iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Tried to nap but couldn't, paradoxically because I was thinking about Ivan Illich writing in 1974 about participatory low energy societies

Text from Ivan Illich's Energy and Equity (1974): "While people have begun to accept ecological limits on maximum per capita energy use as a condition for physical survival, they do not yet think about the use of minimum feasible power as the foundation of any of various social orders that would be both modern and desirable. Yet only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity. The one option that is at present neglected is the only choice within the reach of all nations. It is also the only strategy by which a political process can be used to set limits on the power of even the most motorized bureaucrat. Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology."

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Prediction that this will be me when the budget drops

Winnie the Pooh holding a piece of paper at arm's length with an incredulous expression hinting at mild distaste

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Real ones know that intellectual disciplinarity is akin to that time that Greg tried to convince a horse named Eustace to pull a plough [Excerpt below from: Dening, G. 1973. “History as a Social System.” Historical Studies 15 (61): 673–85. doi.org/10.1080/1031... ]

"HISTORY AS A SOCIAL SYSTEM*

Part of my life was spent in ecclesiastical institutions. Offices and duties
in such institutions tended to be distributed less with an eye to talent than
with an eye to the good of one's soul. One year I was appointed Magister Equi,
Master of the Horse. The horse's name was Eustace. He was an enormous brute,
with great rolling haunches and huge belly inflatable at any given point to
frustrate tight girths. In my innocence I thought that all horses knew some sort
of farmland patois like 'whoa', 'giddup'. Eustace knew only violence. He had
come to the seminary from timber haulers in the mountains and he was trained
to give of himself instantly and totally, which was good for logs, but bad for
mowers and ploughs. One of the tasks of the Master of the Horse was to plough
the orchard. My image of ploughing had come mainly from the Dutch Masters.
I saw it as a serene meditative occupation, tripping on occasional larks, lunching at the angelus. I discovered that ploughs are heavy. They require two hands
just to hold them upright. Where, I asked, did the reins go? They went round
one's neck. With Eustace streaming into the middle distance of the orchard, one
had a poor choice. Pursue him at break-neck pace with the plough, or be dragged
by the neck without the plough.

It was then that my first scepticism about scripture began. It is sometimes
more difficult to take one's hands off the plough than to keep them on. I have
an image of the disciplines as ploughmen of lonely furrows, hauled along by
forces over which they have little control. They need some courage to stay, but
more courage to take their hands away."

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

It's far from the only or most important form of resistance, but it's a good day to lean on your most nourishing analogue tools to carve out a little space for your soul

To do list written in purple ink. Resting on top are an emerald green flat top fountain pen and a tortoiseshell amber coloured fountain pen.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Happy birthday William Morris, sorry that your ghost has to keep so busy haunting so many people

William Morris banner design for the Democratic Federation. Text at top reads "liberty equality fraternity", smaller banners laid over the top of a branching oak tree read "educate", "democratic federation," "organise", "educate"

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Reading Shelley while waiting for an appointment sometimes has similar vibes to reading gossip magazines in the waiting room, feeling enlivened by potent snark

"Let this opportunity be conceded to me of acknowledging that I have what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms a 'passion for reforming the world:' what passion incited him to write and publish his book he omits to explain. For my part I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus. But it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life."

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

In honour of today's fash-normalising media piece trying to invoke gnosticism, please accept this extremely queer excerpt from The Thunder: Perfect Mind, a roughly 3rd century gnostic text found in the Nag Hammadi collection:

I am he the mother and the daughter
I am the limbs of my mother (21)
I am a sterile woman and she has many children
I am she whose wedding is extravagant and I didn’t have
a husband
I am the midwife and she who hasn’t given birth
I am the comfort of my labor pains (27)
I am the bride and the bridegroom
And it is my husband who gave birth to me
I am my father’s mother,
my husband’s sister, and he is my child (32)
I am the slavewoman of him who served me
I am she, the lord (14) of my child
But it is he who gave birth to me at the wrong time
And he is my child born at the right time
And my power is from within him
I am the staff of his youthful power
And he is the baton of my old womanhood

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Further proving that the citations that are most personally significant are those that don't "count" conventionally, have just seen that a podcast episode featuring some guy I know was mentioned in a wonderful @royalhistsoc.org paper from last year:

Text reads "The above raises questions as to who medical records and heritage archives are for and how we can best engage with them. As disabled scholar and ‘institutional heckler’ Lauren Pikó has observed, traditional methods of archival research are simply inaccessible to many of us."

