odds and ends / 3.31.2025

 

Frank Wilbert Stokes, "The Sun’s Rays, Sidney Herbert Bay and Joinville Land, South Pole, Feb. 10, 1902." Via subterranean thunder.

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Found text via stopping off place.

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What was being contrived at the time was the abolition of all dissent or nuance, with narrow-mindedness elevated to a universal principle, and betrayal the new public morality.

W.G. Sebald, translated by Jo Catling. From Silent Catastrophes (excerpted in Book Post). 

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Flooding the ether with bad ideas isn’t Trump’s unique know-how—it’s standard autocratic fare. Hannah Arendt used the word “preposterous” to describe the ideas that underpinned 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy. By forcing us to engage with them, they make our conversations, our media and our society dumber. By conjuring the unimaginable—radical changes in the geography of human relationships, the government and the world itself as we have known it—they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult. That kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control.

Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water—because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.

Masha Gessen, "The Barrage of Trump's Awful Ideas Is Doing Exactly What It Is Supposed To." The New York Times, 2/15/2025.

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Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed . . . by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli . . . We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made? 

Paul Valery, quoted as the epigraph in Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity.

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To put it bluntly, under conditions of ‘liquidity’ everything could happen yet nothing can be done with confidence and certainty. Uncertainty results, combining feelings of ignorance (meaning the impossibility of knowing what is going to happen), impotence (meaning the impossibility of stopping it from happening) and an elusive and diffuse, poorly specified and difficult to locate fear; fear without an anchor and desperately seeking one. Living under liquid modern conditions can be compared to walking in a minefield: everyone knows an explosion might happen at any moment and in any place, but no one knows when the moment will come and where the place will be. On a globalized planet, that condition is universal—no one is exempt and no one is insured against its consequences. Locally caused explosions reverberate throughout the planet.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity.

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Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality. ...  

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula K. Le Guin, "Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters." November 19, 2014. Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin.

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A writer can’t not respond to the present, because it’s the only thing that’s actually here. A writer can’t be anyone other than themselves. But an obsession with raw surging nowness or authentic personal experience can often just feel like an excuse for incuriosity. If mainstream literature shows it’s possible to be deeply incurious while maintaining a superficial commitment to diversity, alt lit shows that a superficial commitment to being countercultural and different doesn’t guarantee much either. There is probably no shortcut to a better literature, but a start might be writing that tries more ambitiously to escape its own confines, expanding into the large and sensuous world we actually inhabit, in all its contradictory and ironic dimensions. This writing would take a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being. 

Sam Kriss, "Alt Lit." The Point, 2/4/2025. 

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chronoclasm

(plural chronoclasms). From Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos, “time”), and κλάστης (klástēs, “a person who breaks something”); from κλάω (kláō, “break”).

 1. The intentional destruction of clocks and other time artifacts
 2. (politics) The desire to crush the prevailing sense of time, due to a conflict regarding the fixation of linear time in a community

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Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood. It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene. It is also a social contract, one we adjust according to different needs, whether for daylight saving or simply setting a watch five minutes fast to avoid being late. Yet, as philosopher Michelle Bastian has recognized, our habitual ways of telling time have their limits. 'While the clock can tell me whether I am late for work,' she writes, 'it cannot tell me whether it is too late to mitigate runaway climate change.' She suggests that, as our usual ways of telling the time flounder, perhaps other living things might become our 'time-givers' instead.

David Farrier, "Wild Clocks." Emergence, January 23, 2025. 

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What tense would you choose to live in? I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle—in the ‘what ought to be.'

Osip Mandelstam, Critical Prose and Letters. 

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Saturday plans:

Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. They're taking everything they can get their hands on, and daring the world to stop them. On Saturday, April 5th, we're taking to the streets nationwide to fight back with a clear message: Hands off!

odds and ends / 2.27.2022

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Photograph of "The Baltic Way," a human chain protest on August 23, 1989, against Soviet occupation of the Baltic states via Macguffin Magazine. About two million people from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined hands from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius to create one of the "longest unbroken human chains in history."

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Ursula Le Guin, "The Next War." 

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Once we knew that we were all staying, we started playing games and fortifying the house. We played hide-and-seek. As we ran around the house, we taught the kids how to fall while opening their mouths—that helps protect your lungs during an explosion. I told them that Russia had attacked us—I couldn’t hide that—but we did it in a way that wasn’t scary.

Lena Samoilenko, an activist and journalist in Kyiv, Ukraine, describing her family's preparations for war to Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 2/25/2022.

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"Put sunflower seeds in your pocket so that they grow when you die."

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Servant of the People. 

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Ways to help Ukraine.

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I don’t understand who these people are: the ones I consider my friends, the ones I get together with every Thursday to play cards for small change while consuming a mountain of cookies and candy. What scares me most is stability. It’s quiet, but an unsteady kind of quiet, giving way, like a bog or a swamp. 

Yevgenia Belorusets, "The Stars." Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky.

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Ambivalence at its best is good for lots of things—conveying the moral and epistemological complexity inherent to the human condition, say—but even at its worst it’s a great way of dodging criticism ... When the writer’s thoughts and feelings have been tastefully hedged, they become much harder to find fault with—particularly when the writer’s subject is the self, about which some iffiness is to be expected. Still it grates, the way so many of the highly intelligent, highly educated, highly observant essayists ... glance at the external world’s ills, shrug, and resume fingering the knot of first-personhood. 

Jackson Arn, "Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot: Against the Contemporary American Essay," The Drift, January 31, 2022.

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To simplify and evade excessive philosophizing, it is not necessary to speculate about destruction—moral, social, political, ideological, artistic, et cetera—it is happening quite vividly and aggressively before our eyes. Also, we see how history is repeating itself, how its monstrous face is surfacing. 

