john rakestraw

Retired teacher of #philosophy and philosophical theology who once worked with faculty and graduate students to think deeply about #teaching. Longtime (and just knowledgeable enough to avoid the precipice) user of emacs and cli to pull together and access all sorts of ideas and data. Looking for more (and more and more) things to read, and struggling to find room for a committed introvert in online social space. | #photography | #emacs | #bicycling | #FOSS | #linux | #politics |

Blog: https://johnrakestraw.com/
Photos: https://photography.johnrakestraw.com/
What I'm reading: https://johnrakestraw.com/reading/

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Published at

2026-05-20T00:31:16Z

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Last Notes

2026-04-05 11:54:34 UTC

“A book never looks more alluring, more essential, than when it is about to get packed away in a box.”
—Sven Birkerts
#SundaySentence @npub1q60…kp90 #bookstodon #reading

2026-02-03 17:37:26 UTC

Another month of reading. Some fiction, some memoir, some writing advice from a psychotherapist and self-help from a neuroscientist, and even a return to some philosophy. All good.
@npub1q60…kp90 #bookstodon #reading
https://johnrakestraw.com/reading/january-2026/

2025-09-14 12:22:09 UTC

#silentsunday #reflection #photography #boston #charlesriver
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/115/202/616/914/854/963/original/dbd36b115926ef43.jpeg

2025-07-17 16:15:28 UTC

“If the fact that I am a ‘celebrity’ makes you feel silly, what dear girl do you think it makes me feel? It’s a comic distinction shared with Roy Rogers’s horse and Miss Watermelon of 1958. In a great many ways it makes things difficult, for the only friends you can have are old friends or new ones who are willing to ignore it” (Flannery O’Connor, in a December 1955 letter; ‘The Habit of Being,’ pp. 125f).
@npub1ny7…uv57 #fame #reading #FlanneryOConnor

2025-07-13 18:18:00 UTC

“The two friends, one of them blond, resembling Richard Strauss, smiling, reserved, adroit, the other dark, properly dressed, gentle and firm, all too supple, lisps, both epicurean, constantly drink wine, coffee, beer, schnapps, smoke uninterruptedly, one of them pours for the other, their room across from mine full of French books, write a great deal in the musty writing room when the weather is nice” (Kafka’s Diaries, 29 July 1914).
@npub1ny7…uv57 #franzkafka #sundaysentence

2025-07-12 22:26:33 UTC

I know this is a minor problem compared to all the major problems of the world today, but I think there’s a special place in hell for people who mark up library books — especially those who mark prolifically in bold ink strokes
#reading #libraries @npub1ny7…uv57 #books

2025-06-26 18:52:28 UTC

"There is glory in each day, for each of us. It is waiting to be illuminated and observed. ,,, Art has the power to alter our interior selves, and in so doing to inspire, exhilarate, provoke, connect, and rouse us. As we are changed, our souls are awakened to possibility — immeasurable, yes, and potentially infinite. If ever there was a time for art, it’s now."
--Claire Messud
@npub1ny7…uv57 #art #poetry #literature

2025-06-20 15:55:57 UTC

"I walk along the edge of a precipice, I count days and make notes. I do it in order to remember. Or I do it in order to hold the days together. Or perhaps I do it because the paper remembers what I say. As if I existed. As if someone were listening."
-Solvej Balle, "On the Calculation of Volume II."
@npub1ny7…uv57 #reading #memory #journaling

2025-06-19 18:05:31 UTC

Private faces in public places
Are wiser and nicer
Than public faces in private places
—W. H. Auden, in the dedication to his verse play ‘The Orators.’ Quoted by Hannah Arendt in her acceptance speech for the Sonning Prize for Contributions to European Civilization, 1975
@npub1ny7…uv57 #WHAuden #fame #modesty #hannaharendt