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

gonna get this framed to hang next to my unreasonable number of Blake prints 💜

"The truth, however, is that consciousness is a wonder beyond its own comprehension. Perhaps the universe is nothing more than cold, calculable matter—that, as Galileo posited, “the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics.” But the laws of consciousness are written in language. Indeed, I suspect that rather than language being a development of consciousness it is a precondition of it. More specifically, I would suggest that consciousness and thought emerge from the idea of representation—that it is when we developed the idea that something can be a metaphor for, imitation of, or reference to another thing that we began to think. I would go so far as to say that, in fact, this miraculous imprecision is what thought is."

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Beset by impossible crushing deadlines, the postie chose to interrupt my panic attack to give me a treat ... Though now I need to not actually read any of it until the weekend/after Sisyphean tasks are somehow complete

Paperback of Christopher Hill's Milton and the English Revolution. Cover art is a grumpy black and white portrait of Milton.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Courtesy of the intrepid @bluntshovels.bsky.social , this ARC Discovery project sounds thrilling: "aims to uncover the lived experience of disability in Australian families ...a new understanding of disability as an integral aspect of the Australian story, rather than a minority experience."

Dr Kate Murphy; Emeritus Professor John Murphy; Emeritus Professor Alistair Thomson; Professor Elizabeth Tilley; Associate Professor Lorna Hallahan

Australia’s first history of disability: Making a more inclusive Australia. This project aims to uncover the lived experience of disability in Australian families between 1945 and the Disability Royal Commission of 2019–23, using innovative methods to co-produce data with people with disability and their families. The project expects to develop the first comprehensive, national history of disability in Australia. Expected outcomes include a new understanding of disability as an integral aspect of the Australian story, rather than a minority experience. This should provide substantial benefits, informing initiatives and policy aimed at creating a more inclusive Australia, and bringing new insights to bear on public discussion about disability policy and the future of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

It's ten years ago this month that I made the UniMelb meme pages because it turns out a week 10 lecture on theories of neoliberal urbanism wasn't a big drawcard when studio assignments were due that week

Student view of a nearly empty lecture theatre. Two people behind the lectern are finishing up a previous class. Lauren (white with blonde hair, dark rimmed glasses, blazer) is sitting in the front row of the lecture theatre waiting to set up her slides. Text over image reads "Week 10 lecture be like... let's just have a one on one tutorial"

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

This, every time I open anything I wrote the day before, forever, until eternity

Winnie the Pooh looking incredulously at a piece of paper

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 30/08/2025

Comfort-reading my boy Shelley because he absolutely gets it on every level

Fragment: Death in Life
[Published by Dr. Garnett, Relics of Shelley, 1862.]

My head is heavy, my limbs are weary,
And it is not life that makes me move.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

My kingdom for the Broadway Melody tailoring line, truly. /Fin

Gene Kelly stands in front of a dancing crowd. Immediately behind him is a dancer in a purple and lilac checked suit and red bow tie, and another in a solid cobalt suit paired with a neon pink tie

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Look 16 and 17, the above kings are joined by peach and blue checks and a neon pink and blue barber stripe

A crowd dances looking up at Gene Kelly who performs before them on a stage. In the crowd in addition to the figures mentioned above, there is a man in a peach and blue checked suit and a pink and blue striped suit

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Looks 12-15, some glorious suits getting their three seconds of air time

Cropped detail of background actors from the Broadway Melody dance sequence. One man in a maroon and pinkish-red suit with thick stripes looks confused, while a man in a grey, link and burgundy checked jacket looks up from his game of cards

Cropped detail of background actors from the Broadway Melody dance sequence. Through atmospheric cigarette smoke you can just see among a range of more conventionally dressed actors in suits and dresses, one figure in a purple and lilac windowpane check suit

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Look number 11, dweeb Gene in the Broadway Melody, another combo I have spent multiple decades looking for pieces to replicate (the third great windowpane check blazer to appear in this film)

Gene Kelly stands hands outstretched, in a pink and blue check blazer over a yellow waistcoat and grey trousers, paired with thick black glasses and a straw hat. Behind him an agent in a pinstriped waistcoat and trousers and a bowler hat prepares to slam a door labelled 'agent'

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Look number 10. We aren't even in the wall-to-wall fashion inspo section of the Broadway Melody yet and we have some peak blazer lounging

Gene Kelly leaning against a piano wearing a grey and mustard checked sport jacket over a white open necked shirt

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

This always looked like a really awesome bookstore to me

Still from Gene Kelly performing Singing in the Rain. He is standing in front of a bookstore with a two-window display displaying signage for first editions and novels, with three tiers of opened rare books in each window organised in tableaus with a globe, artworks on paper. There are peachy-gold velvet curtains hanging behind the displays.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

People talk about Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction as one of those legendary brief film appearances that sticks with you, but he had nothing on purveyor of look number 7: Phoebe Dinsmore, vocal coach, lover of draping, comfy deep voiced icon

