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josie-effortposts · 1 year

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Polysemy, the way one symbol can have multiple referents, seems linked to how big language is allowed to get; the smaller your collection of tools the more creative you have to be with them. Gestures in dance or theatre are 'naturally' polysemous because they must stand in relation to multiple concepts.

Some forms take this as a challenge - for instance the rakugo comedian who tells a complicated story without standing up or using more than 1-2 very mild props. Or formal bhara-natyam, where dancers are expected to perform alone for a period of roughly two hours and convey a story from a repertoire of eleven gestures.

But this irks me: from my notes I have what turns out to be a part-quote from Marie-Laure Ryan, that "while polysemy is good for poetry it is bad for science".

Is polysemy good for poetry? I've read a little philosophy of poetry and encountered the idea that what makes a poem 'unparaphrasable', its warp and weft of meanings, is an artifact of the poetic reading itself - much like hyperintensionality, the condition where replacing a term with a logical equivalent no longer works as we would hope, is a byproduct of a context where we care about something (anything) more than logical equivalence. Put more poetically, taking a thing as unique is the recognition of its own self-contained unity, where otherwise from synonymy springs a counterfactual forest.

And while sciences expand language by coining new terms, where we might say that the arts coin new meanings, that's all in service of an ultimate simplification. It benefits us very much to speak polysemically of things we once took to be unrelated, like electricity and magnetism or the motion of planets and the fall of pianos. The Standard Model and the axioms of ZFC both attempt to speak of, ground, all possible phenomena without losing their structure and dissolving into simple reflection ("for all A, A is A"). A model's use is the number of things it can faithfully represent, and useful models proliferate.

I'm being a bit unfair to Ryan, whose next (full) sentence is "It is better to work with a large collection of sharp tools that fulfill precise tasks, rather than a single blunt one, even if everyone cannot share the tools." This is pragmatically and straightforwardly true, and yet the struggle against polysemy that produces these tools, the attempt at doing/saying/pointing-out exactly one thing (and thereby taking that thing as unique), is just as desperately needed in the arts.

Polysemy is the limit natural to language and to communication in general, that there are always fewer words than there are things to be discussed with them. As LM once said, the fundamental issue isn't finding the right adjectives but that adjectives shouldn't have to exist in the first place. We live in a world composed only of uniquenesses, and communication can only serve us insofar as it obscures them.

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josie-effortposts · 1 year

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The Role of Sailor Moon in Finnegans Wake

(re/crosspost from another blog)

Finnegans Wake is probably the greatest mystery in literature, a monstrosity of a book written in "night language" where words deform, split, rearrange, take on other meanings and become jokes in other languages. Its world is a dream someone's having, its character change and turn into each other and play-act all the wars and families and Biblical falls in history, and its structure is as deep as its references and its sense of humor. It's the ultimate exercise in classical interpretation, the kind where scholars try really desperately to see what it was that James Joyce meant to communicate to us.

What makes this interpretative task more difficult is the finding of things that seemingly shouldn't or couldn't be in it, leading people to write off the whole exercise as chasing ghosts of meaning. For instance, Robert Anton Wilson (rest his merry soul) claimed that one chapter perfectly predicts the bombing of Nagasaki, and that fourteen particular paragraphs read backwards will yield Bach's Stations of the Cross.

It's not in my purview to defend interpretations like this, only to say that if these weren't put in on purpose then holy shit are they fun coincidences. If you stop worrying about what Joyce was really communicating and take the text as is, it's a postmodernist's wet dream. (Maybe literally.) The interplay of meanings and structures found inside of it makes it as easy to do "personal" readings in as the Bible, and presents it as an object of study that is forever yielding up new and interesting associations.

To that end, let's see if something's in the Wake that absolutely could never be there. I picked Sailor Moon, the much-beloved 90s anime about schoolgirls who fight monsters from another dimension. Television itself hadn't been invented yet, although there's inevitably a scene of people watching it in the Wake - presumably Joyce predicted some way to eventually play movies outside of theaters. He also mentions Popeye ("I yam as I yam") and lived in the 30s, so he knows about the beginnings of animation as an art-style. So we're in by a thread.

