez, I have to say, their debut album has an almost platonically perfect cover:

My brother’s partner put on some music, and I was like, Cool, some “Wicked Games” vibes, love this. And then I was like, What are you doing, fool, ask what it is!

Hermanos Gutiérrez, it turns out. On repeat, on my ears.

England is a country that takes its hydrangeas extremely seriously, and, you gotta hand it to them, very good hydrangea.

Just realized that everything they say about Scorpios, it’s actually hella true of Libras, we’re just a lil sly about it.

I’ve decided to experiment with cross-posting image-only posts from Jasperland to Instagram. Definitely playing with fire: I’m a like-addled social media junkie, 7 years sober from the ‘Gram. Initial impression: woof, that timeline has become absolutely choked with ugly auto-playing videos and ads.

Platforms may cannibalize what came before, but eventually they generate their own formats:

• • Spotify started with CD culture, ended with bland “mood” playlists full of 90-second vibe-clones

• • Google started with the open web, ended full of bland, SEO-optimized pap

• • Amazon started with books, quickly added 100% of physical culture, and ended with endless fake-sounding SEO-optimized pseudo-products

• • Ebooks started with the vast catalog of all books ever written, ended with direct-to-ebook authors cranking out 6+ novels a year to keep their speedreading fans satisfied

Of course the cannibalized thing usually persists, impoverished but still alive albeit continuing to be cannibalized. How interesting, though, to look directly the formats generated specifically for and by these platforms. We should pray that the places we go for culture in the next twenty years call forth formats that feel less hollow, less joyless, and less “optimized” than these.

Mendocino, August 2023

One of my favorite things about public school classrooms is the way particularly cool print objects persist over the decades, passed from one teacher to the next, to the next. I was extra delighted to find that my dad’s late-70s map of Mendocino County persists in a 6th-grade classroom in Mendo:

A writer in this weekend’s workshop expressed a pet peeve against the word “that”. Said she searches her draft for the word and excises it. She called me out for being a big “that”-er.

Huh?!

“That” is one of the great pronouns, a key glue word, a ligament. It’s indespensable. And that’s that.

I love writing essays and poems, but maybe it’s just because I’ve figured out how. Or because they reward a try-hard like me. Writing in the literary forms of this century—“blog voice,” “Twitter voice,” “newsletter voice”—feels more challenging. Is it because they require a hard-to-fake breeziness?

Great explanatory power in Talia Lavin’s latest, “The Christian Right’s Deal With the Devil”:

Political attitudes and policies that can seem inexplicable and monstrous from the outset always have their reasons, their own internally coherent logic, even if those reasons seem outrageous to outsiders.

If we want to understand today’s religious right, Talia argues, their actions make a lot more sense when you realize that for millions, the Satanic Panic never actually ended.