{"id":5773,"date":"2009-12-11T03:52:06","date_gmt":"2011-07-11T07:09:32","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-07-11T13:09:32","modified_gmt":"2011-07-11T07:09:32","slug":"proverbs-for-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/proverbs-for-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Proverbs for the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nAnne Herbert <\/a>was a gifted writer who edited CoEvolution Quarterly (the periodic magazine of the Whole Earth Catalog<\/a>) before I did in the early 1980s. We never worked together, or were close friends, but I really dug her writing. It was telegraphic, lyrical, abbreviated, evocative, extremely personal and mystical.  She wrote in short bursts. Like proverbs from a secret bible. Brian Eno noticed her stuff works really well on t-shirts. It was not like any writing I had encountered.  (She came up with the phrase “practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty” which later became a meme.) Readers loved her; but publishers did not get her.\n<\/p>\n

\nAfter one book<\/a> of her work that sank on the marketplace, she disappeared in the mid 1980s and never published again even in magazines. I often wondered about her. She was decades ahead of her time. I always thought her stuff was perfect for blogs and twitter. But after 1990 no one I knew had seen her.\n<\/p>\n

\nRecently I discovered that she is still going, still writing and that she has a weekly blog<\/a>! In fact she has been blogging since 2005! I’ve been reading her online recently although she doesn’t know it. She’s as good as ever. She is the epitome blog\/twitter writer IMHO. It turned out she had been broadcasting 140 character tweets and bursty blog postings long before either media existed.\n<\/p>\n

\nI love her sensibility. You might too.\n<\/p>\n

\nSome recent samples. These are not cut or edited. These are the entire entry.\n<\/p>\n

\nDo less; have less; be more. <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Flawedness is the only option. I disagree, but there it is. I don’t know how to deal with flawedness in myself or others. Now, that’s a flaw. <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Music fans are more likely than musicians to love the kind of music they love and disdain other kinds.<\/p>\n

Musicians are more likely to love music as a group and to be riveted by at least one kind of music their fans feel is wrong, so very wrong.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Renata Adler was a New York Times movie critic who brought to the job the gift of not being particularly fond of movies as an art form. She almost didn’t like them as a group.<\/p>\n

This gave her access to general insights less available to lovers of the form.<\/p>\n

She said you can’t make an anti-war movie because film always says yes to what it shows.<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

Sometimes the people who invent things and the people who find out what things are for are different people.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Someone who has been deeply wounded must be deeply healed.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I twist myself into a pretzel to believe the story, the official story of some group I like, to stay inside a “we” I want. Not much nutritional value.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I might have to cry for a hundred thousand years. Or maybe an accurate laugh would do some of the same work.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

While I’m thinking about this problem, what is the part I am skittering away from?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

All that room inside a minute, all those seconds, hundredths of a second. All those nanoseconds, and here comes another minute, moving and spacious.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anne Herbert was a gifted writer who edited CoEvolution Quarterly (the periodic magazine of the Whole Earth Catalog) before I did in the early 1980s. We never worked together, or were close friends, but I really dug her writing. It … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"0","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[268],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5773"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5773\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/thetechnium\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}