We're also handicapping ourselves with the word "sailor" here - sailors and tailors appear many times in the text but this is generally recognized as pointing to a character/motif called the "Norwegian captain". The captain and the tailor who he shortchanges for new clothes makes sailor outfits a prominent part of the Wake (and the Japanese sailor outfits are the only reason to put "Sailor" in the title of Sailor Moon), but also takes up a lot of the room for anything female to be happening here. (There is a male character who prominently wears a tuxedo, though...) To make up for it, we have the other motif of the moon goddess (which Sailor Moon very much represents, for reasons I'll leave to one side) and of other planets in our solar system (since her friends have titles like Sailor Mercury, Venus, etc).

So, my short case, not going through every page here:

255.30 foundling filly of fortyshilling fostertailor

A young woman appears in the sailor/tailor distinction, also called the "wishful waistress". The girl who turns into Sailor Moon (Serena in English from 'Selene' for the moon, Usagi in Japanese after the word for rabbit, as in the Moon rabbit), and is a lazy layabout even long after she hears the call to heroism. (Since the book is a dream, it makes extra sense for her to be sleeping a lot in it.)

255.31 shopahoyden, weighing ten pebble ten, scaling five footsy five

Tailor's shop; ship ahoy - the sailors are here (ten in total, five in the first season and five more introduced in later seasons); hoyden: an ill-bred girl (again lazy and sleeping); the waistress's measurements are given as five foot five and ten stone ten (or 150lbs) and this seems to check out. (Her other measurements are given shortly after - including the number 28, referring to a class of schoolgirls who figure throughout the book as 'the Maggies'.)

594.34 saelior, a turnkeyed trot to Seapoint, pierrotettes, means

A sailor dancing (turkey trot was a dance denounced by the Vatican) and pirouetting here; a feminine white-faced pantomime character called a Pierrot, or a Pierrette when played by a woman. (Suggests a dance in moonlight, or between the proverbial moon and the white-masked tuxedoed male lead I mentioned earlier.)

428.08 is saling moonlike. And Slyly mamourneen's ladymaid at Glads-

Sailor Moon; sailing like the moon across the sky; 'saying goodnight' (deformed); moon and morning - the cycle of night ("fighting evil by moonlight..."); Gaelic mavournin: sweetheart.

600.33 Molly Vardant, in goodbroomirish, arrah, this place is a proper

Molly (or Naru), Serena/Usagi's best friend, sometimes given the fan title of "Sailor Earth" (and she seems to represent Earth and normal humanity in contrast to the magical antics of Sailor Moon); Molly is verdant and ardent; Dolly Varden: a fashionable woman's outfit in the 1870s covered in flowers.

220.03 THE FLORAS (Girl Scouts from St. Bride's Finishing Establish- 220.04 ment, demand acidulateds), a month's bunch of pretty maidens 220.05 who, while they pick on her, their pet peeve, form with valkyri- 220.06 enne licence the guard for 220.07 IZOD (Miss Butys Pott, ask the attendantess for a leaflet), a be- 220.08 witching blonde who dimples delightfully and is approached in

Traditionally a section outlining the Maggies and their connection to Issy/Izzy/Izod/Isolde, a daughter in the family the story follows - but consider a "month's bunch" here to mean "the bunch collected in the passing of the moon" and another meaning appears. These are the magical female warriors (Valkyries) who rib the flawed, blonde Ms. Beauty Spot (Serena/Usagi) - the other Sailor Scouts (Girl Scouts) that the series follows.

This ties Serena and the Scouts into the fabric of the Wake by making them at least isomorphic to Issy and her Maggies, making further Sailor Moon references a matter of referencing prior interpretation on these two subjects.

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josie-effortposts · 3 years

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Daoloth, the Render of Veils

Having read Exploring Egregores...

Daoloth is one of the Mythos deities invented by Ramsey Campbell, and hasn't had much press to its name. Its classic description goes as follows:

"[It] was not shapeless, but so complex that the eye could recognize no describable shape. There were hemispheres and shining metal, coupled by long plastic rods. The rods were of a flat grey colour, so that he could not make out which were nearer; they merged into a flat mass from which protruded individual cylinders. As he looked at it, he had a curious feeling that eyes gleamed from between these rods; but wherever he glanced at the construction, he saw only the spaces between them."

