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5 min read 18

UofWinds 436, Week 18, 2026: It's all gone Walter Ong, Arboreality, Fox Fold


Good morning. I did myself no favours by telling you all that the next newsletter after my vacation would be today. I am, indeed, home from vacation but I had forgotten that travelling to the West Coast of Canada for ten days would mean that I would still be on Pacific time for the next couple of days after returning. What I am trying to tell you is that despite my needy cats, I slept in this morning and this newsletter is unlikely to be out by 11am.

(For new subscribers: each issue is written starting at 8am every other Saturday morning. Hence, the occasionally [sic] typo and the very-first-draft feel of the newsletter that just gets more chaotic as you read on).

It's all gone Walter Ong


During my vacation, I consciously tried to not craft a narrative of the trip while it was still happening. I felt I needed to make this effort because I recognize that I have a mild form of poster's disease which is "what happens to your brain, when you've been online too long and you start seeing the world and experiencing reality in terms of the post you're going to make about it. When you've spent so much time online that everything looks like a post to you or a potential post."

My young adult children have informed me that they have never heard of poster's disease and therefore it must be an old-person-thing. I told them that it might not be; the urge to narrate your life in the third person while you experience in the first might be something that writers are more inclined to do. I recalled reading that George Orwell said that he always had narrator in his mind speaking as he lived his life (no idea where I read this, sorry). Trying to find an example that they might relate to, I made the mistake of asking them if they addressed their personal group chats with 'Chat?' – a greeting that I had come across from versions of this short form video format featuring old people). My kids both turned, stopped, and promptly rounded on me. Speaking to 'chat' – they informed me – is a (Twitch) streamer thing - not a group chat thing. They looked disappointingly at me.

Chastened, I did not dare mention Walter Ong at this point.

Streamers repeat themselves. They are incapable of saying anything once; they have to rhythmically fixate over the exact same phrase six or seven times before moving on. As Walter Ong points out in Orality and Literacy, this is normal in illiterate societies. Unlike writing, ‘the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered. Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer on track.’ (It doesn’t seem to matter that on a stream the utterance doesn’t actually vanish; you can go back and hear what was just said again. Clearly, no one does. Without text to structure it, we revert to mindless repetition, which is ‘in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity.’) Relatedly, oral discourse tends to be low-resolution. Like epic poets four thousand years ago, streamers rely on formulas. ‘Not the soldier, but the brave soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak.’ There’s nothing in the world that isn’t already known, that can’t be made instantly legible by assimilating it to some stereotype. Post-literate culture is deeply incurious.

The above is from Sam Kriss' Reading is magic: What will happen in our second peasanthood, a free offering of his recent Jacobian article, Politics After Literacy. And that piece is not the only mention to Water Ong that I've come across recently. A couple of weeks ago, Naomi Alderman and James Marriott had a live-streamed conversation (on point) that was entitled understanding Donald Trump via Walter Ong's philosophy of the Reformation.

Chat, is it time to read Orality and literacy : the technologizing of the word?

Arboreality


On yesterday's flight home, I caught up with some of my podcasts with hopes that I would find something that I could feature this morning. And I did: adrienne maree brown reading "The Absent Silence" which was a blog post from Ursula K. Le Guin that has been re-published in an audio format (hmmm) with additional commentary in a podcast called, In Your Spare Time.

I want to share this particular episode for two reasons. First, even though this short post was written in October 2010, Le Guin places her finger on something inherently worrying about relying on Google as a source of information even while admitting that she had very little understanding how search engines work. Of note, Le Guin suggests that Google could break the relationship between reader and text and the reciprocity that trust requires. (The word of reciprocity in the context of technology brings to mind the work of another Ursula.)

This particular podcast episode is introduced by India Downes-Le Guin, one of Ursula's four grandchildren, who mentions that author adrienne maree brown was foundational to establishing the process by which the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation chooses its annual Book Prize.

I read the 2023 winner of the Ursula K. Le Guin prize while I was on vacation on Vancouver Island: Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell published by Stelliform Press.

It broke my heart. I loved it.

“Arboreality is a eulogy for the world as we know it. Rebecca Campbell’s extraordinary, deeply felt book explores the difficulties of the long hard project of survival. There are no heroes or villains here—only people making brave, difficult choices, out of hope and love for their community, for art, knowledge, and beauty. Arboreality imagines things that we haven’t yet considered about what can and will go wrong with our gardens, libraries, and archives if we don’t act now (maybe even if we do). In her masterful and profoundly ethical stories, Campbell asks us what might be saved, what must be saved, and what it will take to do so.”

I recommend to try reading a book that is located where you are vacationing. Not only does it help you better understand the context of the place-names that you find in the book but, it helps you expand your imagination to see all the times – the past, the present, and future – of the place where you are.

FoxFold


Friends, I loved our vacation. Last night I had dreams of winding through the dark deep forests of Vancouver Island.

The cost is that I now have a dark deep visceral fear on behalf of these forests. I am afraid of the upcoming wild-fire season and the seasons to come. I am afraid of when the deferral period of logging at Fairy Creek is over.

While on Vancouver Island, I noticed that both hotels that we stayed at used FoxFold bamboo toilet paper. On Earth Day, I noted that good.store now offers bamboo toilet paper.

Paper products shouldn’t depend on cutting down forests that have taken centuries to grow. That’s why we work with Save Trees, a partner focused on protecting these critical landscapes by moving away from materials that require deforestation. Instead, we turn to bamboo: a fast-growing, renewable resource that regenerates quickly. It’s a simple shift that helps preserve old-growth forests while still providing the everyday products people rely on.

There's an Issue with Tissue.

I've found a U.S. scorecard of consumer paper products [pdf], but nothing recent for Canadian brands yet. But I will because it's the least I can do.

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