Sixian

Barnes reports that Egyptian farmers in the Nile Valley maintain irrigation ditches not just to keep the water flowing, but also to “sustain communal ties with other farmers.” 20 Similar protocols prevail in Nikhil Anand’s Hydraulic City, in which the anthropologist shows how the maintenance of water infrastructures binds residents, plumbers,... See more

To use a post-modern turn of phrase, the Stream is “inhospitable to strangers.” If the Garden is exposition, the stream is conversation and rhetoric, for better and worse.

The problem with a carefully crafted positioning is that it typically makes the wrong part efficient - it makes it easier for clients to hire you for well defined work. It allows greater legibility, trust and expertise around work which is well defined.

We, however, are preoccupied and tormented by the haunting of what was and by the eternal Long Now.We are so burnt out from surviving the present (and the lingering past) that considering what could be seems but a naïve hobby – one that, ironically enough, few of us have time or energy for.

When I first started writing essays, I couldn’t figure out where to put myself in the text. Trying to situate the “I,” which is necessarily attached to a body, has always felt like a trap. I didn’t want to succumb to that well-known female imperative of the confessional, “relatable” mode, where revealing your self is the basis for all your... See more

I suspect we may be on the verge of an antiflock era of history now, at all levels.

Critics and activists have validated a greater range of (re)productive activities, to include all the mental, manual, and emotional work necessary to “maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation.” 34 Maintaining life — that’s a big job.

Anyway, the point is: the hero’s journey and carrier bag are both about narrative models rather than gendered modes of storytelling, and the rise of the novel was a fall of the hero (whether male or female) from epic demigod figure to boy-with-toy. Or girl-with-toy as the case may be.