helen❣️ > Recent Status Updates

Silicon Valley can be an amazingly drab place. The peninsula south of San Francisco has natural beauty, with rolling hills and coastal views, but you strain to see them beyond so many corporate parking lots. Mountain View and Menlo Park are bizarrely full of rug shops,

She always remembered that place, that moment, “a wild, beautiful little body of water, a resting place for the wild water birds of all kinds, many varieties of ducks, wild geese, swans, and pelicans.”

“ Life in frontier times was a perpetual hard winter. There was joy—riding ponies, singing hymns, eating Christmas candy—but it was fleeting. There was heroism, but it was the heroism of daily perseverance, the unprized tenacity of unending labor. It was the heroism of chores, repetitive tasks defined by drudgery. Cooking and eating the same fried potatoes, day in and day out. Washing dishes in dirty water.” Reallife

“Ninety-one percent of farmers are dependent on multiple sources of “off farm” income, just as Laura Ingalls Wilder was, and her father before her.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/op...

Interesting in light of the WWOOF trend, a touristic taste of the hard life, “immediate gratification,” shallow, dip in and dip out.

“ Visible off the county road, like a disgruntled dipper on the land the Osage once patrolled, an oil derrick pumps”

“ Yards behind the quaint replica of the “little house on the prairie,” built in the 1970s to celebrate the television show, lies a buried Enbridge petroleum pipeline that can carry more than half a million barrels of crude a day from Illinois to Oklahoma, a “quiet clone” of the controversial Keystone XL.”

“ Wilder’s hometowns are a mute witness to what has happened to small-town farming and self-reliance, lost to taxes, to banks, to big business. We know, or should know, that Independence, Kansas, is now more closely associated with oil wells than wheat.”

“But nostrums have a way of papering over contradictions. The New York Times asked recently, “Why Do People Who Need Help from the Government Hate It So Much?”6 It was no mystery to Wilder. As she knew too well, people who are poor are ashamed. It’s easier to blame the government than to blame yourself. Wrestling with shame was one of the reasons she wrote her books”

“her abhorrence of dependency was rooted in the humiliations she had worked so hard to leave behind. She herself had been dependent before, on a father forced to accept flour from the state of Minnesota, on a husband forced to sell his land after failing on his homestead… For her, the very idea of dependence was wreathed with shame, the most deranging of human emotions.”

The context of the war: “ended with the laconic Almanzo and the reluctant Curley dedicating themselves to the wholesome pursuit of farming. And both offered wartime America a retreat from the internecine mechanized warfare that was consuming the planet.”

stoicism… apathy… colorism… really interesting discussion of how much lane hated FDR and big government while being the least independent individual herself….

“… never forgotten the sight and sound of wild birds migrating across its marshes or the image of wolves on its shores. She had felt in her core the last of the wilderness passing into oblivion and mourned its disappearance, making the loss a leitmotif of her books as it had been in her father’s life.”

“It was this ambiguous relationship to the truth that enabled Wilder to transform her family’s lifelong struggles into a sterling portrait of indomitability, security, and success…She seemed ever more invested in presenting her idealized view of her parents as factual, fulfilling a deep longing within herself not only to preserve their legacy but to elevate it, elevating herself in the process. …to have it both ways”

“Virtually all the plans, however, relied on fundamentally changing the way farmers thought about their land and their lifestyle. Men and women hitched to the plow of productivity all their lives were being asked to step out of harness and admit the limitations of nature, a shift that felt not only counterintuitive but psychically impossible, even reprehensible.”

geographies of displacement!

bespoke loneliness

asian american chronically online final boss… lain core mentioned…. i guess thank you to my boss at a “digital innovation lab” (think uiux tech bro bootcamp for undergrads) for recommending me this book after overhearing me giggle about a (typically) vulgar halloween copypasta…. reality is more absurd than fiction….

unrelated but still thinking about gabe’s line where he asks, how many times have you split open a pomegranate in your life? and how often do pomegranates come up in your poems versus an iphone? thinking about that a lot during modes of transport and meaning-making, glued to the iphone….

the push and pull of yuriko and natsuko might be my favorite

boygenius

we started whiny, without grace.


….

so each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

“as if life had slipped free of its netting. As if the netting itself had all along been an illusion, nothing real. An idea, which could not contain or describe the borderless all-enveloping reality of life.”

it’s all about rhythm

beekeeping as making bee hives legible… to “keep” a bee to “keep” a woman

Extraction is made possible by observing “bee space”—the precise distance between the frames that the bees will leave open as passages rather than bridging the frames by building intervening honeycomb.

foreshadowing for palantir… everything is big data….

picking grapes. simply stunning

tw needles bruh

How the high-tech rednecks mastered cybernetics and corporate culture without losing Christ or country music… Whole earth catalog

He rented a dwelling that was once a storehouse for the palace candles from a eunuch who had once served the Empress Dowager Cixi.

Chinese Household Furniture