Category: studio

Writing is a kind of loving. Loving sticks a widget into the machinery of doubt.

The End Is the Beginning, Mónica Gomery

‘… where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”

a particular kind of flower [or form] around which a vast edifice of human responses has arisen

Thought, sunshine, flowers: they wanted intangible as well as tangible goods, pleasures as well as necessities, and the time to pursue them, the time to have an inner life and freedom to roam the outer world.

(RS)

New Yorker, 2021.

Humanity supports […] vulnerable life.

The cycle of rupture and repair is a requirement of living, a cost of surviving, something that goes hand in hand with another reality of survival: that, throughout your life, you may not only lose people but also gain them.

they spend at least some of whatever time they have left stitching together small pieces that, eventually, might make something big enough to be meaningful.

In Defense of Despair, Hanif Abdurraqib

Absent from thee, I languish still;
Then ask me not, When I return?
The straying fool ’twill plainly kill
To wish all day, all night to mourn.

Dear, from thine arms then let me fly,
That my fantastic mind may prove
The torments it deserves to try,
That tears my fix’d heart from my love.

When, wearied with a world of woe,
To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love, and peace, and truth does flow,
May I contented there expire!

Lest, once more wandering from that heaven,
I fall on some base heart unblest;
Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven—
And lose my everlasting rest.

Return, John Wilmot

When the planet is galloping through space and you gallop after it through light and dark with your time-drunk brain, nothing can end. There could be no end, there can be only circles. (Samantha Harvey)

In terms of the development of “democracy,” it is difficult to overestimate the enormous gain Western governments managed to consolidate when they successfully advanced democracy as the opposing counterweight to communism. They had actually gained control of the entire word for themselves, leaving nary a trace of its former emancipatory resonance. Indeed, democracy had become a class ideology justifying systems that allowed a very small number of people to govern—and to govern without the people, so to speak; systems that seem to exclude any other possibility than the infinite reproduction of their own functioning. To be able to call an unchecked and deregulated free market economy, a ruthless, no-holds-barred opposition to communism, a right to intervene, militarily and otherwise, in countless sovereign nations and their internal affairs—to succeed in calling all this democracy was an incredible feat. To successfully present the market as an evident condition of democracy and to have democracy viewed as inexorably calling forth the market, is an astounding accomplishment. (Kristin Ross)