"It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; it’s not everything and it’s not nothing, but it seems much more than something. It’s made of rock but appears from here as gleam and ether, a nimble planet that moves three ways—in rotation on its axis, at a tilt on its axis, and around the sun. This planet that’s been relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines—the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its knobble of moon. This thing that harbors we humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it's of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind's ego by the instruments of scientific inquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through." --Samantha Harvey. Orbital p. 41.

A week of wins. A grant application turned in on Monday, a good discussion of Percival Everett's James on Wednesday by our book club that is solidifying as a group, and over 30 people for Craig Freshley in the second month of our lunchtime speaker series. Now shopping for a small PA system with a lapel mic so that the speaker can be heard clearly over the background noise of the restaurant. Should get a speaker stand as well. Lunchtime Learning is a thing.

In our book discussion, we noted how James evolved to be more comfortable with killing as a way of escaping slavery and punishing a slave breeder. In my social media feeds I see a lot of guillotines, a lot of Luigi posts, a lot of defaced Teslas, a lot of people getting more comfortable with assassination. Just noting this.

It is hard to escape the prevailing gloom and anxiety as chaos takes over the presidency and the tech bros loot the treasury data and ridiculous trade wars are started so that they can declare countries enemies and threatent to invade them. It feels like nothing is being done to contravene the illegal actions, although I know law suits are in progress. I have to agree with Elie Mystal that a "moral resistance" is needed and it needs to be impolite:

To me, that response is extrajudicial, anti-institutional, and, at the very least, impolite. I don’t want to hear a word about “friends from across the aisle” when those “friends” are trying to banish 20 million people. Instead, I want to see Democrats doing sit-ins and being carried out of Congress by the sergeant at arms. I want to see politicians chaining themselves to other people. I want Democrats lying down on train tracks. I want them reviewing the civil rights–era playbook and remembering how people who had no institutional power brought about structural change by demanding better from institutionalists.

I picked up this book at Smitty's in Waterville yesterday. It's hard to escape the online ecosystems created by the oligarchs: Amazon, Spotify, Facebook, Google. I want to change my buying habits to avoid them and support independent businesses. The book partially exonerates Spotify (for which their is no substitute) and instead blames the big record labels for decades of cheating the artists who create music.