2025-06-08 14:56:26 UTC

"Would I prefer to be remembered wrongly, I wondered, if it meant that some trace of my life would persist, a barnacle on a raft, into the future?"
Madeleine Thien, 'The Book of Records,' p. 50.
@npub1ny7…uv57 #SundaySentence #memory #legacy

2025-06-08 13:55:19 UTC

“It is not easy to describe things here. It is a life of unreality. … Reflection withers. … There seems to be no place at all for real thought. … Every day I say to myself: Patience, just be patient. Don’t be discouraged, no matter what. If we do what we can, the rewarding moments are bound to return.”
#KarlJaspers, writing from Germany, in a letter to #HannahArendt, 12 March 1946.
Seeking reason for #hope, wherever I can find it @npub1ny7…uv57 #patience #politics #thinking

2025-05-25 10:37:49 UTC

#silentsunday #photography #blackandwhite #blackandwhitephotography
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/114/568/023/257/788/064/original/0930911f10b2cce1.jpeg

2025-05-11 13:09:00 UTC

"We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the breathing, bleeding place we guard so carefully in daily life" (Andrea Barrett, 'Dust and Light,' p. 55).
#SundaySentence #writing #reading @npub1ny7…uv57

2025-04-29 15:50:16 UTC

Last week's celebration of independent bookstores has me thinking about the independent bookstores I've treasured and the treasures I've found there. I wrote up a list of stores that have been important to me --- perhaps you'll find some of your favorites in this list; even better, tell us about stores that aren't on my list. I love to find stores when I'm in a city that's new to me.
https://johnrakestraw.com/post/treasures-of-independent-bookstores/
@npub1ny7…uv57 #reading #books

2025-04-27 10:54:18 UTC

“Any body politic governed by a sovereign ruler accountable to nobody is in the hands of a sick man.”
Simone Weil, in “The Need for Roots.”
#SundaySentence #simoneweil @npub1ny7…uv57 #tyranny #tyrant #government

2025-04-23 19:52:12 UTC

- reply

Interesting observation. Thanks for posting. I definitely agree that all sorts of accidents — both on the grand scale of the universe and on the small scale of day to day life — have a significant impact on the universe and on an individual life. And that love and understanding are crucial. But I see more significance in the intellectual than Feyerabend does here. (That fits, I suppose, with my take on his philosophy of science.)

2025-04-23 16:08:47 UTC

A human side to #philosophy/philosophers:
“It still seems incredible to me that I managed to get both things, the ‘love of my life’ and a oneness with my self. And yet, I only got the one thing when I got the other. But finally I know what happiness is.”
Hannah Arendt, in a letter to her husband Heinrich Blücher (also a philosopher), 18 Sept 1937 (Within Four Walls, p. 41)
#marriage #flourish #happiness #selfhood #love #hannaharendt @npub1ny7…uv57

2025-04-22 13:05:36 UTC

- reply

Good question. I wondered the same thing, and considered leaving them out, but my own “punctuation nerdiness” won out. See attached screenshot — Knopf’s Everyman’s Library edition of the essays, ed. John Carey. Front matter says “text drawn directly from The Complete Works of George Orwell.” The discrepancy is definitely interesting — my library has several collections of the essays — I might spend some time snooping around the next time I’m there.
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/114/381/713/882/394/065/original/c16c951c27337e69.jpeg

2025-04-21 21:14:56 UTC

“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits “atrocities” but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.”
—George Orwell, 4 February 1944
@npub1ny7…uv57 #georgeorwell #totalitarianism #history #truth #PostTruth

2025-04-20 14:04:34 UTC

"How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are" (Georges Perec, "The Infra-Ordinary").
#SundaySentence @npub1ny7…uv57 #reading #journal #quotidian #Georges_Perec

2025-04-16 15:35:01 UTC

A prophecy?
"Who knows whether in a couple of centuries there may not exist universities for restoring the old ignorance?"
-- Georg Chistoph Lichtenberg, "The Waste Books, Notebook K, 1793-1796." Quoted in "Ignorance and Bliss," by Mark Lilla, p. 199.
@npub1ny7…uv57 #universities #academicfreedom

