{"id":6263,"date":"2010-01-25T14:42:04","date_gmt":"2010-01-25T22:42:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=6263"},"modified":"2010-07-30T22:56:48","modified_gmt":"2010-07-31T05:56:48","slug":"because-plastic-is-a-sad-strong-material-that-is-charming-to-rodents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=6263","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=6208\">What are today&#8217;s household gods<\/a>? A few days ago, the <em>New York Slime<\/em> published <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/01\/22\/technology\/personaltech\/22sfbriefs.html?scp=1&#038;sq=beat%20poet&#038;st=cse\">Gary Snyder&#8217;s paean to his Macintosh computer<\/a>, titled &#8220;why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh.&#8221; There are several good lines in the poem, and here are two of them:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at \u201cdelete,\u201d so it teaches of impermanence and pain;<\/p>\n<p>And because my computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Roman household gods, the Lares, were less brief and not made of plastic. Yet many of today&#8217;s households have small altars devoted to personal computers, we give them offerings of electricity and our attention, and many of us pay obeisance to them on a regular basis; so I&#8217;d say at the moment personal computers sometimes fill the role once filled by Lares.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What are today&#8217;s household gods? A few days ago, the New York Slime published Gary Snyder&#8217;s paean to his Macintosh computer, titled &#8220;why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh.&#8221; There are several good lines in the poem, and here are two of them: Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,18],"tags":[505,481],"class_list":["post-6263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-blogs","category-theology","tag-gary-snyder","tag-household-gods"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6263"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7321,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6263\/revisions\/7321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}