A while back when I lived in the tropics for a year, in a fiberboard and corrugated zinc sort of lean-to, I thought about luxury. Because I had all kinds of it: unlike my housemates, I had a laptop computer, occasional dinner in some excellent restaurant, the option for hailing a cab on days I didn’t feel like a 90 minute walk home through dust and crushing sun. A careening 15 minutes in a 1983 Lada, in that context, was far more meaningful than a jaunt these days down Sunset Blvd in somebody’s Porsche. Luxury isn’t absolute: it arises out of contrast. The ethical implications of this make me squirm, but anyway.
Saturday morning is not like the others, and so I revel in it like crazy. I get up after the sun, scrap the esoteric breathing shit, don’t bother like usual to pack 2 meals and 4 bags of books and clothes for the day, and clean the house and my in-box until 10. At 10, the minute the despised Click and Clack come on the radio, I make for my friend J’s vinyasa class, which after six days of Mysore is a long cool iced tea. Now that I look at it, housecleaning and late morning vinyasa flow maps exactly on my (unkind) stereotype of the uninspired Brentwood housewife life. But god is it nice one day a week.
Cleaning my in-box includes a couple of hours picking up links that have been sent me during the week, reading the smart mags and the not-so-smart ones, and a blogroll. This week, I’m going to try posting the notes I’d usually send to different sub-sets of you, to see if that’s useful. If I post something that’s 5 days old and so stale in internet time, it’s because when I read/listened to it this morning, I liked it anyway. Cheers.
Princeton ESP lab closes. “How do you get peer reviewed when you don’t have peers?”
Jenny Diski explains Second Life to the over-30 set. I love her writing.
On neuroplasticity, or changing your mind to change your brain. No surprise to you fans of habits-and-will student John Dewey, or to yogis. (Skip the first 30 min.)
Lethem on The Ecstasy of Influence in Harper’s. Read it as his typical looky-here cultural omnivorism, or an exploration of the boundaries between self and others.
Say Everything. NYM sociologizes the generation gap in privacy. Similar theme.
Buddhist geeks. Sort of promising.
One Comment