2025-04-13 16:01:14 UTC

“I have no problem with the idea of an online social network; I just don’t want to buy a sense of community with my attention to ads, on a platform that implicitly encourages me to advertise myself, all while my data gets collected.”
—Jenny Odell, “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock,” pp. 89f
@npub1ny7…uv57 #SundaySentence #socialmedia

2025-03-30 12:47:18 UTC

"In the West even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a leg of mutton."
--George Orwell, 'Coming up for air,' published in 1939.
@npub1ny7…uv57 #SundaySentence #georgeorwell #incomeinequality

2025-03-28 13:49:03 UTC

#Predators and #prey: size matters. “A chickadee is almost too small to have any [enemies]. That whimsical fellow called #Evolution, having enlarged the dinosaur until he tripped over his own toes, tried shrinking the chickadee until he was just too big to be snapped up by flycatchers as an insect, and just too little to be pursued by hawks and owls as meat. Then he regarded his handiwork and laughed. Everyone laughs at so small a bundle of large enthusiasms."
--Aldo Leopold
@npub1ny7…uv57

2025-03-23 15:20:49 UTC

“A journal — any writing — is a chance at immortality, or if not eternal life, at least a little more life, a little more after death” (Elisa Gabbert, 'Any Person is the Only Self,' pp. 102f).
#SundaySentence #journaling #writing @npub1ny7…uv57 #meaningoflife

2025-03-21 18:14:03 UTC

Like many others, I post notes about my reading in my blog. Some of those notes are rather long, and some readers might stop scrolling and leave the page before noticing a book that they might find interesting. But TIL about the HTML details disclosure element. Now I have a short summary, and readers can click on the summary to reveal the entire note. Seems much cleaner to me. (And #emacs, #oxhugo, and #hugo make it very easy to do this.)
https://johnrakestraw.com/reading
#blogging @npub1ny7…uv57

2025-03-16 15:00:06 UTC

“I can get food for my mind in books — in observation of life — in my own reflections, [but] food for my heart must come direct from others — & my heart always craved more than my mind” (p. 96 in Megan Marshall's book 'After Lives,' quoting a letter from Elizabeth Peabody to her sister Mary).
@npub1ny7…uv57 #reading #SundaySentence #friendship #conversation

2025-03-12 14:36:12 UTC

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the aesthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture" (Aldo Leopold, writing in 1948).
#conservation #environment @npub1ny7…uv57 #climatechange #nature

2025-03-09 14:15:03 UTC

#silentsunday #photography #winter #snow
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/114/132/884/058/836/304/original/45b4e9126baf9ba7.jpeg

2025-03-06 18:55:46 UTC

Occasionally in my reading I stumble on a passage that seems so germane it's as though truth and emotion have jumped across decades. Consider this from a letter the philosopher A.J. Ayer wrote in 1939: "The political situation makes me more and more depressed. I resent above all the feeling of impotence from which one suffers at times like these, the feeling that really everything one values is at the mercy of knaves and fools" ("A.J. Ayer: A Life," p. 160). #politics @npub1ny7…uv57 #despair

2025-03-02 14:51:43 UTC

"In withholding or distorting knowledge or imparting falsehood, a liar deprives others of the information they need to participate in public and political life, to avoid dangers, to understand the world around them, to act on principle, to know themselves and others and the situation, to make good choices, and ultimately to be free" (Rebecca Solnit, in Orwell's Roses, p. 221).
@npub1ny7…uv57 #SundaySentence #truth #lies #democracy #politics #freedom #bookstodon

2025-02-09 15:56:19 UTC

“Whenever I hear, as I sometimes do, one of my colleagues say that there are no ideas which cannot be expressed clearly in simple language, I think, ‘Then your ideas must be very superficial.’”
Alfred North Whitehead, as recorded by Lucien Price in "The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead," p. 196.
@npub1wce…lzu8 #bookstodon #thinking #philosophy #alfrednorthwhitehead #reading

