holiday

I have too much to say. I was asked today, what were the three highlights of your trip? I thought that was a good question. "Tell me about your trip" is so broad, and "what was the best thing" is so narrow. A perfect solution, no, but a nice middle way. Yet without a doubt, the main highlight was seeing my good friends. Deeply affirming. People who've known you a long time remind you who you are. I think a lot about Florence, where I could in ten or fifteen minutes walk to the house of anyone I wanted to see. I missed a lot of my friends in the states, of course, but while I was there, all of my friends there were so conveniently located. Someday I'll found a town. It'll be an invitation-only town, a curated town. Only people I like. If you're reading this, the odds are pretty good that you'll be invited to come live there. (Say yes.)

More details shortly.

cosi secreti

"Again, had he been in love...himself, I fancy that the tender passion would, with him, have been so vague and feeble a sentiment that he might have gone down to his grave with a dim sense of some uneasy sensation which might be love or indigestion, and with, beyond that, no knowledge whatever of his state."

                     – Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon (published 1861)

Oh, I do love an overwrought Victorian novel every now and then.

why indeed

Foucault: ...Your question is: why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer your question simply, I would say this: why shouldn't I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject of our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves.

So I can't answer the question of why I should be interested; I could only answer it by asking why shouldn't I be interested? Not to be interested in politics, that's what constitutes a problem. So instead of asking me, you should ask someone who is not interested in politics and then your question would be well-founded, and you would have the right to say "Why, damn it, are you not interested?"

                       –The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature