tributarium

I realise now what I was getting at in the OP is how people massage themselves into a state of inspiration where they can maximise their engagement and what they get out of the book and the beauty of it and open their hearts to it or whatever, and how they interact with the text when they're in that state. I realised this because I had the unusual honour of experiencing a state of inspiration the other night. Life feels pretty much dull and my heart feels pretty much shut to suggestion most of the time. What actually got me there was a completely unrelated life event (whose enchantment has already long since dried out). Seems like a work of art is the seed but the soil is life itself--how you read might be, at best, the water, so my question maybe isn't of much use if we live in a world of concrete. I hope there's more we can do that's under our own control but it doesn't seem that way now to me. (edited to rephrase a few times)

People sharing their goals & how they're doing on achieving them I guess

I've always wanted to learn to sing, ever since I was a kid. I even started taking lessons before I went through a major life change that pushed all of that aside. I meant to come back to it but I realised recently it just doesn't matter to me enough to pursue it compared to other things I want to achieve. And it really never became fun for me: it seems like the only way to improve is to 1) make it a team sport, which isn't an option for me, 2) start improving from when you're young enough that you're not self-conscious, or 3) painfully just listen to yourself be awful until you improve as an adult. Which is totally 100% doable, but pretty joyless & not worth the time investment for me rn.

Nobody has to take it seriously but I suspect it's more fun if they do. Some writers plot and foreshadow as baroquely as if they were building up a philosophical argument. I just read a review of a novel I'd read and the reviewer quoted some beautiful sentences I have no memory of.

Good for others but doesn't work for me as it's not on mobile sadly. There are several mobile translation extensions but they all rely on Google/Microsoft/DeepL & I don't know how to assess the privacy consequnces of that.

I dunno, I just mean like, in a qualitative way. A painter just puts the paint on the canvas, mechanically speaking, but there's some idiosyncratic internal imagery going on as they make the decisions as to what goes where, right? Some people do things faster than others. I imagine some people read more by theme, maybe including reading several pieces on the same thing in sequence. Others read more by character. Some people see literature as being morally instructive, others as escapism. Some people are very sentimental and loving towards some aspect of a work and not an other. Some people re-read a lot. I actually re-read about half of a novel because I initially came into it with a lot of suspicion but as I became sympathetic to the protagonist and author midway through the book I wanted to go back and suck in what I'd already read with more generosity and love. We all do things a little differently, it's fun to hear about how folks do it.

In terms of fiction I'm 2/3rds of the way through Free Food for Millionaires. It's all right. I found the writing in the beginning so compelling, but now I'm not sure if it's going anywhere. We'll see. I'm an inattentive reader in fiction.

Not too good. I had a half hour long conversation with a friend on the phone recently & I realised it's the first time I've had a phone conversation with somebody I actually wanted to talk to in months, except for that time I called another friend freaked out bc I was scared of my neighbour harrassing me. Not exactly the same giddy energy. This phone friend and I tried to meet up and got foiled multiple times. Shit's exhausting.

My first edit to this post was "maybe I should take up gardening or sth but where to start" bc I want to be able to interact with and get feedback from just about anything besides my coworkers once in a while.

Hey, the link expired, can you make another?

Can you please share more about what the appeal of Baudelaire is for you?

Good response, thank you! I found the article I posted interesting but I have no horse in the race about whether AA is effective or not. Seems pretty convincing that it isn't.

I find theorising addiction both unfortunately directly relevant and applicable and abstractly extremely interesting. I recently read an article which was satirical (but seemingly not entirely so) arguing that alcohol (and, consequently, addiction) is a disease of civilisation, Gilgamesh-style. But Amazonian foragers and horticulturalists (to my knowledge) get loaded on manioc beer (and seemingly did so before Old World contact), not to mention dolphins and elephants getting high on all kinds of shit. Fair enough that in a natural setting there are systemic limits on these things so addiction doesn't often arise. So, how, why? And what roles do different kinds of intoxication (or other non-intoxicating addictive states) play? A million questions for a million different answers, all important in their own way. Gets at the fundamental questions of pain and pleasure and why and how we do anything at all in life.

When it comes to the internal logic of the paper, I have a few questions:

• destructive schismogenesis is said to be possible either in symmetric or complementary modes. so if AA does promote an "almost entirely complementary" epistemology, (1) are there negative consequences? (2) is this realistic (even if more realistic than the cartesian reification of the self?) the author himself seems to beckon at a similar question at the end now that I look at it again

• also obviously I'm just getting into this discourse now & it's been going on a while so I wonder to what extent this binary has been elaborated upon in cybernetic theory