Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Item by Item Meditation on a Networked World

  1. The world has always been networked.
  2. The world is already networked.
  3. Sex is networking,
  4. as is music and all the arts,
  5. including the art of cooking
  6. which has long since needed a patron muse.
  7. I would suggest maybe a guy named Gormaldo.
  8. Just a suggestion.
  9. I mean really, who hasn't connected over food?
  10. Now.
  11. Reading and writing is networking too.
  12. And speaking of reading,
  13. a good receptive reader is fertile with a kind of blindness,
  14. like a potato's eye just on the verge of sprouting.
  15. The idea here is that you read expecting your eyes to sprout toward the indicative light of the text.
  16. Sometimes this sprouting happens, sometimes it does not. 
  17. Incidentally some writers are cool, others are not. 
  18. Try to read the cool ones, who sound like catbirds
  19. because they love the variety of the song of life
  20. and put their words together with a sense of sympathy and poise and an easy sense of wonder.
  21. By the way, it's probably obvious but
  22. garrulousness is a plus as well as an A+ when it comes to networking.
  23. Now to change the subject one more time,
  24. Catbirds are sonic bricoleurs.
  25. They make their songs out of other birds' songs. 
  26. So there you have it. That's what they do,
  27. and to get to the point,
  28.  all language is a phenomenon which is sort of reducible to
  29. millions and millions of catbirds in the human brain
  30. that say stuff out of an enthusiasm for networking, and what they say is: 
  31. Reader, thou has sprouted.
  32. I mean, if you have.