Max Hauschild, A View Through a Window, with Vine Leaves, ca. 1810-1895.
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Excerpt from They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, a collection of interviews with ten ordinary Germans who became Nazis. At Popula, found thanks to The End of the World Review.
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Octopus hidden in shells; screengrab from My Octopus Teacher.
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Porcelain box in Brussels’s Royal Museum of Art and History, photgraphed by Charlotte Edwards.
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These self-conscious times have furnished us with a new fallacy. Call it the reflexivity trap. This is the implicit, and sometimes explicit, idea that professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that fault—that lip service equals resistance. The problem with such signalling is that it rarely resolves the anxieties that seem to prompt it. Mocking your emotions, or expressing doubt or shame about them, doesn’t negate those emotions; castigating yourself for hypocrisy, cowardice, or racism won’t necessarily make you less hypocritical, cowardly, or racist. As the cracks in our systems become increasingly visible, the reflexivity trap casts self-awareness as a finish line, not a starting point. To the extent that this discourages further action, oblivion might be preferable.
Katy Waldman, "Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction?" The New Yorker, 8/19/2020.
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I sometimes struggle to find evidence in contemporary literature and the conversations around it of one of the most basic material facts of our era: in order to live, the vast majority of people have to sell the hours of their lives at work. Or some others: nearly everything around us is owned, and almost everything owned was built (by people and out of something), or that all of this is threatening to fully deplete our common home, the earth. How strange that we live in the epoch of hour-selling, in a made world in which we do not acknowledge the makers, in an arrangement of space in which trespass threatens every step, in a world in which no extractable goes unextracted, and yet much of the most lauded literature locks this up like a secret inside itself. The structure of reality becomes, in our books, a hidden chamber unlocked only with the question, “but who made this world?” The books themselves hardly ever seem to ask it.
For example, I am not sure that beyond the work of radical poets, I’ve ever seen much mention in literature that a car requires gas, that the gas requires the oil industry, the oil industry requires imperialist war, etc. Instead, people in books move via invisible fuel in machines that are visible only as reflections of character, like a Ford Fiesta is not a material fact but a mere symbol of selfhood, running on biographical oil. I sometimes imagine some alien reader picking up a contemporary novel and thinking that everything about our species in our time and place was feelings, self-identification, self-interest, self-fulfillment, self-determination, that humans were made from the inside out, instead of the outside in, and that the only relation to objects we had was our curation of them.
Anne Boyer, in conversation with Sam Jaffe Goldstein for The End of the World Review, 9/15/2020.
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Most members of the bourgeoisie experience history as they do their heartbeats: they know it’s there but only become aware of its presence when something goes wrong. Neither I nor my peers in the “creative class” of that faux-meritocratic New York understood that the Obama years were precisely that — years, an era among others, a period with a beginning and an end.
Nicolás Medina Mora, "An American Education." N+1, Winter 2020 Issue 36.
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Just after the publication of The Hobbit, but before he began writing The Lord of the Rings, J.R.F. Tolkien wrote an essay arguing that fairytales gave us three things: recovery, escape, and consolation. His earnestness jolts, in a very agreeable way. He didn’t think much of modern society, thought we had broken off relations with the natural world, and argued that fantasy was our way of trying to heal the breach, to learn how “to converse with other living things.” The unhappiness of the world, as he saw it, was not something to be trivialized. It was not a bad thing to want to escape it, as a prisoner rather than a deserter (which was the difference to him between escape and escapism). Because our world was as oppressive as it was, a happy ending was not trite, or easy. He termed the word “eucatastrophe” to express the intensity of such an event, of experiencing joy “beyond the walls of this world, poignant as grief.” Happiness that cuts like a knife: He wanted his readers changed when they returned from his world; to make decisions differently, expect a different outcome. For him, fantasy was radical, profound.
Jenni Quilter, "Fish Tossing." (It's an essay about the Muppets.) Avidly/LARB, 8/19/2020.
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2020 is not a lost year. It’s a chance for parents and children to watch and listen to one another, to turn the weekday scramble into an occasion to experiment and think about what it takes to make a free human being — one whose freedom comes from truly knowing something about the world, and about herself.
Molly Whorton, "When You Get Into Unschooling, It's Almost Like a Religion." NYT, 9/25/2020. (I'm unschooling my kid this year, and it's ... kinda awesome?)
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Snack: cinnamon-sugar scones.
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Doyle Lane's "ravishingly seductive" weed pots: "Some are smooth as river rocks; others are cracked or lumpen, like overripe fruit from otherworldly trees."*
If you want to stop fascism, the efficient mission is not to attack the opposing side. It is, rather, to be the opposite of Donald Trump: a defiantly open heart who protects and bolsters valid information systems required for people to truly decide for themselves about all that he and his movement represent.
Sarah Smarsh, "How is Arguing with Trump Voters Working for You?" The Guardian, 9/17/2020.
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‘Florida and Ohio, man,’ the barista at the local café said to my husband, when he asked about the tourist trade. ‘People here at least acknowledge that it’s real. But people from Florida and Ohio don’t even seem to think it’s happening.’ Having lived in both places, I believe him: I have long had a theory that the surrealism that has overtaken the political landscape in America can be traced back to the poisoned ground of Ohio Facebook.
Patricia Lockwood, "Insane After Coronavirus?" The London Review of Books, 7/16/2020.
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Army ants will sometimes walk in circles until they die. The workers navigate by smelling the pheromone trails of workers in front of them, while laying down pheromones for others to follow. If these trails accidentally loop back on themselves, the ants are trapped. They become a thick, swirling vortex of bodies that resembles a hurricane as viewed from space. They march endlessly until they’re felled by exhaustion or dehydration. The ants can sense no picture bigger than what’s immediately ahead. They have no coordinating force to guide them to safety. They are imprisoned by a wall of their own instincts. This phenomenon is called the death spiral. I can think of no better metaphor for the United States of America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ed Yong, "America is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral." The Atlantic, 9/13/2020.
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Maisy Card: "The idea that there is a beginning and an end, a single leader and a single traitor to a movement, is an illusion."