from a north study window five cats behind me

after talking about halpin's "foundations of a philosophy of collective intelligence"

afternoon office window before discussing deleuze's "to have done w/ judgment"

european black pine adorning ecology action center downtown normal

reading doug robinson's chpt "shklovsky's modernist poetics"

TWSBI Diamond 540, clear demonstrator, medium nib, piston filler. Lamy blue/black ink. Capacity 2.6 ml. Designed 2010.

Lamy 2000, fine nib, makralon piston filler. Noodler's permanent black.
Capacity 2ml. Designed 1966.

the better angels of our nature: how violence has declined

Steven Pinker's 800 pg reminder as to how far we've come. After paddling in a pool.

the only way out is in

vipassana in an alabama prison

donaldson correctional facility

sinking of the edmund fitzgerald

On this day November 10 1975 the then largest freighter on the largest lake on the planet's largest body of freshwater, the Great Lakes, in whose region I was born, sank in a storm at 19:10 eastern, in 11 meter waves, in Canadian waters, 29 crew members perishing.

Three songs from that region stirred in me as a boy an incipient awareness of energy in meaning-rhythms. They were not the best songs, by any means, but the last remains my favorite, probably in part because it employs the doric mode, and as I grew up loving that immense lake, its history, and the smell of its water:

The Hamms beer jingle
The Song of Hiawatha
The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Ballads are repositories of cultural memory that help fix in us a shared sense of sorrow at loss and misfortune. The most successful ones, I think, are those which spring directly from real-world misfortune. Many ballads stem instead from cobbled together tales and stories, which is itself a testimony to the staying power of this genre as an archive of emotion.

"36 years ago, the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald and its crew of 29, succumbed to stresses caused in part by 40 ft waves during a 'white hurricane,' with sustained winds over 80 mph. Due to constructive interference (rogue) waves with heights of 70 ft, storm surge, overloading, a weakened hull, and possible top-side flooding through missing hatch covers, the 'Fitz' catastrophically split in two and sank 15 miles from Whitefish Bay in as little as 14 seconds."

The interference waves mentioned in the above YouTube comment are particularly significant on enclosed bodies of water near shorelines. Such wave patterns are sometimes called "waffled clapotis."