Last week, I finished the Random Walk through my home library. Let’s review what we’ve learned, explore some underlying ideas, and then I’ll open the floor to questions. (Ha! Me? Answer questions? Are you kidding?)
Chance Operations, Parts 2, 3, and 4
Attorney General Ellison will be elevating the charge against Chauvin to 2nd-degree murder, which will allow the other three ex-cops to be arrested and charged as accessories. (via MPR & Strib)
It is, perhaps, significant that the protesters marching from the Capitol building this afternoon took the I-94 roadbed westbound, shutting it down. The heart of the Rondo.
📚 What I finished this week.
Today was the last day of my Random Walk, and I thought I’d take a minute and describe my process. Randomness, after all, takes a lot of planning.
Chance Operations, Part 1: The Process
Also: starting in June, and for the rest of the summer, this will be a weekend thing.
We finally slept from midnight to 3 am. Up for a while. Still quiet on the street. Back to sleep.
We took an early morning drive around our neighborhood to see its condition. No new damage to any nearby businesses or residences. The few unboarded windows were intact.
42:12, 23:44
Uptown is, at last, quiet. No sirens, no explosions, no traffic. And after circling loudly all day, the helicopters have now moved off and we can hear them only faintly. Lots of neighbors here keeping vigil like us. Let’s hope this relative quiet lasts the night.
The cellist was back tonight, playing for the neighborhood just before curfew. But instead of hawks, there were National Guard helicopters overhead.
And here we go.
This is going to be a long night.
Each weekend this month, as a lark, I’ve been posting a picture of a Minneapolis sidewalk. But I think everyone has seen quite enough of our sidewalks this week.
10:19, 6:7
8PM curfew tonight.
2:19, 22:21
45:5, 16:5 Tulips and New Amsterdam. (The NYC book was published in 1954. Absolutely amazing photos.)
22:13, 44:6
From a certain angle, this is so me. I could have carefully chosen seven important books for last week’s challenge. But 62 books (two a day all month), picked completely at random, seem to be working just as well at sketching an outline of my identity.
29:19, 55:5 No comment.
Sidewalks of Minneapolis #4
17:16 Pronounced Mardu Gorgeous. Such a fun book, and exactly the sort of eccentric thing NYRB is so good at rescuing from obscurity.
16:24 (Click here for a dispeptic divagation on one of the blurbs on the back cover.)
Marjorie Perloff’s blurb on the back cover of The Mathematical Sublime is an inadvertant description of exactly what bothers me about too much contemporary poetics and criticism. Why shouldn’t a critic be able to handle both langpo and formalism? Why does such eclecticism strike Perloff as so remarkably rare? Everyone outside Academia is exuberantly, unapologetically, and often instinctively eclectic.
I agree with her that Mark Scroggins is “unpredictably brilliant and persuasive.” I’m just annoyed because her blurb reminds me that everything she praises him for shouldn’t be so damn unusual. If you’re a cultural critic, you have one job: to range as widely and deeply as possible through human culture and send back reports of your remarkable discoveries. Perloff is praising the window frame when she should be admiring the view. And her blurb implies she doesn’t look out very many windows.
TFW you spend fifteen hours over two days writing an extended reply to and critique of something someone said online, and then not publish it, but file it away instead. Well, at least I have a bit more clarity around some of my core beliefs, so that’s something.
28:17, 21:13
5:13, 42:7
Today’s books represent two lifelong preoccupations of mine. (Because I’m more hedgehog than fox, I actually see them, like yesterday’s books, as aspects of my single lifelong preoccupation…)
33:25, 36:2
I tried commenting on these, but I got talking about dowries, genocide, potlatches, and fire, with stupid phrases like disastrous attempts at self-domestication; girl’s gotta have it; apex scavenger; chimp with a dayplanner… Fuck it. Draw your own connections.