Still from Singin in the Rain. Phoebe Dinsmore stands next to Lina Lamont. Phoebe has copper hair, gold chandelier earrings, and is draped in red, gold and green fabric

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Honorary mention to random camera operators in great jumpers

Two camera operators shown from the back. They have complementary geometric patterns on their sweaters and are wearing riding breeches and berets to complete the 20s director look.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

5. My 80s brocade blazer collection wishes it had cuffs the size of a small car like Don

Gene Kelly in period costume with a powdered wig and a silver jewelled cane. His suit jacket is a silver brocade with gigantic cuffs that take up most of his forearms

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

There's a lot of fairly generic tuxes and tails at the premiere and at RF's party, but we get straight to look 4, a second windowpane suit matched with a vest I really love. Honorary mention to Cosmo's extremely comfy-looking hat for Make Em Laugh

Gene Kelly wearing a grey suit with blue windowpane checks and a matching cap worn at a rakish angle. Under the suit is a blue and white fairisle vest.

Donald Connor sitting at a piano wearing a soft looking greyish beige floppy brimmed hat

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

3. While it's a great look, delivering one of my favourite lines, I can't be made to wear all white under any circumstance

Gene Kelly in a white suit with a white trench coat and wide brimmed hat, grabbing a microphone to deliver the line "Dignity. Always Dignity".

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

2. Session musician Don's casual wear

Gene Kelly wearing a red, grey and black Argyle sweater with a white shirt underneath that has an aggressively dagger pointed collar, and extremely textured grey tweed trousers

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

1. The Fit as a Fiddle suits. First appearance of windowpane pattern suits in the film, with green and white two tone brogues (I legitimately have searched online for shoes like this every few months since like 2008)

Still from Singin in the Rain. Gene Kelly and Donald Connor performing "Fit as A Fiddle" wearing white suits with green windowpane checks, matching white and green brogues with bright red socks, and turned up brim hats

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Currently inked: Parker 45s in Circlet and Harlequin, made in the UK in 1981 before Parker realised they weren't profitable to make and shut down production. They have strong utilitarian Ludd energy to me.

Two thin steel fountain pens resting on a a notebook. Each pen has a geometric design etched into it.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Fully expect this to be a banger in a highly specific way involving a lot of sad middle distance staring

Hardcover edition of "The Experience of Defeat: Milton and his contemporaries" by Christopher Hill

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

"like a human form, a friend with whom he lived benevolent" May we all live benevolently in friendship with our human forms, as we keep on our wondrous journeys upon the earth. Blake rules so hard.

"The nature of infinity is this: That every thing has its
Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro Eternity.
Has passd that Vortex, he percieves it roll backward behind
His path, into a globe itself infolding; like a sun:
Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty,
While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth
Or like a human form, a friend with whom he livd benevolent.
As the eye of man views both the east & west encompassing
Its vortex; and the north & south, with all their starry host;
Also the rising sun & setting moon he views surrounding
His corn-fields and his valleys of five hundred acres square.
Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent
To the weak traveller confin'd beneath the moony shade.
Thus is the heaven a vortex passd already, and the earth
A vortex not yet pass'd by the traveller thro' Eternity."

Cropped detail of marginalia figures from plate of Blake's Milton. One figure is kneeling, embracing a ghostly child figure. The other is bending and stretching in a C shape. Each figure spans only a few lines of text and has minimal detail.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Grateful for the chance to savour @eruditorumpress.com 's Last War in Albion, a delightful companion to things I love deeply and things I know nothing about. This captures why this is maybe my favourite bit of Milton, the everydayness of visions that come to cottages of those sick with fatigue

Blake had such visions throughout his life, and depicted them in his work, as in Milton where he describes how

Walking in my Cottage Garden, sudden I beheld
The Virgin Ololon & address’d her as a Daughter of Beulah
Virgin of Providence fear not to enter into my Cottage
What is thy message to thy friend? what am I now to do
Is it again to plunge into deeper affliction? behold me
Ready to obey, but pity thou my Shadow of Delight
Enter my Cottage. comfort her, for she is sick with fatigue

There is a power to these lines. The Shadow of Delight refers to Blake’s wife, Catherine, a marriage Peter Ackroyd describes as “one of the most poignant relationships in literary history.” The image of Blake begging his angelic visitor to think of Catherine’s suffering while simultaneously admitting his willingness “to plunge into deeper affliction” if that is what should be asked of him is a haunting portrait of the delicate balance of sanity that such visionary creativity entails. Blake further suffered from what he described as “Nervous Fear,” which frequently manifested as a searing anger that did an often faltering career few favors.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

Tools for Conviviality rules, and super excited to hear McQuillan talk about its relevance coherently, instead of listening to myself just mutter about it constantly

For a hundred years we have tried to
make machines work for men and to school men for life in their
service. Now it turns out that machines do not “work” and that
people cannot be schooled for a life at the service of machines. The
hypothesis on which the experiment was built must now be
discarded. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave
men. Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a leisure mass can
escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools.