Daoloth is inexhaustible, infinite, overly complex. A set of simple, interconnecting parts, laid out for long enough, can calculate the answer to any question at maximal efficiency. The familiar shores of everyday numbers slowly give way to unending ocean - the supermajority of integers couldn't be written down if you used the whole universe as a chalkboard. Primes, groups and cyclotomic polynomials are the symbols (and simples) we use to make the world properly digestible.

More than this, Daoloth is the aspect of reality that provides unexpected bounties, rivers of experience you never expected to find. It's what you encounter during original seeing. It's why John Cage claims that "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." This is the slash in the veil - sit being bored for long enough and you start poking permanent holes.

But this is a Great Old One, and not to be trifled with; Daoloth's abundances can fatten, choke and drown. You look something up on TVTropes and hours later you're somewhere completely different, hours lost to the Pavlovian buffer of new knowledge. You paint to express your adoration of the beauty of light and slowly lose it to the maelstrom of other things you can express, only to wind up painting about painting. We're attracted to new information in the same way that our eyes are attracted to motion, but for the same reason the things that we find meaning in are few and far between. Whatever you want, most of existence isn't it.

Interdisciplinarians brush against Daoloth, dimly viewing the "spaces between". Every subject seems to elevate its own importance - open an intro text for a field and see it list all of the pies it has fingers in. Two people talk on a streetcorner - an expression of facts in biochemistry, neurology, psychology (the people), physics, acoustics, linguistics, sociology (the talking), geography, architecture, politics, history (the streetcorner). Every sentence a dozen concepts apply - conflict, war, love, desire, scripting, authenticity, the past and future.

Daoloth is a titan whose joints are reality, and we peer between them feeling watched. It's the sum total of that we don't yet see, even in front of us. It is the hidden object of all contemplation. Summoned directly without containment, it could envelope the world in its form and extinguish all life - but on distant Yuggoth its priests, who can sustain the brain in machinery long after the body decays, call on it to divine the past and future, and to see things as they truly are, to their extensions in "the last dimension."

Ia, Daoloth! Ia, lw'nafh shugg sgn'wahl phlegeth-or! Ia!

#daoloth #cthulhu mythos #egregores #rattumb #ramsey campbell

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josie-effortposts · 3 years

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An Exhaustion of Apples

What is true of one apple may not be true of another apple; thus more can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world.

That links to another post which quotes it, usually bad etiquette but despite reading all the Sequences I don’t remember it and it touches very directly on my reasons for writing this. Consider it a supplement, maybe.

The process of understanding involves abstraction and modeling, the breaking or deforming of messy reality into manageable parts. Different disciplines and professions have their own units or principles, (nigh-)universals, which field introductions will excitedly expound. Above very niche topics, most things you can study claim a laundry list of applications to the world and life in general - philosophy, biology, physics, many intertwined branches of psychology and sociology, geography, semiotics, chemistry, planetary motion, nature, conflict, spirituality, ad inf. When I was younger learning all of these bits and pieces was exciting, amassing knowledge or tools or understanding.

Now it depresses me.

I’m sure I’m not to the end, and I don’t want to seem like I’m decrying my massive storehouse of knowledge. There are plenty of fields I still want to understand at some point, but the will to actually do it is slipping or undergoing some kind of change.

I remember being so annoyed in high school when I learned about the three and five-act structures of drama. In hindsight it’s precisely the kind of thing that Aristotle would write when trying to explain fiction, but it felt so painfully limiting. Plenty of writing guides warn that fledgling writers tend to make ridiculous and obscure experiments that only become successful when done by writers who are already successful - so maybe my feeling wasn’t limited to me. But why outline it like that? If the structure of a coherent story will always immutably be that way, why teach it? And if it could be otherwise, why limit it?

Maybe that’s the crux. There are so many explanations of things that can’t be otherwise or which don’t meaningfully inform action. To know that dialogue always expresses one of a few things might as well be a challenge, and to see the underlying structure is to choke a sense of freedom that had happily coexisted with it in ignorance.

This is a bit puzzling, because some areas have this and some don’t. I’m not bothered by the idea that every molecule decomposes into atoms, or that every word I’m typing here is made up of a small alphabet. And yet it does bother me to consider the Library of Babel and know that anything I read would have some place there. Every book I read that’s unique to me reduces my enjoyment of others (real and Babelian) that are too similar. Combine that with Pareto, or with Sturgeon’s Revelation, and this beautiful notion of reading all the good books that have ever existed starts deflating. I don’t know when it stops, and I’m scared to learn.

