I'm listening to Africa/Brass by the John Coltrane Quartet. The volume's up, the windows are open. It all feels pretty good.

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Earlier today I planted peas. I'm no kind of farmer, but I love me my peas.

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One of the books I'm loving now is Timothy Morton's The Ecological Thought which is finally out as an affordable paperback. It's sort of a prequel to Ecology without Nature, and like movie prequels was written after the fact of the latter book.

I can't urge you enough to read either, but preferably both, of these fine books. Check out my interview with Morton at Ask/Tell if you need encouragement.

Morton is great at refiguring, rejiggering, making strange, what it means to be within the mesh of material circumstance. Consider this bit from The Ecological Thought:

"At the basis of 'life' there is DNA, and it has no specific flavor. There is no chimp-flavored, no human-flavored DNA; we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimps and 35 percent with daffodils." (66)

Consider this bit, too:

"Organisms are palimpsests of additions, deletions, and rewritings, held together mostly by inertia." (64)

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