Rather than giving the person a pep talk, these examples reflect back what you’re hearing and offer specific ways you might help. “What I hear from depressed people is that to have somebody say get over it is not very helpful and actually really annoying,” says Rosen. “It’s more helpful to say, ‘I can see what a hard time you’re having, but I’m going to be here. I’m going to see you through this. You probably don’t believe this, but it will pass. I know it feels really bad.’”

How to help someone with depression.

Matt Webb kommenterar ett konstprojekt för några år sedan, där ett antal personer levde som vargar:

Bonkers and beautiful – actors in fur suits hanging out in the cold and walking around on all fours. AND YET – if there is a challenge of our time, it is precisely about how to get people to see through the eyes of other people, animals, forests, the atmosphere. How to have common feeling without being identical; to find fellowship and difference both at once.

(Apropå katter).

Det är ju helt uppenbart att det här spelet inte utspelar sig “genom en katts ögon”, utan snarare att det är genom en “människa” som följer efter en katt strax bakom. Jag vet inte riktigt vad det skulle innebära att se världen genom ögonen på en katt, men det är naturligtvis något imponerade och empatiskapande över fysiken i “Stray”.

Nyfiken på La novela luminosa:

The prologue to Mario Levrero’s The Luminous Novel takes the form of a diary. Some 450-pages long – more than double the length of the eponymous work that serves as the book’s second section – it is one of the great evasive acts of twenty-first century literature. Paralyzed by a recently awarded Guggenheim fellowship, Levrero begins the diary in lieu of the novel he is meant to finish. ‘The aim is to set the writing in motion, no matter what it’s about, and keep it up until I’ve got into the habit’, he explains. For just over a year, the prosaic features of his existence – his PC, to which he’s addicted; detective novels; dreams and interpretations; physical ailments; tango; pigeons; women with whom he enjoys varying levels of intimacy – are subject to the gentle, implacable pressure of sustained attention.

“Avoidance Strategies“, Dustin Illingworth, New Left Review Sidecar

Jag har låtit mig påverkas av samtidens intresse för Ivan Illich. Här är några saker som jag tagit del av eller är på gång att läsa:

• En artikel hos Real Life som verkar sammanfatta en del av tankegodset, med fokus på automatisering och arbete.
• L. M. Sacasas nyhetsbrev “The Convivial Society“, som förutom att handla en hel del om Illich också låter sig inspireras av honom i någon slags reflektioner om “det digitala” och teknologi, se t.ex. 41 frågor att ställa sig om teknologi.
• Ett samtal med Sacasas i The Ezra Klein Show, som väl egentligen inte handlar om Illich.
• En nyutkommen biografi över Illich, skriven av David Cayley.

Completed in 1968 and regarded as his most important work, the Neviges pilgrimage church was the result of a competition, for which Böhm submitted an unearthly crystalline model. It was a fragmented cluster of angular forms, more meteorite than maquette, like something sent down from planet Krypton.

The archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Josef Frings, who headed the jury, was nearly blind at the time, and is said to have liked the feeling of the jagged model as he ran his fingers over it, touching the clefts and valleys of this peculiar mineral mass. Combining allusions to mountain peaks and penitents’ hoods, it would be unlike any church before it.

Gottfried Böhm obituary