Zen in the Art of Archery quotes another book, which I haven’t read, about swordsmanship. The swordsmanship book says that those who learn to use a sword actually become worse at it. Newbies are playful and relaxed, and when they realize how many ways they can be struck and how limited their situation is, they lose their cool. After that, it’s only through rigorous training that they win back this initial ease as something that can never again be taken away. I wonder if that’s what I’m inside of.

Or, another interpretation, maybe I’m just fed up with one kind of knowledge that doesn’t do much heavy lifting. Quantifying and breaking things down are both important, but alone they don’t lead to discoveries or changes, inventions or patents. I think I’ve read at least 500 books in the last five years, and yet I don’t feel capable of much more than I could do at 20. Maybe we just never feel competent in the first place (after all, we never feel incompetent until we’re introduced to the work) but I feel disappointed with this nuts-and-bolts approach.

The article in the first link makes the point that knowledge is specialization, where you can distinguish between the evolution that evolutionary biologists talk about and the “evolutions” of stars or technology. I come across the idea in Zen and elsewhere that nothing is boring, that the average person doesn’t exist because averageness is an abstraction, that the world itself is unendingly interesting, and I just don’t find myself capable of whatever perceptual contortion these people are doing. My interests don’t stretch that far - I’ll sprain them.

#son of man #lesswrong #virtue of narrowness #apples

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josie-effortposts · 3 years

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The Woman Who Fell to Earth

I stopped watching Doctor Who in 2013 after the 50th anniversary special. Up to then I was deeply obsessed by its reams of stories, hidden subspaces and detailed production histories. It wasn’t just entertainment, it was a case study in a massive shared universe, and a direct function of the times and places it had been written.

It’s never been very controversial to anyone I know to dislike Moffat’s run of the show, and as it drew to a close everything that followed seemed pretty well-telegraphed: Chris Chibnall would become the head of the show, it wouldn’t be very good, reactionaries would blame bad writing on a female Doctor while plenty of others would just lost interest, the ratings would drop and the whole show would become less culturally relevant. It was a Cassandra truth.

But that said, I still wanted to try it. I watched a bit of the Twelfth Doctor and had mixed feelings, and when I watched the first episode of the Thirteenth I found myself taking notes on it. So, without a lot of structure, here are my thoughts.

1. New Who treats first episodes as very important, the first moments that we see new Doctors and their statements to the world. Call it a modern tradition - where “Robot” and “Time and the Rani” play the change for comedy before jumping into the week’s adventures, “The Christmas Invasion” and “The Eleventh Hour” are primarily statements of continuity. By Twelve’s first outing the villains themselves become metaphors for change, and now Thirteen delivers a brief speech about deciding to become different while paying respect to the past.

2. Speaking of that speech, I feel like there must have been an earlier draft that connected the plot to these metaphors a lot better. The villain of the story keeps pieces of his past triumphs with him at all times, but these trophies are body parts taken from the dead, and they disgust the Doctor. At least Twelve’s flesh robots were stumbling towards eternity.

The villain as a whole is just what you’d expect from a low-grade Doctor Who monster, I guess. He’s supposed to be on a hunt, which sounds really cool, but this consists entirely of him walking places and murdering random bystanders by touch. He’s not keeping the masquerade up or succeeding in his goals by doing this, and the rest of the story implies that he’s at least shrewd about getting what he wants. The Doctor’s complaints against him center on him being a cheat who can’t do the hunt fair and square and on his desecrating corpses, but she never seems very angry at him over murdering people.

The idea of the Doctor stopping a proper hunt actually sounds interesting to me, especially as someone who sat through all of DWAD’s The Most Dangerous Game. There’s a lot of suspense in dealing with an intelligent, directed killer with a small number of targets, be it in Predator or Day of the Jackal, and a villain that stalks, hides or sets up ambushes could be easier on the budget. Or you could keep the villain the same but add a second member of his species to the setting and have them in competition, conflict on conflict. (That sounds like it’d make a good module for TIMELORD, actually...)

