The spoken word artist Andrea Gibson died this week. I thought they were one of my obscure interests, but the internet exploded with love when they passed. She grew up in Calais, Maine and went to St. Joseph's College. Local girl breaks out, becomes poet laureate of Colorado.
I know this world is far from perfect. I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon. I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic. But every ocean has a shoreline and every shoreline has a tide that is constantly returning to wake the songbirds in our hands, to wake the music in our bones, to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that new born river that has to run through the center of our hearts to find its way home. ― Andrea Gibson, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns
Thanks to recent reading, I understand everything in the headline: "Bitcoin Devs Float Proposal to Freeze Quantum-Vulnerable Addresses — Even Satoshi Nakamoto’s." In short, quantum computing is coming for all things that depend on encryption.
The local woman who works for a company that brokers tax credits was in the library telling me about how she is uses AI to search & scan info on PDFs. We decided the next remote worker network meetup will be about members sharing how they use AI in their work.
The Balsam Consortium is beginning the work of migrating from Evergreen to Koha for the ILS. I'm supposed to help Chris with data mapping, but I don't really know the underlying database. Everyone else on the committee is a real librarian, but I do have some experience with exports and MySQL dumps and such. The go-live date on the new system is January 14.
We saw the new Superman movie at the Colonial in Belfast just to get a glimpse of Lois Lane driving a BZ like mine. It was loud and simplistic and the parallels to current events (Trump/Putin character colluding with evil tech billionaire) were obvious, but, hey, Superman has always been woke. The Colonial is an old theater that is now lovingly run by a non-profit. The small lobby feels like stepping back into another time, a labyrinthian path leads down to the Dreamland room that must be way below sea level, the seats don't have neck rests, and I think it's my new favorite place to see movies.
The Phenomenon of Man is on the coffee table and I pick it up and read a random chapter from time to time:
"There can be no doubt that, to an imaginary geologist coming one day far in the future to inspect our fossilised globe, the most astounding of the revolutions undergone by the earth would be that which took place at the beginning of what has so rightly been called the psychozoic era. And even today, to a Martian capable of analysing sidereal radiations psychically no less than physically, the first characteristic of our planet would be, not the blue of the sea or the green of the forests, but the phosphorescence of thought."
drops a line like this: "the revered moment between the hunter and the hunted, the ascendancy of life itself spread its bright black wings over the horizon and over them both." Fire, even backyard trash fires, are ritual in the book as is dancing. Charles suffers as a Penobscot in a white skin: "This was something I had no claim to talk about—as in I had no Native blood—yet I knew and still know what it was like to both not belong and belong, what it was like to feel invisible inside the great, great dream of being. We’re all alike, even when we’re not." Another theme of the book is the way we know our identity: "We are made of stories, and if we don't know them—the ones that make us—how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?"