Dasa Drndic, interviewed by Dustin Illingworth for The Paris Review, 8/21/2017.

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[T]o those tortured by uncertainty, any explanation, however simple, comes as a balm. Seen in this way, certainly, attachment theory offers the consolations of the heuristic. This is true of almost any Grand Theory of Everything that explains the unknowable—in this case, the interiority of the other—using a few rough-hewn concepts. Other examples that spring so immediately to mind that ignoring them requires active cognitive suppression include astrology, early modern witchcraft trials, structuralism, Myers-Briggs, and men at their dude’s night poker game complaining that their wives are “crazy.” The problem is that you get what you pay for, analytically. While it may be comforting to make sense of the world and others’ motivations by resorting to immutable identities to provide a causal deus ex machina for complexity, the danger is that this tends to spit out answers that only confirm your priors. This type of thinking feels good to exactly the same extent that it buffers you from the terrifying unknowability of reality.

Danielle Carr, "Don't Be So Attached to Attachment Theory." Gawker,  1/25/2022.

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It is a peculiarity of Joan Didion’s work that her most ironic formulations are now read as sincere, and her sincerest provocations taken with a large pinch of salt. Perhaps when your subject is human delusion you end up drawing that quality out of others, even as you seek to define and illuminate it. How else to explain the odd ways we invert her meanings? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. A sentence meant as an indictment has transformed into personal credo.

Zadie Smith, "Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking." The New Yorker, 12/24/2021. 

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The pandemic briefly widened our aperture for reckoning with the pain and vulnerability of others, many of whom were suffering long before COVID-19 struck. Epidemiologists, meanwhile, encouraged us to take some responsibility for protecting them. But this created a problem. Such thinking chafes with American moral common sense. To maintain sanity in a country as bafflingly unequal as ours, you must convince yourself that your own comfort is causally (and morally) unrelated to the suffering of less fortunate strangers. The alternative is an acknowledgment of our interdependence that is, frankly, incompatible with our social order. In this sense, people who continue to insist on safeguarding the medically vulnerable are irrational, beset by a kind of madness.

Sam Adler-Bell, "The Pandemic Interpreter." New York Magazine, 2/24/2022. 

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More than 60,000 people died of covid in January alone; as of this writing, the U.S. has recorded more than 2,000 daily covid deaths for each of the last 30 days. Daily covid deaths have been above 1,000 for over 180 days (roughly half of an entire year).

In this context, what could possibly justify the impending declaration of the end of the pandemic?

Artie Vierkant, Beatrice Alder-Bolton, and Death Panel, "'The Beyblade Strategy' or: How we Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Focused Protection." The New Inquiry, 2/22/2022.

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Arguments for returning to normal—and, subsequently, letting the virus rip—hinge on the assumption that those who aren’t vaccinated have made informed, ideological decisions not to vaccinate. (In other words, the vaccinated can ethically expose them to the consequences of their actions by returning to normal life.) That assumption is not accurate. 'When they say highly vaccinated communities, what they really mean—and this is backed by data—is highly vaccinated white communities,' Ganapathi said. 'They are actually talking about highly privileged, very select communities.'

Melody Schriber, "Why Is This Group of Doctors So Intent On Unmasking Kids?" The New Republic, 2/22/2022. 

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"I kept telling myself, I’m a good person. I am here with good intentions. So whatever I do is good. And then I realized I sounded like the United States of America."

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"I feel like I have developed a phobia to my way of life." (NYT) 

'revelation was lacking'

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest. Found thanks to Phoebe Cummings.

sunday tune: richard shindell - are you happy now

A song for Halloween.

I smashed your pumpkin on the floor
The candle flickered at my feet
As goblins flew across the room
The children peered into the room
A cowboy shivered on the porch
As Cinderella checked her watch
A hobo waited in the street
An angel whispered, trick-or-treat
But what was I supposed to do
But to sit there in the dark?
I was amazed to think that you
Could take the candy with you too

It's a sad song with a funny backstory (explained in the clip above — you can listen to a clip of just the song here).

My brother was singing this to Hugh last week while my mom and I cleaned up after dinner, and I wondered how many horrible breakups a person has to go through to write like that. She laughed, and said I was underestimating imagination — which was true. I forget that I know (knowledge smothered beneath giant, tome-like biographies minutely tying lives lived to work produced, endless (endless!) personal essays, and so many people seemingly going everywhere and doing everything) that personal experience only matters so much in creating something extraordinary.

A comfort, as I pick up pieces of small wooden fruit for the seventeenth time today.

On that theme:

Dayna Tortorici writing about Elena Ferrante:

Ferrante has caused a minor crisis in literary criticism. Her novels demand treatment commensurate to the work, but her anonymity has made it hard. The challenge reveals our habits. We’ve grown accustomed to finding the true meaning of books in the histories of their authors, in where they were born and how they grew up, in their credentials or refreshing lack thereof. Forget the intentional fallacy; ours is the age of the biographical fallacy.

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Ferrante knows that authorship is never the isolated work of an individual artist; the author owes everything to those she remembers. “There is no work of literature that is not the fruit of tradition, of many skills, of a sort of collective intelligence,” she told the Paris Review. “We wrongfully diminish this collective intelligence when we insist on there being a single protagonist behind every work of art.”'

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Julie Phillips' profile of Ursula K. Le Guin:

To talk to Le Guin is to encounter alternatives. At her house, the writer is present, but so is Le Guin the mother of three, the faculty wife: the woman writing fantasy in tandem with her daily life. I asked her recently about a particularly violent story that she wrote in her early thirties, in two days, while organizing a fifth-birthday party for her elder daughter. “It’s funny how you can live on several planes, isn’t it?” she said.