3. The Doctor feels simplified. I don’t mean the new personality of this incarnation, although I think the slight amnesia-until-climax is a bit forced. There’s just stuff that comes off wrong. For instance, things are outlawed in “every civilized galaxy” and the villains traveled from “five thousand galaxies away”. Despite ostensibly going anywhere and anywhen, the show’s always respected some species of distance, in that going far enough away or leaving the universe itself is a pretty big deal (especially since so much of it sticks to Earth). This line could’ve been any distance and nothing else would’ve changed, but it kills the idea of space - how can galaxies be civilized? It feels like the setting is shrinking - the word just sounds big and spacey, and this is the part where the Doctor says that something’s out of place, so big, spacey words go there.

This probably sounds nitpicky, but it feels lazy. Where Davies and Moffat both repeatedly made the Doctor or companions into the Most Important People in History, Chibnall seems to take it as read that the Doctor can just do stuff as the plot demands it. The climax involves her making a jump over a dangerous drop to the gasps of all assembled, but her first appearance is after an even longer fall where she breaks through the ceiling of a train car and isn’t even scratched. She "reformats” a phone into some kind of tracking gadget with six seconds of thumb typing and builds a new sonic screwdriver out of random scrap, which then solves basically every issue in the story. And, naturally, she can pinpoint things from a billion light-years away.

My favorite Moffat story is probably “The Eleventh Hour” because it presents the Doctor with a genuine challenge at his most vulnerable. If he had his regular tools handy then it would’ve been a much more straightforward Doctor Who story, but there’s no time to stop and build a new sonic screwdriver, because people are going to die by the time he’s finished. I wish more modern stories had that.

4. I can’t tell how I should feel about the side characters here. Not the companions, although it feels like Chibnall looked at RTD’s companions and thought “why not bring the entire family along?” There’s just this odd tension in characterization between comedy and drama for them, and without a very detailed soundtrack it’s hard to tell what emotions the script’s trying to go for.

One of the hunter’s victims has spent years trying to find his missing sister after another hunter abducting her. Instead of any resolution coming to that story he just gets murdered without ever knowing what happened to her and then the Doctor commandeers his workshop. (It’s even made clear that these human trophies are all still alive, just “in stasis”, so there’s no reason to think they couldn’t save her and presumably several others.) Meanwhile one of the main characters suffers a short fall and dies, taking up most of the final act with a funeral despite us hardly knowing her.

Other victims are worse. A man throws pieces of his salad at the monster for no discernible reason - he doesn’t even seem drunk, and then he dies as the hunter crushes that salad underfoot. A security officer gives a heartfelt goodbye to his family and tells them what a lucky granddad he is, then walks offscreen to be murdered. Neither of these scenes had to happen, and both together don’t even fill a minute of the runtime, so what was the motivation? The first is at least charmingly odd, but both of them feel like bizarre, extremely cheap set-pieces.

The soon-to-be-trophy himself listens to positive affirmations in a crane, then shouts them as he’s being chased. “I’m important! I matter!” The implication would seem to be that this is goofy behavior, and yet the things he shouts are in some ways the themes of the show. Is this self-critical deconstruction, unabashed humanism poorly delivered, a running gag?

5. The other half of a new Doctor, classic or modern, is this shedding of old things. Not always in terms of showrunners, but sometimes in attitudes or fans. The change from Six to Seven was motivated by a desire to change the tone of the show, for instance. Nowadays this is reflected a lot by the fandom - every Doctor has newcomers who jump back out because they don’t want their hero to be replaced, but the jump to Eleven confronted a lot of younger fans with this for the first time. Then Twelve culled some fans who couldn’t stand the Doctor being old and unkissable, and now Thirteen’s wiped out her own contingent of grognards who think the Doctor being a woman is a radical idea invented in the last three years.

That said, I’m not a fan yet. Some Doctors I don’t like as much for aspects of their characters, particularly Five, but Thirteen just doesn’t feel Doctorly. (To be clear, neither did Twelve.) I grew to enjoy Matt Smith’s performance where I thought I wouldn’t, and I’ve found a lot to like in every Doctor, but for some reason both of them still feel like actors playing the role to me, where Unbound Doctors and Mark Kalita have captured whatever the core is.

6. I feel like I’m getting old. So much of the beauty of Doctor Who just feels transparent now. After Moffat the maximalist decades of worldbuilding can never convincingly pretend to add up to a coherent universe and they can’t escape into the freedom of canon-indeterminacy any more than they already have. Even Big Finish, which I used to adore, feels strangled by a mandate to realize and box-set every possible combination of whatever actors they can summon from the show, no matter how many tedious hours they have to fill with cardboard characters and back-of-the-napkin monsters.

