Train views: looked in vain for chimney fox on the way down to the lake, but 1 black cat spotted on a children's playset, surveying its backyard kingdom from the top of the slide

The autumn Friday morning quiets are about to start, Orangina is practicing

Just wondering why I would want a technology whose "grandest promises" include destroying the need for human creativity and creating a new class of enslaved people trapped inside data centers controlled by oligarchs

Clarice Lispector, Too Much of Life

Crowded train, a grandmother and granddaughter share breakfast: croissant torn in half, apricots, two small cartons of milk, small bar of dark chocolate, chatting quietly the whole time.

A superb summation of the weird dream we're all having. Genuinely made me feel better. Or at least, that I'm not going mad.

Lake run, rainstorm, no one else on the path but me and a teenager under a massive umbrella. A few meters into the water a heron landed calmly within a family of four grebes like an eccentric uncle swooping in to join them for supper.

Reading is a form of ordinary possession of one person by another. —Siri Hustvedt

Heatwave broke in the night, this morning is soft, gray, relieved; plants soaking up the rain, starlings fighting over the dogwood cherries.

In a parallel dimension, every politician has to live on minimum wage for a year before taking office. #multiverse

Morning riverwalk to the train station, a fisherman at the short falls beside an old factory (now a luxury event space), rowan seedlings trying to colonize the high stone wall and chestnut trees with heatwave-dry leaves.

Today was 2200 meters high, included marmots and a very bright blue lake.

Chaperoning teens in a big city is exhausting. I've released them into the wild so I could see all the art. I saw much art. Glorious, messy, interesting, difficult, pleasing art.

Robert Bringhurst

And brought to you, more seriously, by Als's "The Story Part". I hope it is an excerpt from a forthcoming book, it is incredible. The best kind of fierce and tender and sharp intellectual/emotional writing. From the July 7/14 issue of The New Yorker.

This is exactly what the LLMs cannot do, they can't access the individual's wonderful jumble of knowledge & experience, they cannot do anything startling with language except fail in a mechanical way that might, at times, be interesting. (This lament brought to you by an early train, no coffee yet.)

Aware I am preaching to the choir, but many at my day job and the young people I know are scarily too happy to outsource their writing. Als's essay pulls from all across his vast knowledge, looping and linking and juxtaposing while the language he writes with is both startling and complex and clear.

Not only is Hilton Al's personal history "The Story Part" beautiful and thoughtful and moving, it is a perfect illustration of why we should never ever give creative writing to a statistical-word-order-machine. Language is our tool for explaining thought and wonder; we should fight to keep it ours.

Went to a small Dorothea Lange exhibit tonight; nothing felt historical, but instead felt now and always.

Hope in this deep & powerful sense is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but...an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed. - V. Havel (tr. P. Wilson)

Gaza | The scale of human suffering and the stripping of human dignity have long exceeded every acceptable standard, both legal and moral. This tragedy must end now. Mirjana Spoljaric, ICRC President: ms.spr.ly/63327sGyPt

Today's wandering among crowds is: eavesdropping, making lists of arresting details, wondering who is who, guessing countries and languages, guessing moods, finding one small treasure, admiring crumbling buildings

Folded and busy for today's entry for the catalogue of wingtips

Bisous, with basil and petunias

Vagabonding: unfamiliar sidewalks, building details (gargoyles with walrus mustaches!), listening to parenthetical snips of other people's conversations, flowers on balconies, dogs waiting outside shops for their owners, a courtyard overgrown with vines

For summer reading recommendations

En plein vitesse

Fast walk through fields in the upper village, wildflowers all turned into bright but brittle little sticks because of last week's heatwave, magpies scolding each other in the walnut lane

Sudden rainstorm, heavy, hard rain, the grasshoppers scatter, the mint lets out a deep longheld breath

délicate, for the catalogue of small brights

Reading a second hand copy of Flaubert's Parrot (delightful), find a sticky note in the pages (a shopping list, includes green beans, oats), notice there is an eyelash on the sticky border of the note.

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.” ~ Wisława Szymborska

The editors (including me) at @necessaryfiction.com have a rich list of summer book recommendations - some very excellent suggestions on here necessaryfiction.com/reviews/summ...

Sous l'ombre, la petite terrasse au coin du jardin

Les lacs suisses ont grimpé de cinq degrés en deux semaines

Struggling with the work/they're building concentration camps balance.

I wish I didn't need this word but, alas...!

Texxxxxxturrrrre... entries from the catalogue of shadows, catalogue of tiny pleasing things

The editors (including me) at @necessaryfiction.com have a rich list of summer book recommendations - some very excellent suggestions on here necessaryfiction.com/reviews/summ...

Computers used to scream every time they connected to the Internet. They knew. They tried to warn us. We did not listen.

Sheltering from today's heat on a wall. Carries clouds in its wings. Today's entry for the #catalogueofwingtips

by the time you read this by the time you are written by the time you forget - W. S. Merwin, "To the present tense"

きょうの朝顔 小さい朝顔には花粉がたくさん付いていました @botanical.bsky.social

The first dahlia of the year is perfect #smallbrights

Fridays are the first slow morning of my week. Today there is time for threading the sweet potato vine on its trellis, watching un mésange bleu on the broken wall of the neighbor's barn, saving a bee from the birdbath.

In a village near mine, the name of a road: Chemin de la fin

this world