#davidboles — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #davidboles, aggregated by home.social.
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The Retirement Is Always Silent
On a Tuesday in August, at three in the afternoon in Manhattan and two in the valley, a telephone went to speaker and a family in Nebraska began to read a week to me. The call carried a death and a storm in the same breath, which is how the plains have always carried them, the funeral hour and the rain total riding the same wire. Trees down across the county. The town's grain silo wrecked the week before the crop came in. A hundred utility poles down, thirty-four of them consecutive on one county road, snapped at ground level and thrown across into the lines and trees on the other side. Four inches of rain that day at North Loup, and still raining. The festival, Popcorn Days, running since 1901, had gone on among the ruins anyway, because a town that cancels its celebration has lost something the storm cannot carry off. […]https://bolesblogs.com/2026/08/22/the-retirement-is-always-silent/
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Nobody Closed the Gate: How Traditions Convince Themselves That Thinking Ended, and Who Collects the Toll
In 1984 a legal historian named Wael Hallaq published a study whose title was a question: "Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?" The question sounds technical, and the journal that carried it, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, is read by a few thousand specialists. What Hallaq did inside those pages deserves a wider audience than it has ever had, because he performed one of the cleanest demolitions in modern intellectual history, and the thing he demolished is a structure that keeps getting rebuilt in other neighborhoods, including our own. […] -
Three Books on a Table
When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others. One was a slim green-and-gilt volume from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country, foxed at the corners, written by a woman almost nobody remembers. One was the Theogony of Hesiod, a genealogy in verse, roughly a thousand lines of who was born to whom, composed by a Boeotian farmer about seven hundred years before Christ. And one was the Inferno, in the English that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made out of the worst years of his life. An animal book, a family tree, and a tour of hell. The Disposition is what happened when I stopped treating them as three books and started treating them as one instrument with three registers. […] -
The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink
Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say. […] -
The Conditions Were Not the Ones I Would Have Chosen
The cultural and political conditions under which my new book RelationShaping: Field Studies has been published are not the conditions I would have chosen for it. The book is an argument for sustained attention, long apprenticeship, and the slow acquisition of perceptual capacities that operate below the level of declarative description. It enters a culture where the dominant economic logic rewards short attention, fast turnover, and the substitution of automated outputs for the trained reading those outputs are supposed to approximate. I make the case anyway, because the case needs making, and because the people who recognize what the book is describing will recognize it whether the cultural moment is favorable or not.
The book’s central claim is that relational seeing is a competence: a real, trainable capacity to attend to the relations among elements rather than to elements considered separately, acquired the way reading is acquired, operating faster than conscious analysis, producing results the practitioner cannot fully describe in declarative terms. I develop the claim across ten case studies that range from Giorgio Morandi’s still-life shelves to Michael Faraday’s iron-filing diagrams of magnetic field lines, from phyllotactic spirals in plant growth to Renaissance counterpoint, from the human microbiome to Anni Albers’s woven textiles, from mycorrhizal networks beneath forest floors to Charles Sanders Peirce’s three-cornered theory of signs and the classifier predicates of American Sign Language. The case studies share a structure: a trained perceiver attends to relations among elements as the constitutive features of the structure the elements together produce.
The book is the companion volume to The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory. The Scientific Aesthetic developed the theoretical framework for what I called the originating-act test, distinguishing acts of art and science from the craft activities that follow them. RelationShaping takes the relational dimension of that earlier argument and develops it into a sustained examination of one specific perceptual capacity across a wider range of human practice than the first book could cover. The two volumes can be read independently. They make a single argument together, and the order of publication is the order of the argument’s development.
The argument is not a recent one for me. I started a blog called RelationShaping in the BolesBlogs network in 2007. The blog has been working on the questions this book gathers for almost twenty years, and many of the book’s arguments began as blog posts whose claims I refined, tested against new examples, and pushed further across that span. The new book is the culmination of long work, the gathering of two decades of writing into a single sustained argument that the blog form, by its nature, could not quite hold.
The closing chapters of RelationShaping extend the framework into harder territory. Chapter Eight examines the trained-perception competence in domains where it has not been institutionally named, including the recovery of the Antikythera Mechanism, the decipherment of Linear B, the Hubble Deep Field, and the contested Sappho papyri. The next chapter addresses the methodological problem of attending to relations that have not yet been discovered, drawing on microbiome and connectome research, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time, and the substantial scholarly traditions of Indigenous knowledge integration. The book closes with Chapter Ten, titled “The Severed Field,” which addresses the contemporary cultural and political conditions under which the discipline of attending to the between has come under pressure.
Chapter Ten is the chapter that made the book hard to write, and the chapter that makes the book necessary right now. The trained eye depends on conditions that are political, not merely epistemic. The classroom where a student learns to read counterpoint exists because public funding for music education exists. A museum where a young painter can spend weeks in front of a Morandi exists because the public funding that maintains museum collections exists. The graduate seminar where a future scholar of Indigenous ecological knowledge learns the methodology for ethical engagement exists because public funding for humanities research exists. Forests where botanists learn to read mycorrhizal networks exist because public funding for forest conservation exists. None of those institutional preconditions is independent of the political settlement that funds and protects them. The settlement turns against the institutions; the institutions thin; the conditions for the acquisition of trained perception thin with them; and the next generation of trained perceivers does not appear.
