I’m from the Umpqua Valley of the Pacific Northwest. This is an in-progress space for sharing activities and updates. If you want to get in touch, send me an email (1025orchard [at] gmail [dot] com).
What I’ve been working on…
I’m currently engaged in long-term research on the utopian community of New Odessa (1881–1891) and its significance in the history of social movements, political philosophy, and Jewish life. My recent focus in the project is the epistemological writing of chemist and philosopher Peter Fireman (1863–1962), one of New Odessa's founding members. I've been reading Fireman's Sound Thinking (1947) and slowly translating his "Kritik der Marx'schen Werttheorie" (1892). I'm also digging around for information on Paul Kaplan (1858–1918), who was a leading figure of New Odessa and a beloved socialist revolutionary in New York. I recently had an article published in Harbinger issue #3 (ed. Blair Taylor) on progressive principles of agency in eugenics history and their relevance to social ecology. Expect a much longer text on that topic in the near future. You can also find a guest essay I wrote on private property in Regenerative Reader vol. 2, issue 4, published by the Maurin Academy for Regenerative Studies. I've contributed three entries on freedom, intentional communities, and esotericism to be published as part of An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping (Thick Press) in late 2024. In more personal activities, I discovered my great-uncle Alexander Portnoff (1887–1949) was a communist and had been under investigation by the FBI in the 1940s for his affiliation with the Silvermaster spy ring. I'm gathering more documents on him to potentially write up a short biographical text.
Some past activities…
I have a featured article in The Dry River issue 3 (Crybaby Press) on wildfires, electricity, and moral order in California, with emphasis on the 2021 Dixie Fire. As part of a presentation at Otis College of Art and Design, I compiled a set of notes on personal websites and the appearance of the Internet. My short essay on the problem of claiming authority in relation to knowledge was printed in The Vendor (Onomatopee), describing the basis of my own struggles as an author. I wrote a study of ritual architecture and the establishment of modern city centers for PROTOCOLS issue #10: TEMPLE (eds. Lauren Levy & Ben Ratskoff eds). My essay on Emily Ensminger’s utopian project Housepitality (2012–2020) was published in The Feral Fabric Journal volume 05: Labor (eds. Paulina Berczynski & Amanda Walters). Another piece of prose on language and war appeared in Plates issue 04: Craft (ed. Casey Carsel). An infrequently ongoing side project is the Authoritarian History Film Index, a spreadsheet of films on authoritarianism and its opposition, all of which are available to watch online for free. I continue to grow my “Links” document, a directory of helpful websites for those in orbit of the arts.
What I’m studying…
I'm regularly discussing selected writings of Karl Marx with the Maurin Academy for Regenerative Studies under the guidance of Jakob Hanschu. On my own, I'm presently reading Mikhail Bakunin's God and the State. My brother and I are also discussing James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State while building a small city in Minecraft together, and I'm revisiting Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" with Hailey Loman. In the evening, I've been playing through Final Fantasy VI and recently rewatched the HBO miniseries John Adams.
Last updated July 26, 2024.
After paying for a website through Format for years, I finally learned to code one by hand through a class at Index. Many thanks to Megumi Tanaka for getting me started. I am currently paying $15 USD a year for my domain and host the code on GitHub for free. My favicon is a portrait of me drawn by my former first-grade student, Taven.