Tootfinder

Calamus 26 We two boys together clinging
This is one of the gayest of the Calamus poems, a fantasy of two men against the world, full of life and ardor. I should be all over this in my gay reading!
Instead I see a darker form of Americanism here. "Power enjoying ... Armed and fearless ... No law less than ourselves". It's classic American individualism fantasy, a repudiation of community and law. Armed, at that.
On top of that I trip over the "North and South" part every time I read this. In 1860 when this was published we were just steps away from a Civil War after 10 years of enormous tension. I don't blame Whitman for wanting unity, his whole program in Leaves of Grass is American unity. All I can think is how there's no moral equivalence between the North and South. But Whitman wasn't an abolitionist and this poem reflects that.
Sorry for not reveling in the gay, maybe it's the ICE and California National Guard news affecting my reading today.

Calamus 24 I hear it is charged against me
This poem feels just so typically Whitman, but lesser somehow. Not one of my favorites.
He says he is "charged that I seek to destroy institutions". Charged by whom, one wonders, is he really so important? He sort of denies this, or is ambivalent to it, and then gets to the queer part:
I will establish ... the institution of the dear love of comrades
And here we are again at the central queer question: just what does he mean by "dear love of comrades"? As I read these poems I'm increasingly thinking it's both things. Sure, it's brotherly love, adhesiveness, a sort of robust fraternity. But so much of his writing and life is homoerotic it has to also have that charge. It can be both.
I feel like I've heard that phrase "the institution of the dear love of comrades" repeated often.

In announcing her resignation from the National Science Board, Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social details #DOGE interference in National Science Foundation #NSF grant making. «

Thinking about LLMs in the context of Philip Anderson's classic paper More is Different
the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a "constructionist" one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.