changes

Annotated detail from my snapshot of a quote on the wall of the Niko Krivanek: dear sally, love mom photography exhibit in the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Saturday, October 23, 2021.

Text in image:

As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family-and, often, is all that remains of it. As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

-Susan Sontag, On Photography

Replace “photography” with “Facebook

Standalone post link: Replace 'photography' with 'Facebook'

Started reading Bewilderment by Richard Powers today - library book copy on my back porch. 📚

Boxed-text in picture:

I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where

each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow. Then I wanted to punch him. I suppose there’s a name for that, too

…

Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.

My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody’s perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

— Richard Powers, Bewilderment, p. 5

Standalone post link: Reading: Bewilderment

Teen Librarians are not Pornographers and Other Things You Should Know About the People Who Have Dedicated Their Lives to Serving Youth in Your Community

by Karen Jensen of Teen Librian Toolbox

Loved this blog post that I happened upon today – being on School Library Journal’s network she’s kind of preaching to the choir, so I don’t know if this will convince or speak to anyone outside of libraries, but it’s honest and heartfelt and made me personally feel just a little bit better about my life.

These issues hit close to home but I’ve been avoiding social media and the news about them, which I think has been personally healthy but perhaps professionally a little irresponsible? There is always a fine line with news…

Standalone post link: Reading Link: Teen Librarians Are Not Pornographers

Writing the Great American Email

(Published this new ‘longer thing’ in the Features / Longer Things area of this website.)

Standalone post link: New Longer Thing: Writing the Great American Email

I Made the World’s Blandest Facebook Profile, Just to See What Happens

by Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic

It seems like not many people are talking about this aspect of why Facebook is so horrible because it is also horrible in so many other ways. This is actually one of the main reasons I finally deleted my Facebook account, though.

I didn’t have a ton of “friends” (230ish, which I’m sure is below average for someone on Facebook for over a decade) and most of them didn’t share much that was real (or if they did, the algorithm didn’t see fit to share it with me), so my feed was filled with so much inanity and corporate stuff, and I still just scrolled through it compulsively, hoping something interesting would happen.

You can see this article had a different headline when I first encountered it in the Apple News app (another demonic time suck if you aren’t mindful and deliberate about finding quality content there - you have to dig to find things like articles from The Atlantic.)

After this I did find one more person talking about this, again via The Atlantic, but this time one of their new newsletter authors, Charlie Warzel in his Galaxy Brain:

What might the Facebook conversation look like if it more readily acknowledged Facebook for what it is: a vast algorithmic wasteland? Infinite channels, but nothing on.

Facebook’s Vast Wasteland

by Charlie Warzel

Standalone post link: Reading Link: Facebook Sent Me Down a Centrist Rabbit Hole

Your art is more important than your audience.

– so says my A.I. / algorithmically generated horoscope today, the notification popping up while I was mid-contemplating just how to curate collections and microthoughts such as these on this website, and whether to continue to do it just for myself or reconnect somehow with a social media network for the possible benefit or irritation of unknown others.

I still haven’t decided.

Standalone post link: Your art is more important than your audience

The things you don’t say accumulate.

The things you don’t buy don’t accumulate.

Standalone post link: Accumulation

I really did that.

Somehow it became super important for me to clear out over 20 months' worth of emails from my personal email account this weekend. I did it, though, by letting myself let go of some things (like all the poem-a-days that I had never read.) Weird trip back through the history of the pandemic as portrayed mainly through brand and organizational emails.

Standalone post link: Daily Picture- Nothing Inbox

THINGS I DIDN’T POST DURING THE PANDEMIC - 01

Back in the spring of 2020 Mesita was writing, recording, and releasing the music of the pandemic in realtime, but I didn’t post anything about it at the time because I wasn’t really posting things, and I feel bad about that.

Because after that he kind of went into a thing where he tried to get away from the Internet and from music, and he still is kind of into that thing, and I’m kind of into a thing like that, too, and so I wish him the best in whatever he decides to do, but a downside of that thing, besides the fact that maybe he’s not going to make music anymore, is that he deleted all his youtube videos of individual songs that I would have posted and that were easy to share. He did later gather all those springtime pandemic songs in this album Empty Island, though, and it is still around on Bandcamp and the streaming services- at least for now.

And it turns out that it is actually quite easy to share or embed stuff from Bandcamp in any number of ways, and youtube is actually kind of awful even though it is so easy and ubiquitous.

Album: Empty Island Artist: Mesita (Brooklyn, New York by way of Littleton, Colorado) Release Year: 2020 Label: Self-Released

Standalone post link: Listening: Mesita - Empty Island

I wrote and had published on Granite Media a review of The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera. Might as well reshare it here for a record.

Full review text from https://www.granitemedia.org/2021/11/the-last-cuentista/ :

It’s literally the end of the world: a solar flare has knocked Haley’s Comet into a catastrophic collision course with Earth. But for almost-13-year-old Petra and her family there is an opportunity in the midst of this tragedy: they must leave their grandmother and their home in the New Mexico desert to secretly board an interstellar ship on a mission to colonize a new planet. Petra’s family is chosen as part of the mission because her parents are expert scientists with knowledge needed for exploring and terraforming the new planet. They will be put into stasis for the nearly 400 year space journey, and along the way Petra will receive a cognitive learning implant that will make her an expert in botany and geology when she arrives and is brought out of stasis. More than that, though, she also carries within her the Mexican folklore her grandmother shared with her, and the desire to be a storyteller, and preserve the stories of humanity. When she is brought out of stasis, not to her parents but to a future far different and more precarious than what was planned, her stories and Earth memories might be the only hope for saving what is left of humanity.

This book launches with a seemingly typical near-future sci-fi premise, but is unique as a middle-grade novel centering the story around a young person’s perspective. The author expertly interweaves Petra’s present predicament with flashbacks to her life on earth before the journey, as well as folklore and tales she learned from her Grandmother, which turn out to be absolutely prescient to her current situation light years from Earth. The book has positive echoes of middle-grade classics like The Giver and the Wrinkle in Time books, but with a contemporary flair, a fresh Mexican American perspective, and perhaps higher stakes for the characters. Beyond being a gripping science fiction adventure, it is filled with topics and situations for tween readers to discuss and think about, which would make it great for a book club or classroom study.

Reviewed by Joshua Whiting, Library Media Program, Granite Educational Technology Department Review shared in October 2021 Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5 stars) Interest Level: Grades 5 and Up

Author Website: dbhiguera.com

Title: The Last Cuentista Author: Donna Barba Higuera Publisher: Levine Querido Release Date: October 12, 2021 A review copy was not provided by the publisher.

Standalone post link: Book Review - The Last Cuentista