“Becoming American would remain an incomplete project” (HH); especially with a preference for Congo peas.
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Category: language
No quantifiable practical result
“Ecology without class struggle is gardening” — Chico Mendes, via Marcela Cantuária’s The South American Dream at PAMM.
Gardens are nodes “where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result” may coalesce, but those aspects may align and “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.” (RS)
Mendes was assassinated in 1988. He might have added nuance to this quote, that seems too easily quotable.
AG2023_1033596a or reach
Reach passed the “imposed conditions of apartness” (IF)
Hidden aptitudes
…their hidden aptitudes unlocked
only by time and the heat of a burbling mélange;
(Rita Dove, Soup)
sharp, of course. more variously:
crisp or peircing, clean or fuzzy.
(RD, The Terror and the Pity)
Five p.m. I never thought
I’d find relief
in the old joke that it’s always darkest
before it goes pitch black,
but at least then
it will be dark and then
thank god, black.
(RD, No Color)
“It could not be predicted. The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant noting … (Joan Didion, The white Album)
Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness, to wisdom, we only make promises; pain we obey. (Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain)
AG2023_1033326a or as it comes
Aubade: East
Harlem, a.m.
Today’s the day, I can taste it.
Got my gray sweats pouting in a breeze
so soft, I feel like I’m still wrapped for sleeping
as I head uptown in my undercover power-suit,
bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.
This morning there ain’t nothing I can’t do.
This is my territory, I know all of it—
ten long blocks flanked by mighty water.
Walking any Avenue is like riding
a cosmic surfboard on the biggest wave
of the goddam century, the East River
twerking her bedazzled behind
while sky spills coin like a luck-crazed
Vegas granny flush at the slots. Today
I’m gonna make out like a bandit myself:
hook up with my buds to drop
a few shots on the courts, ogle the ladies,
then play the rest of the day
as it comes see where it goes
feeling good
feeling good
somewhere over the Hudson
the sun heading home
Rita Dove, via The Georgia Review, Spring 2016 and Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems.
““Aubade East,” is set in Harlem, N.Y. The cocky speaker, out for a walk, squints into the “bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.” This is a hat-tip to Toni Morrison, who famously — famously in my house, anyway — wrote in “Sula,” “The sun was already rising like a hot white bitch.”” Dwight Garner, Houston Chronicle.
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“… one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a [enchanted] lever, a means of inspiring fear” (JB)
AG2023_1023244a or space-route
“W. E. Du Bois interviewed Harriet Tubman late in her life …” seems part of, or at least a solid anchor point in, the epic narrative known as the Black Radical Tradition.
“… abolition geographies are made, on the ground, everywhere along the route–time-route as well as the space-route” (Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography Essays Towards Liberation)
AG2023_1110662a or a cosmology, an order
“a […] cosmology that depended on their attention”
“Distraction was not just a personal problem, they knew; it was part of the warp of the world,” Kreiner (Jamie Kreiner’s new book, “The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction” (Liveright)) writes. “Attention would not have been morally necessary, would not have been the objective of their culture of conflict and control, were it not for the fact that it centered on the divine order.” (Casey Cep, Eat, Pray, Concentrate, New Yorker, January 30, 2023)