2025-02-08 16:39:41 UTC

“Under … Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions.”
—Ortega y Gasset, writing about Mussolini in 1930, but has a ring of truth today as well.
#politics #fascism #bookstodon @npub1ny7…uv57

2025-02-07 16:27:30 UTC

- reply

And there’s more — it seems that the fact that fish are social creatures was the evolutionary driver for these developments: “Social interaction creates a complex environment for an animal, and is very often a driver of the evolution of intelligence.” I gather that was a crucial element in human development after our ancestors moved into the Savannah.

2025-02-07 16:23:51 UTC

“#Fish will count objects in experimental tasks. They use counting as a last resort, using other clues if they can…. Fish have learned to discriminate different styles of #music—blues from classical—and could extrapolate from one blues artist to another; they were not learning the quirks of one performer.” (Peter Godfrey-Smith’s “Metazoa,” p. 178; a fascinating book). I’d like to learn more about the experimental evidence for all this. #evolution #intelligence #biology @npub1ny7…uv57

2025-01-27 00:20:24 UTC

"All fiction offers up the possibility of escape from everyday life, but great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from" (Agnes Callard, "Open Socrates," p. 46).
@npub1ny7…uv57 #SundaySentence #reading #fiction #bookstodon

2025-01-22 21:08:49 UTC

Blog post — yes, it’s bad. And there are fights to be fought. But there are still the day to day things, including the reading
https://johnrakestraw.com/post/quotidian-life-in-the-midst-of-turmoil/
#uspol #uspolitics #reading #quotidian @npub1ny7…uv57

2025-01-19 13:28:35 UTC

As I live today, fearing what comes tomorrow and the day after, I find myself thinking of this from Hannah Arendt:
"Constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present."
@npub1ny7…uv57 #SundaySentence cluster #hope

2025-01-17 14:34:21 UTC

This offering from Oliver Burkeman may be the best advice regarding my #TBR pile I've read in a while. "Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it's your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by." (If only....) @npub1ny7…uv57 #bookstodon #reading

2025-01-14 00:47:42 UTC

- reply

I track my books sporadically — it comes and goes. Right now I’m in a tracking phase — https://johnrakestraw.com/reading/january-2025/. I track because I like to reflect on what I’ve read, and that reflection also involves several different books (as in, “I know I read somewhere recently something that relates to what I’m reading now). I’m posting on my blog these days because I’m trying to think more publicly, posting what some call a digital garden.

2025-01-12 14:55:30 UTC

Rebecca Solnit: "In withholding or distorting knowledge or imparting falsehood, a liar deprives others of the information they need to participate in public and political life, to avoid dangers, to understand the world around them, to act on principle, to know themselves and others and the situation, to make good choices, and ultimately to be free" (Orwell's Roses, p. 221).
@npub1ny7…uv57 #bookstodon #SundaySentence #lying #truth #democracy #freedom

2024-10-17 18:34:33 UTC

It’s so refreshing to be reading an older #philosophy book that has true #footnotes instead of #endnotes. In addition to the obvious, it reminds me of a conversation with my favorite philosophy professor — when I complained about the frustration of dealing with endnotes, having to bounce back and forth between text and notes, he said “Oh, I just read all of the endnotes first, and then read the text itself.” Would that I could.
@npub1ny7…uv57 #reading #paratext

2024-08-25 11:43:26 UTC

#silentsunday #newyorkcity #centralpark #reflections #photography #cityscape
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/113/022/467/104/861/255/original/9809ba4597767d6d.jpeg

2024-08-18 11:16:08 UTC

#silentsunday #photography
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/112/982/732/808/212/327/original/a4f78d29f70cadfd.jpeg

2024-08-04 12:27:16 UTC

#silentsunday #streetart #streetphotography #photography #brooklyn
https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/112/903/733/873/163/673/original/2be1471e1e73c63c.jpeg