Happy anniversary, hubski!

Looks like this soiree has gone all real-time A/V, and less chat-spiral. Which is cool. Hope you are all having a blast!

Thanks so much for making this. It was really wonderful to return to the hubski sphere, and to hear so many familiar voices, and all of the interesting things they have to say. It made for a wonderful lens through which to recontextualize all the strangeness of these times. I hope that you are all still well!

Yeah, it sure does. And it's a complex chord, because we relate to the little fella's disillusionment and loss, even while we're trying not to fall over laughing at his melodrama. At least, that's what it's like for me. It crystallizes the moment of pathetic self-realization, mixed with a certain portion of sympathy.

Will do! Love to G-X & R too!

I love sooooo much that you recently shared this. Noelle and I were just yesterday (or was it the day before?) revisiting in our minds this spectacularly earnest moment in cinema. I think of it often, but Noelle was quoting it verbatim. Eat your heart out, St. Crispin's Day speech.

While the lofi thing hasn't held much of my attention, I keep coming back for this vid, and a number of other Joji tunes too. That gorilla suit, and the dance that becomes possible in it, are just too great.

Yes, audiobooks/podcasts have been the saving grace of many a road trip for us! I really do enjoy the time machine effect. I also sometimes marvel that the best way to endure the experience (as a body forced to sit still, but taut, for long periods of time) is to escape the body into the mind. Highways are designed to facilitate this trick, but I think also made to curve just often enough to avoid totally mesmerizing every driver into catatonia. It's one of the senses where our desire for pleasure/utility play a game of chicken with our bodily wellness.

I appreciate the perspective, zebra2. And truth be told, I totally relate about the joy of driving in ideal (or simply not horrible) conditions. I like g forces, going fast, and combining those sensations with good music, and the sights, sounds, smells, etc., of the world I'm passing through. Celebrating that set of experiences is a totally worthy endeavor. Having a fun car really helps, as does living somewhere gridlock doesn't make a mockery of one's fine engine. (If we could watch the commercials of professional drivers on private tracks in the Alps or wherever while sitting in traffic, then the closed loop of self-parody would truly be complete).

I just wish it weren't increasingly (though surely not in all places) the only form of personal transit deemed acceptable, respectable, and therefore, protected and effectively sponsored by our society. We have zero public transit where I live, too, so the automobile pretty much has a monopoly on getting from point A to point B. Even walking (which I love, but many seem to sneer or gawk at as if it were a disgustingly plebeian undertaking) can't get me past the edge of town safely.

We might have developed our infrastructure to permit and encourage multiple forms of transportation -- the really fun, fast, mechanized, motorized ones, and the slower, user-powered, and inexpensive ones (travelling styles that actually improve health more than they threaten it). For the most part, we didn't, though. Maybe Fordism really is the better name for our type of economy, as Gramsci apparently put it. Either way, the route back to diverse, egalitarian transit seems now about as laborious as it is unpopular.

That stands to reason. Tiny machinery doesn't just assemble itself.

I am currently being paid for podcast editing. Of course, compensation is sub-sensational ... and that's a rather deep understatement. The work is good though, when it's there.

Yeah, I've long wondered whether I shouldn't try and get in that game, sound editing for film. I assume you have to know the secret password and have good ins to get a seat at the table, on top of skills/experience.

Huh. That's an excellent point. Now I just need to find a DIY guide to high end watchmaking (or jeweled scarab crafting, whichever). Is the iZotope/final mix link a nod to your current gig? I seem to recall you do film, which I have to guess, is the right side of soundcraft to get in on. I'm more on the music/podcast editing side, which ... may not be. It hasn't brought me a pension, that's for sure.

Wait ... for real? I must confess, my mind has never visited this avenue.

And, to throw another wrench in the works, do you think any of that could be reversed with protectionist policy?

Yes. Pain points will emerge though, even if not on paper.

Well, that is indeed the question. If there is no leverage for the worker within the system, or game, can the worker find it outside the system? And is this why the development of weapons of mass suppression has been such a priority in recent times?

I agree that the headline is an overstatement. It's a common ailment where headlines are concerned. It'll be interesting to see how the workers exercise their leverage as things progress in these directions. As always, I'm hoping it won't be through bloody riots, but that's a given. Regarding the man paying, I'm less sure, but encouraged by your optimism on the subject!

