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Tag Archives: Analogies
Divining the Dynamics
Italo Calvino“Cybernetics and Ghosts” [1967 lecture]The Uses of Literaturetrans. Patrick Creagh And so the author vanishes – that spoiled child of ignorance – to give place to a more thoughtful person, a person who will know that the author is … Continue reading
Tables, Tools, Tasks
Donald Knuth’s Turing Award lecture, “Computer Programming as an Art” (1974) Well, it’s true, not all programming tasks are going to be fun. Consider the “trapped housewife,,” who has to clean off the same table every day: there’s not room … Continue reading
Scrap and Scrape
Dominique Scarfone The Time Before Us https://talksonpsychoanalysis.podbean.com The “true past”, indeed, is not a “scrapbook,” let alone a “scrapyard,” but a most precious possession; it is not something dead and useless, but a treasure of references that nourish the present … Continue reading
Poetry, Science, Insects
I have been beginning my day by dipping into a daily reading of naturalist Donald Culross Peattie from the collection An Almanac for Moderns (1935 rpt 1980). The conclusion to the entry I read today with its theme of poetry … Continue reading
Flora from the Gut
A co-worker friend and I were conversing about the spectrum of lactose intolerance and the long long time of gradual adjusting of habits to improve digestive health. We came up with this renku sequence: eat your beans make raspberries do … Continue reading
Affective Economics — But Not That Kind
Is there a social economy of affect? Is the best analogy to understand it an ecosystem or a well-oiled machine? I think the one (machine analogy) is well suited for weighing the drift and strength of flows; the other (ecosystem … Continue reading
Cuisine Choreography
James Barber The Urban Peasant Cooking for Two Cooking for two is very intimate and very immediate. I very seldom start to cook of a guest until the doorbell rings, and then we do it together. Of course you can’t … Continue reading
Obviously Valuing Vintage
Culimnation of an extended analogy between cars and people … But there are exceptions. Every now and then one comes across people who have grown old gracefully, or have become more handsome, sprucer, and more active and vital than they … Continue reading
Reluctance of the Verb
The allusion here is to the secret life of plants and the roots/routes of tree talk. On trees communicating with each other see https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/ An analogy between the human world of relations and trees in the city] concludes “Boxed In” … Continue reading