The crisis can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools; if we give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency, thus simultaneously eliminating the need for either slaves or masters and enhancing each person's range of freedom. People need new tools to work with rather than tools that 'work' for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Had to check a quote from Freddie and was reminded that the previous owner of one of my copies of Conditions of the Working Class in England owned a very scratchy fountain pen, but used it to mark up all the best anti-Malthus passages

Text from p. 308 of Conditions of the Working Class in England. By Friedrich Engels. "Meanwhile the most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat is Malthus' Law of Population and the New Poor Law framed in accordance with it." Text has been underlined by hand using a scratchy pen that fades in and out.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

The inverse of this is that you can feed your fatalism and inertia as well if you let that muscle waste away. Every second, you get to choose who you want to be, at the small and large scale. (Am I still thinking about @criticalrole.bsky.social and #ExUDivergence? Absolutely.)

Grainy photo of a TV screen depicting Brennan Lee Mulligan talking, from ExU: Divergence 's Cooldown. Caption on screen reads "but hope as a lived practice of getting involved".

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

Recently reminded of this essay I wrote in 2021, which is closer to my heart than anything else I've ever written. On "conviviality in the face of chaos", by meeting people and times in their specificity, without reverting to "precedent thinking". newsocialist.org.uk/precedent-th...

Resisting the absolute authority of precedent, then, is a kind of convivial solidarity across time, and a grace which we might also extend to ourselves in the present. By moving beyond the narrow grammar of precedent, we have room to meet the specificity of each historical moment. What is the mould in which experience is being cast? What is shared, and what is specific to the moment, to particular groups, to regions, to nations? How can I attend to the specificities of other experiences distinctive from my own? This is something like what Hall advocated for in analysing the crises of the present; the need to attend to what is now, rather than to assume that established plots will play out.

In Williams’ terms, it is the “qualitative” fullness of each moment, “experienced on the senses”, “in a personal as well as a general way.” To capture both the personal and the general, to “see the world in the grain of sand”, in a way which insists on the specificity of each grain as well as its interconnection with wider wholes. Thinking expansively about the pasts which we can connect to, also helps avoid the paralysis of viewing the present as unmoored from all stories which might help make sense of it, and all inspirations which might be drawn from to challenge or intervene on injustices and exclusions.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

Increasingly glad I spent so much of last year reimmersing myself in the bank of coping mechanisms that is The Return

Still from Twin Peaks: The Return. The Mitchum Brothers, wearing suits, are crouched next to each other near the front door of a house hiding from gunfire. Rodney Mitchum is pointing a gun out towards the street, and says "People are under a lot of stress, Bradley."

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

Aus historians / archivists: local book repair tape sources you'd recommend? I just need one roll of filament tape to make sure the spine of my Milton doesn't collapse mid-Paradise Lost revisit, because that would feel like A Sign of The Times.

A cracked book spine, revealing fragments of wastepaper offcuts used to reinforce the initial binding. The word "POEMS" is visible on one fragment

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

But as much as we want the green tea latte, sometimes presence means we watch someone sweep the floor for what feels like hours. Sometimes we see other things we can't unsee. But it's why this show is a love letter to practice and process, that it spiritually centres turning up, where you are.

Interior shot of the Roadhouse from Twin Peaks: The Return. A man sweeps dirt from the floor, lit from behind and almost in silhouette. Behind him, Jean-Michel Renault is standing behind the bar.

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

Two pieces from @emilystjams.bsky.social that are truly sustaining at the moment: 1) on Whitman, facing the sundry daily horrors, and "the days that must happen to you" episodes.ghost.io/election-202...

"Yet there's no sense of divine providence behind the use of the word "must." We are not really going to learn anything from what happens to us, other than that time moves forward, and every beginning carries within it its own ending. The days that must happen to us are simply an accident. We are alive now. These events are in motion. Thus, we must endure them. There is no other option."

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

I'm entirely here for slow inscrutability outside of digital panopticons, but also it does mean I'm constantly doing this

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

It is good to spend time with a friend. Kafka's diary entry for 19 October 1921 (the paragraph after the section on 'wandering in the wilderness').

Kafka's diary entry, 19 October 1921. "Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate -- he has little success in this -- but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for be sees different (and more) things than do the others; after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor. This assumes that he does not need both hands, or more hands than he has, in his struggle against despair."

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Lauren Pikó @booklearning.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

This snacking friend is my favourite

Cropped detail from quote-tweeted black and white photo, of a shepherd leading a herd of sheep. Featured sheep has pulled away from the herd to have a snack on some grass by the roadside.

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