Cory Doctorow: “ In the Big Tech internet, it’s freedom for them, openness for us. ‘Openness’ – transparency, reusability and extensibility – is valuable, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for technological self-determination. As the tech sector becomes ever-more concentrated, the limits of openness become more apparent.”
Last night I dreamed that Leo Messi lived near me and out of neighborliness did some work in my yard. I determined to pay him, but he said he didn’t use Venmo, so I wrote him a check. I figured that he probably wouldn’t cash it, since he doesn’t need the $, but it was the right thing to do.
Chris Arnade: “I’ve also become more convinced that while all suburban bleh might look the same, might seem boring and banal, there is a lot going on in it, because people are always more interesting than their surroundings.”
I wrote a post about the wonderful artist Tirzah Garwood.
Tirzah Garwood
Regular readers of this will know of my fondness for the art of Eric Ravilious. Ravilious was married to another highly gifted artist, Tirzah Garwood, whose work I have posted a couple of times; but she deserves more attention than I have given her. (In the Ravilious painting above, that’s her on the right, accompanied by her friend Charlotte Bawden. I will write at some point later about the Bawdens, Charlotte and Edward.) Here they are together:
Here’s something of a self-portrait:
(Compare Ravilious’s “Train Landscape.”) Garwood worked in several media, and when you look at the image below you’ll wish she had done more in that curious medium, embroidery.
(Also perhaps a bit of a self-portrait?) Larger version here.
Alas, neither Eric nor Tirzah were blessed with long life. In the Second World War Eric was an official “War Artist,” and in August 1942 his plane was lost somewhere over Iceland. He was 39. Tirzah suffered from recurrent cancer and died in 1951 at the age of 42. Their three children survived them, and their youngest, Anne Ullmann (born 1941), still celebrates and advocates for her parents’ work.
In my early years I was utterly devoted to Ace Doubles, which bound two short novels back-to-back — you’d read one, then flip it over and read the other. The great SF editor Terry Carr once said that Ace would publish the Bible as a Double: War God of Israel and The Thing with Three Souls.
I have an essay, “Looking Westward,” in the new issue of Raritan. (Paywalled; sorry about that.) It concerns water, Wallace Stegner, the 100th meridian, and where the West begins.
