TLDR – I dont have to do the reading.

I am doing altMBA. I know a few people that have done it, one person who I love who loved it, one person I love who is mixed about it, one person I am mixed about it and I’m not sure how they feel about it – you get the picture. My experience of altmba is sort of like being in the Qdoba in the Dallas Fort Worth airport. I thought it would be more ALT but appears to be more MBA. I have a week left but just now I had an epiphany.

I do not have to do the readings!

I love reading, I love doing the work – I am like the anti tim ferriss. I am not trying to game anything – I am not optimizing anything – I am taking the long way – the way of junk dna. I take it all in because I like it like that. I don’t know how my digestion system works how my metabolic. I even sometimes eat at the Qdoba at the DFW airport and enjoy it.

Anyway I am writing this while in a book discussion for a book that I did not read and I’m like and yes I don’t have to do the reading.

Maybe you also don’t have to do the reading. I am talking about me because that is really the only experience I have – the experience of being me.

Its not that I am such a genius that I don’t have to do the reading – although who knows -maybe that is true too – but really it is because

a) I know more than I think I know

b) I can learn what I want or need to learn in other ways

c) its ok just to read the book review or the response – often this is enough for the spark in me

d) I can read what I want – I dont have to read like a stranded person in a desert looking for an oasis desperate for water.

People are just throwing water at me all the time. Maybe it is not clean, or tasty, or with high pH, but if I want a particular kind of water I can get it and responses to the prompt.

Anyway I dont have to do the reading – I’m liberated. Do you have to do the reading? Probably not?

What do you want to read? What reading do I want to do ?

I am working on a poetry book, the poems are related in a fractal way, a self similar way. I have a book called An Interface for a fractal landscape. It is poetry about creating fake landscapes, procedural landscapes using fractal mathematics (I think). I am attracted to this sort of work – I have a certain fetish for code that is used in ways that code ought not be used. Poetry is language used in ways language ought not be used, or was not intended to be used. Poetry makes language more powerful. Code is powerful when it is run through a compiler. Code as poetry is less powerful, in the sense of performative, but can code as poetry be powerful in another way, can it be erotic? Can it be generative as a life force? Is code as poetry the true artificial intelligence, or artificial life.

I read Ulises Carrion‘s book on sonnets. It is the same sonnet by Dante Gabriel Rossetti written a number of times with slightly different perspectives, Germanic Sonnet, Musical Sonnet, Incomplete Sonnet. The world of the sonnet is expanded by parallel worlds, bubble worlds of the sonnet populated with permutations from the original sonnet. Carrion‘s original version apparently also had these drawings, which themselves appear procedural or algorithmic. My version of the text does not have this. Sonnet comes from the word song, stanza comes from the word room. These images of Carrion look like floor plants or midi diagrams.

I am looking at an interface for fractal landscape and I loved the images of fake geologies. What is fake granite? What is the molecular structure of fake granite? It is code. It is ascii. It is a hidden layer that a machine learning algorithm devices when ingesting images of granite. There is an insert of a black and white rock, and then ascii art waves or dots. Is this what the compiler sees? Is this what the computer agent sees? Does it matter? Does it only matter what the poet sees. I was thinking of Vija Clements who’s body of work includes both pictures or rocks and hyper realistic drawings of water and outerspace. This is a leaning in to the human visual perception of the eye, while “Fractal Landscape” leans into computer perception, what was left out of perception, what is reduced.

I think of Eros and Byung-Chul Han and a creative misreading. Here Eros is metaphysics, the cosmogenesis creating worlds. The models of Owen Barfield, the idols are not erotic they are not metaphysics they are the procedural generation -the fractal landscapes. I am writing a bunch of poems I originally said they were related in a fractal way, I then thought perhaps they were related in the aleatory way (chance, a throw of the dies mallarme style). But this is regressive. What is beyond fractal? I am looking ergodic noo