I helped a friend take two cats she’s currently fostering to Santé D’Or to get their shots and I got to hang out with all the foster babies for a few minutes. The spicy cats have to wear a little tie so that people know to keep an eye on them. I watched this cute little jerk running around and picking fights with all the other cats. He took a break to sit on the kibble barrel.
Even though it seems like Christmas cards are less of a thing (we get fewer every year) Kelly and I wanted to send some out. We weren’t happy with the commercial options so I went looking on the interwebs for some high resolution antique cards and found a nice selection in the digital collections of the New York Public library.
I downloaded two of these cards, adjusted them with Affinity Photo, and sent them to my local print shop, E.R. Copies on Sunset. They printed them up on matte paper for a very reasonable price and I really liked the results.
Coincidentally, the LA Times has a story today on the particular genre of one of the cards I picked, “Christmas greetings, with a touch of gloating, from sunny Southern California“. These early 20th century cards were a way of promoting the place at a time when real estate interests were trying to get people to move here from the rest of the country. From the article,
One, at least, from Pasadena to Pittsburgh, didn’t bother to be coy or even polite, and I have to admire it for that. It showed a “California Christmas” image of palms and poppies, and “Eastern Christmas” of snowbound pines and dead-branched deciduous.
“Dear little postcard, swiftly go / Back to the land of ice and snow / And bear this Christmas message please / To those dear friends of mine who freeze / Our California’s fine — just listen: / You simply don’t know what you’re missin’!”
Best wishes for a happy and peaceful 2025.
The Attainment; Vision of the Holy Grail to Sir Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Percival by Edward Burne-Jones (1891-1894)
Back in May I began an overly ambitious look at why we’re all addicted to our devices via the ancient concept of Acedia. This task was a practical one in that I’ve found myself, way too often, lying in the internet gutter like a junky on a bender. After considering the notion of Acedia, heaven help me, I thought I’d look at Martin Heidegger’s take via his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology.”
To summarize that essay in a blog post is to miss its point by falling into the error of treating everything and everybody as some kind of means to an end that, constitutively, is a world shaped by technology. But if I were forced into giving a “takeaway” (ugh) I’d say that Herr Doktor Heidegger is saying, of our technological world that, “when you’re holding a hammer everything looks like a nail.” But it cuts much deeper than this cliche. What he’s really saying is that when you’re holding that hammer your world view, your way of seeing, your ethos, your view of the cosmos is fundamentally shifted. And this shift is totalizing. As Heidegger puts it, “the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” (Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p 56 as quoted by Drefus).
What emerges in this technological mindset is a utilitarianism, seeing everything as what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” as something to be exploited. As Federico Campagna puts it, “A forest is no longer a forest, but a stockpile of timber ready to be sent to production; a waterfall is no longer a waterfall, but a stockpile of hydro-electrical units ready to be extracted; a person is no longer a person, but a stockpile of labour ready to be employed.” (Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality)
It’s also not about the hammer itself. Indeed, Heidegger is not suggesting throwing out technology and living some kind of neo-primitive lifestyle. He’s directing us, again, to consider our enframing. The example of technology he uses in the essay, a communion chalice, is pregnant with meaning, forcing us to consider the object’s telos, it’s end purpose. Or maybe, as in the case of the communion chalice its poetic “uselessness”. Considering a technology’s telos, say Mark Zuckerberg’s social media, for instance, might lead us to conclude that it’s more about capital accumulation via harvesting our attention than connecting people as Zuck likes to claim. It might also lead us to consider the dreary, unpoetic qualities of much of the internet.
If I were a good blogger in the, long past, golden age of blogging I’d conclude this post with a convenient listicle, “10 ways Heidegger can help you deal with your phone addiction.” But, to do so, would fall into the very utilitarian enframing we’re trying to escape. We can’t treat our tech addictions as yet another technological problem to be solved with more technological solutions (apps to block apps). We have to get at the root, enframing and teleological questions. I’d suggest you read Heidegger’s essay for its poetic qualities which, in the end, is the point. The doorway to our escape lies in the ineffable, that which can only be accessed, if dimly, through poetry, through art, through the irrational.
If you’d like to read Heidegger’s essay I’d suggest heading to your library where it can be found in a book Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, edited by David M. Kaplan. That book also contains an essay by Hubert Dreyfus “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology” that gives some more context. You can also find Heidegger’s essay here. And I recently began a book by Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, that riffs and extends the notion of enframing into an astonishing analysis of the world we live in.
I’m just back from a month in Pomona pet sitting for friends and I thought I’d do a series of short posts about what I was up to during my sojourn.
Probably the most exciting moment was witnessing a cloud of miner bees on one of my walks. There are, apparently, over 1,500 different kinds of miner bees so I’m not sure which species I was witnessing. They are a solitary insect that only emerges once a year for a brief period. Look closely at the video and you can see the little holes where they live.
In fact, I thought I was seeing honeybees but the way they were flying around in a large cloud without settling down didn’t look like normal honeybee behavior. Eventually the very nice homeowners drove up and explained to me what I was witnessing.
They even have a metal sign on their lawn to explain that miner bees are non-aggressive and the brief period when they appear. Nice to see native bees getting some love.
We have two senior cats. One of those cats, Buck, has had a lot of health issues over the years, including heart problems, digestive issues and a blood clot. He’s likely on eight of his nine lives and can add another health problem to his long list: hyperthyroidism.
Thankfully this can be fixed with an expensive radioactive iodine therapy. He’s such a sweet cat that I thought we owed him a chance, plus the alternative treatments, a special diet or pills, just won’t work well for him.
Waiting for food.
Radioactive iodine therapy involves one shot and several days at a treatment facility to let the radioactivity levels subside. It doesn’t cause the cat any pain, but they can’t be around people or other animals for a few days. When he gets back we have to minimize contact with him for awhile and scoop out his litter into a bucket that has to sit for a few weeks before we can dispose of it.
I’ve never been to a vet as organized and efficient as the folks doing this treatment, Advanced Veterinary Medical Imaging in Tustin. They send a daily spreadsheet update, call frequently and there’s even a webcam in Buck’s cage which has allowed us to watch him beg for food and hide from the vet techs. I really wish our human health system in the country spent a little more money on communicating with patients and families. It would make life easier for everyone including our overworked doctors and nurses.
Mr. Buck came to us over a decade ago as a kitten from a neighbor who found him unconscious in a driveway. I feel privileged to have lived with this feline in all his ups and downs and when the time came to make the decision on this treatment I didn’t think about it long. We’re fortunate to be able to afford it and I felt an obligation to make whatever time we have left with him as comfortable as possible.
Until this absence this week, I didn’t fully realize what a presence he is, the way he bosses the dog, the other cat and even us around. The house is haunted by his absence, by the way he bangs on the window by the bed to wake me up at 5:30 for breakfast, his nocturnal zooms and his conspicuous midday napping.
