Category: language

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Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit on Radio Open Source. This show first aired on November 11, 2021.

20:17 … he listens to a bird singing, and loves the fact that the bird is singing for no utilitarian purpose. Inutility is itself a kind of resistance this utilitarianism of an authoritarian state.

21:35 … Orwell is using the metaphor of the rose to make a point. And it’s a remainder that all that time in the natural world gives him and gives any of us metaphors, allegories, frameworks to understand the world around us. I often feel we’re really bereft without that metaphorical richness we get from the physical, spatial, and natural worlds.

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By dint of hammer-song he makes his keen,

Raw point, and crowns utility with rose

The Rosehead Nail by A.E. Stallings

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“In this place every true thing is okay.” (TM)

“traced the errant paths and the lines of flight” […] “encouraging you to dream” (SH)

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“The inconvenience of the world is at its most confusing when one wants the world but resists some of the costs of wanting.” “Life can be different; it can be better or worse. Just not simple” (LB)

as the best parts of living have come
unsought and undeserved
inconvenient

Last Words, Rita Dove, in New Yorker.

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Related : “… scenes that people say they want, are uneasy wanting, try to make do with, try to get at, go in and out of caring about, and want to be okay with.” On the Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant.

that stretch of no time, no home
but the gray

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The way that we teach [Black studies] is really about examining Black lives: the structures that produce premature death, that make us vulnerable; the ideologies that both invent Blackness and render Black people less than human; and, perhaps most important, the struggle to secure a different future. And so, therefore, a lot of it’s about interrogating racial categories, understanding the persistence of inequality, how this is shaped by the very foundations of Western thought, which is to say, it’s not about making Black people feel better. […]

But, as a scholarly endeavor, it tries to understand how Black people came into being in the modern world—how that process through kidnapping, enslavement, the extraction of labor, the extraction of ideas, was foundational to the modern world. And, finally, the way that African people really tried to remake and re-envision that world, through art, through ideas, through social movements, through literature, through study in action.

[…]

And not just narrating that oppression and understanding it, and not just trying to think about ways to move beyond it—to transcend it, to come up with strategies to try to live—but also understanding what’s wrong with this country, with the system.

Robin D. G. Kelley with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, New Yorker.

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“history’s footprints threaded among the trees” (Kari Gunter-Seymour via SWWIM) or a history’s footprints threaded though this ixora.