There’s no excitement in the adventure for me, because I know the route and the destination. And I don’t know if that’s Doctor Who being formulaic or disenchantment from seeing the patterns too much, or some personal lack of spark and imagination. I feel like there must be some drive I don’t have, one that would re-energize my own perspective in the face of concrete understanding, that would see it as a good thing that I understand another layer of what I enjoyed so much without sacrificing that enjoyment. But if it’s there, I just don’t see it.

But hey. While there’s life, there’s...

#doctor who #the woman who fell to earth #s11e1

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josie-effortposts · 3 years

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Fracture-ethics

Agents are made of subagents. People are not only the result of several different systems in the brain cooperating, they represent a cooperation of states across time. Without these methods of cooperation there’s not only no identity but no goal-oriented behavior, no action, and no ought. Barring factors like moral luck or amnesia, ethical coherence depends on the ability for the person I am now to interact meaningfully with the person I was two minutes ago and the person I will be a year from now.

If we consider an individual as a temporal nation of people, one after another, I think our views on ethics change. From this vantage utility is basically Epicurean - how good something is matters as much as how thinly or thickly it distributes across states, and whether it creates harms down the line. That is, utility maximizers don’t maximize the peak of the curve but the total area underneath.

On top of this, suffering is enpersoned - a state arising from prior states and an environment which would prefer not to exist. Avoiding negative utility is the same as minimizing the number of your descendants who would prefer not to manifest in reality. And some would seem to - the moments when you wish that you were somebody else, or somewhere else or doing something else. I feel like Benatar’s anti-natalism has more application here than its original arena.

#agent ontology #ethics #david benatar

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josie-effortposts · 3 years

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A Republic of Letters

I moved to the west coast several months ago, and although the drive made it feel alien, across the slopes of Montana and the rainshadow of eastern Washington, it mostly feels like home. Suburban, nestled comfortably in the radius of a large, nationally-important city, but far enough that it gives way to backroads and parks.

In some ways it seems like a shallow tradeoff. So many things are slightly better, and most of the good of coming up here is nonimmediate - wages, healthcare, prospects, weather in the warm half of the year, etc. I’ve settled into it, and it’s nice to be able to wear what I like in public without worrying about having my shit kicked in.

What I’m still looking for, sadly, is good conversation.

It’s hard to give an operational definition of what I’m looking for, to be honest, but I have experience with it. I’ve spoken to people who I could imagine speaking to for months on end, though only a few. These were conversations where I always learned something, where I enjoyed myself, and which I didn’t get tired or annoyed by having.

I’ve tried to think about what a utopian vision of this would be like. Discussion groups or book clubs, meetups maybe. But the most cottagecore vision of this is in trading letters. Not ones stuffed with niceties and incidentals, either, I mean like professors sending drafts to each other, adventurers writing home, artists circulating manifestos, pamphleteers working on essays.

I feel like this is something e-mail could’ve been once, before it became big enough. Discussion boards too, at least in theory. The problem is that they’re too fast, they encourage things that are short and widespread. Email appears without warning, piles up like junkmail and grows increasingly hard to read as reply stacks onto reply.

Other options aren’t much better. Chat programs like Discord get used by tons of people, who usually don’t hang around enough to talk, and soon enough the whole thing vanishes upwards and away into history. Even speaking one on one, there’s rarely an impetus to respond - I’m forever looking for new items, links, pictures or so on to send to reenergize the conversation. Forums feel chunky and bloated to me, sequences of single sentences awash in this ugly sea of sidebars, portraits, quotes, gifs, signatures, ads and UI elements. More esoterically, IRC and newsgroups escape some of these problems but not others.

Instead of being one of the bemoaners of modernity, I think there must be some way to single out the kind of communication I’m talking about. Conscientious use of e-mail might do it, with specific addresses and a set of conduct rules that prevent things from being unwieldy - sending fresh messages instead of direct replies, for instance.

I’ve also considered finding penpals, but that’s a bit like wandering into the street looking to make friends. The single best repository I’ve found is writing to prisoners, who at the very least have nothing better to do than to read any drivel you send them and absorb it into their pores - but it never feels right, and I don’t even know what I’d say to them.

#republic of letters #email #e-mail

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