We have to keep going back to it, after all, if we wish to maintain contact with the possible.
Author: dig
A plan for social transformation
Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.
Annette Gordon-Reed in NYR, 2018.
Figures like King, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks have now become “safe” in ways they never were when they were operating at the height of their powers. Stripped of their radicalism, they are welcomed as sources of inspiration in the curricula of almost every elementary school in the country.
[…]King started to speak even more openly and insistently about the “second phase,” which would be a “struggle for ‘economic equality,’” with unions as the linchpin of this effort. King, along with his aide Bayard Rustin, had long thought that there should be a “‘convergence’ between unions and the civil rights movement.” Everything was at stake for King here: if the second phase of his plan for social transformation was successful, “everyone could have a well-paying job or a basic level of income, along with decent levels of health care, education, and housing.”
He soon found, however, that “union racial politics remained contradictory and complicated.” The same racism that permeated American society also had a firm grip on the union movement. As had been true throughout American history, many poor and working-class whites had no interest in solidarity with blacks against white elites.
[…]With the Poor People’s Campaign, King hoped to reprise his triumphant 1963 March on Washington by leading thousands of poor people to the nation’s capital to demand a “radical redistribution of economic power.” The effort was fraught from the start, as his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had neither the funds nor the infrastructure to organize the huge event he envisioned. The task was not only physically draining, it was psychologically difficult. For as King crisscrossed the country to promote the effort, “the right-wing hate campaign against him escalated.” While in Miami to speak to a group of ministers, King remained in the conference hotel because the police could not ensure his safety.
Signal, worthwhile and preferred–open source, end to end encryption, cryptographically secure.
Dedication
[…], Fady Joudah, Milkweed Editions. 2024.
AG2024_1134136a holds unknown
Richard Brody wrote an appreciation of David Lynch.
“Many films are called revelatory and visionary, but Lynch’s films seem made to exemplify these terms. He sees what’s kept invisible and reveals what’s kept scrupulously hidden, and his visions shatter veneers of respectability to depict, in fantasy form, unbearable realities.”
Also, Dennis Lim (2015),
“Lynch’s mistrust of words means that his films often resist the expository function and realist tenor of dialogue, relying instead on intricate sound design to evoke what lies beyond language.”
AG2020_1880804a or a minutiae
we cheer him on,
winter softened in the tropic of his strength.
Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “Epic” has talismanic importance to older Irish poets who took from the following lines license to write about the minutiae of their own locales:
I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.To be from a small country and to write intimately about your own affairs is to risk making your poetry impenetrable, irrelevant, or both, even when writing in a global language like English. And yet to exclude your own affairs, to eliminate the parochial from your “epic” entirely risks self-censorship or a denial of one’s own truth.
An American poet can mention the film Predator, Henry Kissinger, or the town of Ferguson and an informed and cultured Irish person will know the references. Conversely, if an Irish poet chose to write about Wanderly Wagon, Pádraig Flynn, or the town of Granard even a cultured American reader, unless a specialist in Irish Studies, would be lost.
Patrick Cotter, Introduction, Poetry, September 2015
a calm, a weary happiness
Acceptance
Yesterday it was still January and I drove home
and the roads were wet and the fields were wet
and a palette knife
had spread a slab of dark blue forestry across the hill.
A splashed white van appeared from a side road
then turned off and I drove on into the drab morning
which was mudded and plain and there was a kind of weary happiness
that nothing was trying to be anything much and nothing
was being suggested. I don’t know how else to explain
the calm of this grey wetness with hardly a glimmer of light or life,
only my car tyres swishing the lying water,
and the crows balanced and rocking on the windy lines.
Acceptance, Kerry Hardie via poets.org poem-a-day
a personal signature and a vision of the world
The David Lynch who invented a cinematic tone that’s instantly recognizable as a personal signature and a vision of the world—as opposed to the David Lynch who let the power of his imagination become a style and a signature that took the place of a world view—has made his return in the third and fourth parts of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” and the result is mind-expanding, haunting, and deeply moving.
Richard Brody, 2017
AG2025_1088656a or interrelation between self and other things
the interrelation between self and other things.
effort to resist dissolution of those bounds in erotic emotion.
undeniable evidence remains, in the preserved fragments of their verses, of a sensibility acutely tuned to the vulnerability of the physical body and of the emotions or spirit within it.
— Anne Carson