Brooklyn Diasporism

Zach Barocas, Diasporist Diarist

Resuscitating the Shorts Site

I’m bringing the Shorts micropost feed back. It’s more or less a personal twitter feed, short posts, links, stuff found on the fly. I’ve been posting these items in the main blog but like the idea of giving them their own space, separate from the more ponderous and longer-form stuff I post occasionally. It’s a separate RSS feed, so if that’s how you follow along with sites like these, you’ll need to add the subscription.

I’ts pretty bare-bones by intention but I might spruce things up a bit. One never knows. Meantime, I moved all of the existing microposts over so the archive runs pretty deep. It might occasionally run contrary to the mission, too: I imported all of the posts from the micropost category from the main blog and some of them might be longer or more involved than the micro- prefix indicates.

I can never quite believe “Within the Context of No-Context” was published in The New Yorker but it was. Saddle up. This could take a while.

The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements.

I picked up a copy of Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! and read through some of it last night and this morning. I enjoy Mr. Gambuto’s style — personable, playful, knowledgeable — and his message is clear enough, that we can bring some ease and comfort to our lives by revising and edtiting our digital activity. “Unsubscribe” is for Gambuto an extended figure of speech as well, and includes personal relationships, prejudices, and anything else that contributes to the noise in the cognitive and emotional signal paths in our lives. If this concept is new to you somehow, it’s a great place to start, a friendly, place to start finding a leaner, more streamlined, more satisfying, less hectic and harried life for yourself.

Of particular interest today was reference to The Social Dilemma, a Netflix documentary from 2020 whose aims might or might not be obfuscated by an oddly effective family dramatization which features Skyler Gisondo from The Righteous Gemstones.

I’m not sure I learned anything new from the book or the documentary, but I did have reaffirmed that the algorithmic minipulations we’re subjected to do not leave us simply choosing to take part in those platforms or not, that the platforms seek above all else to keep us engaged.

Today marks nine years without tobacco. I think this is the first year I’m not somehow surprised to be a non-smoker. I won’t go into how much I loved smoking, or how much I smoked. Ex-smokers are boring with our two-packs-a-day stories. We all smoked two packs a day. We all loved it. As much as any smoker, it was my identity, my manager, my clock, my comfort, my voice. But however deeply important it was to me, life is better without it.

Things at the shop are settling back into a less fervid routine: the retail holiday season really is a separate planet, orbiting the one we live on the rest of the year, with its own seasons and special days compressed into roughly a month of life here on earth.

Why I Moved to New York City

“I am going to lose myself in the busy crowd and plunge with it into the open gullet of city and boredom, shuttle from one brief neighborhood to another, underground, like the rats. I am going to ride until there is no more stop or signal, ride between two doomed worlds which a whistle, shrill like the scream of a child-woman riveted to her own vertigo, calls back to the formless world of shadows. I am going to break away from myself through that docile part of me which is not afraid of compromise.”

— Jabès, Yukel, p.28