dig

He [Charles Carleton Coffin] then reproduced for readers Gage’s version of [Sojourner] Truth’s speech at Akron, interrupting the chapter’s journalism for nine pages of small type that biographers of Truth analyze to this day in sorting through connections of women’s freedom to abolition.

via David Roediger, Seizing Freedom. (Verso)

sex is less about the will than about the great chain of being that linked humans to the gods and to the stars. Sex was the moment when human beings allowed themselves to sink back into the embrace of a universe into which their own bodies had been ingeniously woven. They would draw on the life-giving energies of a vast world. Sex was the gift of ever-present gods. Like wine, itself the gift of the god Dionysos, sex filled the body with “an immanent divine force, and the wash of its warm energy was experienced as a communion” with the divine.

Rome: Sex & Freedom By Peter Brown. nybooks.com

The critical narrative thus becomes the flip side of the official narrative. It tirelessly shows how the system reproduces itself ad infinitum, absorbing every form of subversion to make it a motor of its own development.

…

To work on forms of working-class emancipation is to encounter the fundamental reality of time as a form of life.

(JC)

A work from 2003 came up in conversation.

The rumbling aliveness of the novel comes, in part, from the friction of these facts: what does it mean, really, to know better? No matter how many years we spend reading, thinking, watching films, somehow, insanely, we still have to live. As the story’s scenes accrue, this collision creates a sense, if not of agency or of power (which is perhaps the stuff of heroes), at least of stamina, the recognition that more and more life, more and more looking at it, can generate its own sort of strength.

Lynn Steger-Strong in New Yorker.

Instructions for Playing Badminton (Ethel)

In her eye, livid sky where brews the storm,

The sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.

To a passerby,  Baudelaire