that stretch of no time, no home
but the gray
Dig
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Black studies
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.
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New knowledge
One of the most malevolent characteristics of racist thought is that it never produces new knowledge (TM).
Criticism, Lewis Theobald, declared in 1733, [have] three duties: “Emendation of corrupt Passages,” “Explanation of obscure and difficult ones,” and “Inquiry into the Beauties and Defects of Composition.” (ME in New Yorker)
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The idea of paradise
The idea of paradise is no longer imaginable or, rather, it is over-imagined, which amounts to the same thing—and has therefore become familiar, commercialized, even trivial (TM).
Plenty, luxuriant, … -
Preoccupations frame what we saw
On these long walks he did not forget his preoccupations. He used them to frame what we saw (ZS)
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Pleasure … can fortify us. The pleasure that is beauty, the beauty that is meaning, order, calm. Orwell found this refuge in natural and domestic spaces, and he repaired to them often and emerged from them often to go to war on lies, delusions, cruelties, and follies.
