Schrödinger’s Humdinger

Jump into a short stream on the ways in which we express ourselves.

Note: The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡

We are not books. We cannot be read. We have heard it said many times; the “Ugh, I cannot read you!” delivered on a plate of impatient, foot-stomping breath. We stand accused of being deceptive—as though we are simply choosing to flatten the emotional braille of our faces in some sinister plot to hide our true selves. We are not books. We cannot be read.

We are books. We can be easily read. We express ourselves in our pages—our music, our words, our art—and we are open to interpretation. But like our facial expressions, our works can also be misread. The viewer projects their worldview upon us and in their review, we crinkle and cut. What do we mean? This is our mystery to unravel. We are books. We can be easily read.

We are not books. We cannot be read. Our smiles, frowns, and eyebrow wiggles are not the easily consulted chapters of us. Foreword, contents, prologue, body, epilogue, index—we have none of these. No footnotes either. The movements of our features do not align with some AI fit-the-grid formula that measures eyebrow tilts and frownline furrows and ultimately gets our emotions wrong. Our smiles are broken, our nostrils flared, but our faces do not betray us. We are not books. We cannot be read.

We are books. We can be easily read. It’s all there—every word. But don’t mistake your skill at recognizing the text as the lesson. Alphabets are bricks, not buildings. Paints are pigments, not portraits. Notes hang themselves on the staff as overtures to ears—can you hear? Read the signs. We are dog-eared and musty, Deweyed and Decimaled. Our dustjackets often bear no resemblance to the contents of our hearts, but we are books. We can be easily read.

We are not books. We cannot be read. Nor can we be bought, borrowed, or sold second-hand. We will not be shelved by your inability to comprehend or get the reading right, for we are not books. We cannot be read.

We are books. We can be easily read. Our pages, canvases, and compositions overflow with stories and noise and words and colors and smells and history and futures imagined and hope and fate and love and hate. We are published daily. Some days we are a pamphlet, some days a multi-volume set with copious illustrations that’ll need a wheelbarrow to carry. We are reviewed and derided, loved and adored, hated and abhorred. We are, we are…

Are we books? Are we not books? Are we libraries, cathedrals, planets of expression held between the flimsy frontmatter and backmatter of our lives? Is it our destiny to be judged by our covers and those unchaperoned facial expressions that are so easily misread? What the hell are we?

We are trees falling, making both sound and no sound. We are Schrodinger’s cat, both alive and dead in our expression box—we could go either way. Readable, unreadable, read, and misread.

We are books-not-books. Now open. Turn the page.

Yours in tiny thought,

Janeen

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This Week’s Amends…

“What you gotta do you gotta do, life’s a hurly-burly, so I would say try hard to diversify your skills and interests. Stay away from drugs and talent judges. Get organized. Big or little, that helps a lot.

I’d like you to do better than I did. Keep your dreams out of the stinky business, or you’ll go crazy, and the money won’t help you. Be careful to maintain a spiritual EXIT. Don’t live by this game because it’s not worth dying for. Hang onto your hopes. You know what they are. They’re private. Because that’s who you really are and if you can hang around long enough you should get paid. I hope it makes you happy. It’s the ending that counts, and the best things in life really are free.”

- Iggy Pop

An excerpt from Iggy’s 2014 John Peel Lecture on Free Music in a Capitalist Society. If you want more, you can download the audio from here (for what looks like a limited time) but if that is no longer available, look, a transcript!

Via Austin Kleon 

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Never heard this cover¹ before. Nina does a great, meditative intro to it, and then of course she sings and yeah, that’s great too. And now I want that record.

Via Brain Pickings

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“If this disruption undoes you, if the absence of people unravels you…lean into loneliness and know you’re not alone in it.”

I don’t think it would be possible for me to love this more.

Via This is Colossal

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I mean, no real surprise for #1. My fav near-far guy, Grover, came in 6th and while I am a little disappointed by that, I’m sure he’d teach me some lesson about getting over it. Super Grover! You can read the full results here to see where your favorite character falls, as ranked by NPR listeners.

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Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?

1. I’ve always thought the original had ‘walking through fall leaves with a nice jacket on’ kinda feel. I’m not saying it makes me yearn for a Pumpkin Spice Latte (because YUK), but it does make me miss leaf peeping.