040825
Category: landscape
its smallness
It’s just depravity that they try to make glorious, natural. But it ain’t.
The beauty of what we do is its secrecy, its smallness.
– TM
Private archive
The deletions began shortly after Donald Trump took office. C.D.C. web pages on vaccines, H.I.V. prevention, and reproductive health went missing. Findings on bird-flu transmission vanished minutes after they appeared. The Census Bureau’s public repository went offline, then returned without certain directories of geographic information. The Department of Justice expunged the January 6th insurrection from its website, and whitehouse.gov took down an explainer page about the Constitution. On February 7th, Trump sacked the head of the National Archives and Records Administration, the agency that maintains the official texts of the nation’s laws, and whose motto is “the written word endures.”
More than a hundred and ten thousand government pages have gone dark
Julian Lucas, New Yorker
A guerrilla archiving movement has responded.
AG2025_1056028a disburdens the air of this dark weather
and by the power of that amorous hope
that sustained you, though life was bitter,
disburden the air of this dark weather
From poem 34, Petrarch:The Canzoniere. Translated by: A.S.Kline
Appropriate for A Landscape longed for.
In this here place … love small
In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.
Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon — everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them. And these “men” who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother — a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose — not to need permission for desire — well now, that was freedom.
Beloved, Toni Morrison
via The Marginalian.
Devoted to … AG2018_1490143a4
Devoted to the cause … of here, presentness, their conjoined expression.
AG2016_1040729 or direction, clarity, audacity
AG2021_2030352a or But you knew … didn’t you?
This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we were privy to a twenty-four-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance. Part of what was so appalling about Trump and Vance’s recent meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was not just their penchant for channelling the world view and negotiating points of Vladimir Putin but their comfort in expressing them, barking them, at the Ukrainian President in front of reporters in the Oval Office.
[…]
The threat of autocracy advances each day under Donald Trump, and it is a process that hides in plain sight. Some will choose to deny it, to domesticate it, to treat the abnormal as mere politics, to wish it all away in the spirit of “this too shall pass.” But the threat is real and for all to see. No encryption can conceal it.
David Remnick, New Yorker, 032625
Know what the snake said? Said, ‘But you knew I was a snake, didn’t you?’ (TM)