Wow, fun! I love synchronicity. I look forward to the mk onramp to the distributed web!

The banishment of net neutrality has prompted me (perhaps irrelevantly) to finally get around to researching mesh networking. This, in turn, has made me want to try out #tincan, though my smartphone is too smart to let me test it out in a mobile context. More to the point, I can't seem to find it on the interwebs. Has it been called home to the hangar? Is there a newer version, or a recommended alternative?

That is beautiful. I hadn't, thanks for calling it to my attention. Count on Sufjan to apotheosize this tale of shame and farce.

Thanks for that, Odder!

hmmm ... I'd be happy to, but I should find out if that violates hubski policy. Can anybody answer definitively?

Sorry, I didn't realize they had the time-released pay wall. Frustrating, though I get why.

Thanks a ton, man! Things are going pretty well, and I'm aiming onward and upward. Heading down to the RV inspection place to pick up our airstream today, so that's big news. What's new in your world?

It's so funny and true about workshops, in my experience: the writer always ends up taking out your favorite line. Oh well, it's worth it getting to be part of the creative process, I suppose. De gustibus non disputandum est! (Or some such).

I feel like everyone's about as precious about poetry as they are about their highschool sweetheart, and that's whether they lay claim to it as a high-brow occupation of the oh-so-refined, as a supercharged, ultracool assault on society's failings, or as the humble framing of the everyday, as satisfying and disposable as lunch from a street vendor. Everyone seems very invested in a version of what poetry is/should be, which is most hilarious because (almost) no one is doing anything with the actual stuff, except for in those pursuits wherein we are forced to brush up against it, either in class, in song-lyrics, or in those various media which have divided poetry's many powers among them -- lyrical prose, the vaunted rhetoric of speechwriters, advertisements, homilies, etc).

This all means to me that "Poetry," as entity, shares a fate with all of the other subjects from the past that we argue about, not because they're happening now, but because they give us a sense of who we are, and why we mean something. We'll keep arguing over everything dead and gone that offers some force to be applied to the present discussion. The war over the present is waged in how we define the past.

Meanwhile, I think the only useful definition of poetry is flat-out descriptive and broadly inclusive. No one likes everything that is technically, by definition, poetry. And that's fine, or whatever. It's a fact anyhow. Taste is fine, inevitable, glorious even, but we should at least try to keep it out of our taxonomy ... at least, that is, if we don't want to constantly be the cause of our own vexation.

We had some really wonderful sections on light verse in a few of my courses at the program. In particular, for our "80 works" course (a generative, fast-forward through the forms class) we were assigned several different forms of light verse, and the output was all regarded as seriously as for the other projects. Now, that's a grad workshop, not AP Lit in high school, which is where the stick first gets firmly planted, but I'm happy to report that quite a few academics, at least on the creative side, are taking light verse seriously enough to keep thinking about it after they stop laughing.

I think the Clerihew was my favorite of the light verse forms, personally. Here's a fun one:

There's no disputin'

that Grigori Rasputin

had more will to power

than Schopenhauer.

(by Dean W. Zimmerman)

I feel like the best rationale for "writing for the audience that is yourself" is to write that which compels you, in order to make sure you're speaking valuably to all those people more or less identical to yourself (which, statistically speaking, in a world so well populated, is a whole lotta people), and to all of the other types of people engaged in meaningful conversation with those people (which is actually a staggeringly large group of people). None of those people (except yourself) may be in the room with you, or perhaps even in your county. But they are most assuredly out there, in serious numbers. And one is much more likely to have deep, richly nuanced layers of meaning and intensity in expression for that audience than they are for the one that happens to be three tables over at the coffee shop.

Also, if you don't write (at least largely) for yourself, then you will likely have forsaken your inner compass, which probably has a great deal to do with why you started writing in the first place. I'm not going to pretend it's the only guide of value (I've heard Yanni doesn't listen to others' music, so as not to pollute the purity of vision), but ignoring it entirely is, in my opinion, a hollow and baffling experience.

Loved _Life is Elsewhere_, though it gave me something of a hyper-self-analysis problem as a young poet. I'll never forget the scene of Lermontov on the balcony. I think ultimately though, _Immortality_ became my favorite Kundera. Still haven't read _The Joke_, though, and to be honest, his oeuvre is so much cut from the same cloth that I often misremember which characters/scenes were from which novels.