Sluggishness, Wasted Day

 I went to church. Then I napped. I did the laundry, and came back here to dinner. 

The evening's reading: Cloudland Revisited by SJ Perelman review – the humorist who broke the mould; Irish author Edna O’Brien dies aged 93; and Lewis Lapham, The Art of Editing No. 4:

LAPHAM

Schlesinger wrote an essay for the New York Times a few weeks before he died in 2007 at the age of eighty-nine, entitled “Folly’s Antidote.” And that was his idea of history. It’s what saves us, the knowledge and sense of history, what saves us from the delusions of omniscience and omnipotence, from misplaced faith in money and machines. The internet works against historical consciousness because the new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that it buries all thought of what happened yesterday or the day before in an avalanche of data. The more data we possess, the less we know what it means. You know the trends. The schools and colleges aren’t teaching history very much anymore. Even the better colleges promote the stem curriculum. Our languages today, most of them are being made by and for machines. We have machines to arrange the trades for Tinder and Goldman Sachs, to scan the flesh and track the blood, cue the ATM and the GPS. Machines that tell us where to go, what to do and think. The machines cannot hack into the enormous store of human consciousness because they don’t know what the words mean. Yes, Alexa and Watson can access the Library of Congress, but they can’t read the books. The past living in the present and the present living in the past is the stuff of which dreams, and Lapham’s Quarterly, are made.

I forgot how funny Lucy Liu could be:

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