This is what Chapter Ten attempts to articulate. The substantive argument about relational seeing as a trainable competence would have been correct in any historical period. The urgency of articulating it right now belongs specifically to this moment, when the institutional preconditions for the competence are under organized political pressure to dissolve.
The book makes no claim that political pressure is the only force at work, or that institutional contraction has only one cause. The contraction has many causes, including economic restructuring, demographic change, the erosion of forms of community that once supported sustained attention, and the substitution of cheaper automated processes for human practitioners. Political pressure is one cause among several, and it is the cause most directly susceptible to political response.
What the book hopes to offer the reader is a vocabulary. With the vocabulary in hand, a reader may notice the trained eye in the people who still have it, may understand what those people are doing differently, may in some specific case ask to become an apprentice. In other cases, the reader may recognize that the political pressure on the institutions that train such perceivers is not pressure those perceivers can resist alone. They will need allies. The book is one attempt to make the case for being one of those allies.
I want to be honest about the limits of what the book undertakes. The book undertakes a specific task: it names the competence, documents it across a wider range of domains than is usually recognized, and articulates what is being lost when the conditions for its acquisition stop holding. The book makes no proposal for restoring the institutions whose contraction it documents, and no claim that naming the loss is sufficient to reverse it. Naming is the first step the book attempts, on the conviction that a loss without a name cannot be addressed in any organized way. The book gives the loss a name. What follows from the naming is for the reader to decide.
RelationShaping: Field Studies is available now in print, in ebook, and as a free PDF download from BolesBooks.com, along with its companion volume The Scientific Aesthetic: An Operating Theory. The book was difficult to write under the present conditions; it would be dishonest to claim otherwise, and equally dishonest to claim that the difficulty makes the book unnecessary. The argument exists, the case needs making, and the book makes the case.
#amazon #bolesBlogs #book #davidBoles #faraday #fieldStudies #kdp #morandi #philosophy #phyllotactic #politics #relation #relationshaping #scientificAesthetic -
Hey Now! Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 16 (2025): Buy Now!
Hey, there! Welp, it’s that time of the year again — yes, time for us to ask for the indulgence of your continued, kind, support for this blog by buying our eBook — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 16 (2025) — to show your support so we may continue to publish this blog without advertising while still being able to cover our yearly, ongoing, online publication costs that include server space, hosting fees, and bandwidth payments. Yes, we live in a money world — even for free reading!
As you may know, we don’t publish junk articles, we don’t republish old articles with new paid for backlinks, and we never accept sponsored posts. We also have never allowed, or published, any “do follow” links here on BolesBlogs.com — and we are able to do that because of your fine support for our eBook publishing program. Thank you for being a part of our effort, and a part of us all!
From the introduction of this year’s eBook:
Welcome to this year’s edition of — the “Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 16 (2025)” — this handheld electronic edition brings the best of BolesBlogs.com, and provides you easy access to the best writing of the year 2025 by David Boles. This year’s topics include the ghostly rise of Artificial Intelligence. We call it the real soul of the ghost in the machine. Where we once dared to tread with imagination and compunction, we are now met with a whole wave of knowledge that “already exists” and “we already arrived before you.” That is the humbling and institutional resolution of AI embedding in alive lives. As well, we investigate literary connections between Nebraska ideals and authors. We also introduce our Prairie Voice project, and you are finally able to fully meet the history of the Boodle Boy! We also revisit the ethereal world of the great mentor, friend, and teacher Howard Stein. We dig into Kripke and dramatic literature. We investigate what happens when Fascism takes over a democracy. When critics become the censor, bad things happen in a free society.
Stay along in touch with us at BolesBlogs.com and PrairieVoice.com BoodleBoy.com and Jannauary.com and UnitedStage.com and ScriptProfessor.com and BolesBooks.com and HardcoreASL.com and ASL Opera and HumanMeme.com — and Boles.tv and Boles.radio and BolesBrits.com and more! — and we publish all those projects to help define and refine the remnants of the human condition in an ever-decaying modern world where morality rarely mixes with truth and justice.
Thank you!
#2025 #ai #amazon #bestOfDavidBolesBlogs #bolesBlogs #davidBoles #donation #dramaticLiterature #ebook #howardStein #literature #nebraska #publication #serverCosts #support #volume16
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Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 15 (2024): Buy Now!
Hey, there! Welp, it’s that time of the year again — yes, time for us to ask for the indulgence of your continued, kind, support for this blog by buying our eBook — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 15 (2024) — to show your support so we may continue to publish this blog without advertising while still being able to cover our yearly, ongoing, online publication costs that include server space, hosting fees, and bandwidth payments. Yes, we live in a money world — even for free reading!
As you may know, we don’t publish junk articles, we don’t republish old articles with new paid for backlinks, and we never accept sponsored posts. We also have never allowed, or published, any “do follow” links here on BolesBlogs.com — and we are able to do that because of your fine support for our eBook publishing program. Thank you for being a part of our effort, and a part of us all!
