Lauren Pikó

@booklearning

Sometimes historian, evaluator, writer, researcher. Always about disability justice and lying down. Exhortations for slowness, process, practice.🥄 Views own. laurenpiko.com

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Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir booklearning.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Jul 17

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."

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· May 12

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

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Apr 15

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."

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Mar 24

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.

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Mar 24

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"

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Mar 19

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."

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Mar 12

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

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Feb 11

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."

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Nov 18

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."

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Nov 18

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.

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Oct 28

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.

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Oct 14

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"

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Sep 22

Again, and again

The Mitchum brothers from Twin Peaks: The Return, side by side, hiding behind a low wall. Rodney points a gun off camera and looks to Bradley who is at his side. Caption reads "People are under a lot of stress, Bradley"

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Sep 2

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

Winnie the Pooh looking incredulously at a piece of paper

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 30

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.

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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'

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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.

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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.

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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".

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 15

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

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Aug 5

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.

Lauren Pikó@booklearning· Jul 23

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