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Painted wooden fire screen, early 20th century.
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Agate fossil coral (showing small flowers), found on Reddit.
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From How to Read the Aura, Practice Psychometry, Telepathy and Clairvoyance by W. E. Butler, via stopping off place.*
In Your Garden by Vita Sackville-West-West, 1951, first edition.
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The greatest hibernator of all is the snail. When the weather gets cold or dry, snails first go in search of places where they feel safe, among rocks or leaf litter. There they close themselves up. The snail moves in a shell that is its dwelling, and when it wants to hibernate, it makes a covering over the entrance. This is called an epiphragm, Greek for “lid.” The snail concocts it of mucus and calcium. The lid seals in moisture and keeps the snail from drying out. Inside its damp chamber the snail sleeps and waits for rain. Sometimes it sleeps for years. No one knows if snails dream. Someone may know.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, "Uhtceare." The Paris Review, Issue 236, Spring 2021.
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As a poet I feel like it is my task to protect consciousness from the tech lords and the moon from Elon Musk, but I am not so delusional as to think I could lead an organized resistance to this process of enclosure. Nor do I think I can, alone, defend those poet things: the moon and love. But I also can't forget that there are people who want to own, as data, the bacteria in our intestines and the salt in our tears. I have watched people being conditioned into screen addiction and once-unimaginable interpersonal viciousness. I have lost loved ones to paranoid screen holes and conspiracies and seen even self-identified leftists align themselves fully to corporate entities. Even as I stepped away, almost entirely, from most everything online — even, for a time, giving up email — I have felt such survivor guilt about those left behind, the ones still compulsively refreshing their twitter or facebook feeds. I also know it didn't have to be like this: that the technologies developed in my life could and sometimes were used for what was beautiful and good.
Anne Boyer, "the earthly shadow of the cloud." MIRABILARY, 3/30/2021.
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Honestly, the more I think about it, the more the internet in these novels starts to feel like that one awkward white guy who knows he can’t dance but tries to let you know that he knows it so that he can bop along in the background at the party just the same. It feels like one of White Media’s greater farces that they have deceived us into thinking that the internet as described and proscribed in these novels is a thing that is actually worth arguing over. Aesthetically. I mean, really, think about it. The huge tracts of digital life that these novels don’t touch. None of the transformative capacity or will to change that animates so much of online life for black and brown and queer people exists in these novels. For some of us, the democratic dream and the populist impulse of digital life is alive. Not perfect, no. Not entirely democratic even. But it’s still there. Singing.
Brandon Taylor, "i read your little internet novels / it's all very gothic up in here." sweater weather, 3/23/2021.
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I was, unconvincingly, so many people as a teenager—a rebel, a sophisticate, a drama nerd, a go-getter, a witch. I could try on a persona for size and then return it, tags on. There was no social media then and no one wanted me on any reality series, so I never had to curate a self before I had one. But I did stupid things for love. What would I have done for likes? What would that have made me?
Alexis Sokolski, "'Kid 90' and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy." NYT, 3/26/2021.
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Whatever this mode of production is, that it eats brains as well as bodies seems key to how it works, and how it is made. Capital extracts the energy out of the laboring body and makes it over as a thing apart, as capital in the form of the machine, which subordinates living labor to it. This other, more recent mode of production extracts information from bodies, and makes of it a thing apart, forms of artificial intelligence, over and against the thinking, feeling body.
McKenzie Wark, interviewed by Jessica Caroline at filthy dreams, 10/14/2019.
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Books, like vacuum cleaners, are increasingly judged on their ability to deliver what they appear to offer. They are consumer products. The customer has paid and must get what he wants. Pity the writer who falls foul of the vacuum cleaner purchaser.
Alice Jolly, "In Praise of Boring Books." 3:AM Magazine, 3/22/2021.
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And it’s this question of “the business of reading,” of how we read, why we read, and what reading does for and to us, that I keep turning over in my mind.
Yaa Gyasi, "White people, black authors are not your medicine." The Guardian, 3/20/2021.
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He was trying to persuade someone, anyone, to go with him, and only after everyone else had refused did he ask me.
Barbara Greene, quoted by Lucy Scholes in a review of Greene's book Too Late to Turn Back about traveling in Africa with her cousin, Graham (he wrote about their trip in Journey without Maps.)
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