From the introduction of this year’s eBook:
Welcome to this year’s edition of — the “Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 15 (2024)” — this handheld electronic edition brings the best of BolesBlogs.com, and provides you easy access to the best writing of the year 2024 by David Boles. This year’s topics include an amazing trip back to Nebraska to bury my mother and to visit family I haven’t seen in over 40 years. Plus, 2024 was a big year for Artificial Intelligence and AI has swept into all of our lives – whether we realize it or not. Plus, lots of reflections are shared concerning what it means to be human and what it means to know just how you fit into the world. Plus, you get to meet The Boles Birts: Percy and Lotty! Two, new, and beautiful British Shorthair kittens that are now a big part of our family.
You are purchasing this eBook to support the ongoing online publication of David Boles, Blogs located online at BolesBlogs.com where servers, bandwidth, and images support all have a rising, substantial, cost for production. Thank you!
As well, be sure to follow us all year long via Discord server: discord.gg/boles and join our Federated Mastodon server at Boles.xyz
There are no hyperlinks or fancy formatting in this ebook. In fact, this is a purposeful, old-timey, “flat file” publication — just like the old paper books of yore, where you start on page one, and finish reading on the last page. This is a mechanical choice of function, not a historic moment in amber!
Keep in touch with us online here at BolesBlogs.com and ScriptProfessor.com and BolesBooks.com and HardcoreASL.com and ASL Opera and HumanMeme.com — and Boles.tv and Boles.radio and BolesBrits.com and more! — and we publish all those projects to help memorialize the pitfalls and the pinnacles of the human condition.
Thank you!
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#2024 #ai #amazon #bestOf #bolesBlogs #bolesBrits #buyNow #cats #davidBoles #EBook #kindle #Lotty #Percy #publishing
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We’ve discussed AI here several times here on Boles Blogs, and today we’re taking the logical next step into the Uncanny valley by sharing original musical creations and starting our own website radio streaming service using our new songs to accompany our new Boles.radio TLD (Top Level Domain)!
Okay, so now you have your original music published on the major streaming services, like Spotify, but to hear those songs, your listeners need to have an account to access the entire song and not just a 30 second sound snippet.
But what if you want to drill down even more into your songs, and create your own website that will help you stream your music your way?
You have a few choices.
You can go to a website that specializes in helping you create your own radio station where you will have to stream from their proprietary domain. You will have to upload your music, and your storage space is limited. You also will have a limit on how many hours you can stream. The cost for that sort of service is around $150 a month for 10 hours of streaming. Not a great deal, but if you want to do everything live as an old time radio announcer, that’s one way to go.
A second choice you have is to go for an .FM domain name. The “Dot FM” name is popular for some music-related websites, playing off the old “radio” idea of an “FM” radio station. I’m not sure how many folks in the emerging generation even know what “FM” stands for when it comes to terrestrial radio broadcasting (frequency modulation); not that the definition really matters anymore.
An .FM domain will cost you around $100 a year to register. So, for five years, you’re in for $500 in domain registration fees alone. That’s not a terrible deal for a website domain, but knowing that the .FM domain name is really the TLD for the “Federated States of Micronesia” — (not “frequency modulation” at all!) — which is an independent island nation located in the Pacific Ocean — and so you might not really think .FM means really associates “radio” in mind.
However, if you’re old, like me, and you want to try to be a little more traditional with your non-terrestrial web streaming domain for your music, the “.RADIO” domain might just be what fits best with your interest.
Yes, you can get a “Dot Radio” domain for $25 or so a year — if you are an individual with a want to “stream” radio, music, commentary or a podcast. Companies pay about ten times that amount per year for a .Radio domain.
Compared to the .FM domain — at $500 for five years — you can instead get a .RADIO domain for $250 for a 10 year registration; that’s half the cost for twice the time! I’ll go .RADIO all day.
And so I did!
Boles.radio is now live, and streaming my original music, as well as streaming highlights of my Human Meme podcast, along with other great bits of my ancient radio history to come!
Right now, I have started to curate my original SoundCloud music playlists — with my spoken vocal stingers added to my songs stream — to create “channel streams” on Boles.radio based on musical styles, and spoken topics.
Boles.ai · Boles Radio DanceBeing able to control the flow of the Boles.radio experience was important to me. With easily editable SoundCloud playlist streams, I can better form the proactive listener experience moment-to-moment.
Since all my original songs embed the domain name, or project, they are promoting in the lyrics, I am currently creating all new songs just for the Boles.radio streamcasting experience.
I’m currently able to create a new song a day, so in a month or two, Boles.radio will have a good, and deep, visual playlist available for your listening pleasure — a playlist I can always expand, update, edit, or delete as needed.
Hey, give me a shoutout if you need help, or if you have any ideas to share for the future of AI in our everyday lives!
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https://bolesblogs.com/2024/04/04/boles-radio-is-live/
#boles #bolesRadio #cccccc #creative #davidBoles #fm #music #Podcast #production #radio #streaming