the interrelation between self and other things.
effort to resist dissolution of those bounds in erotic emotion.
undeniable evidence remains, in the preserved fragments of their verses, of a sensibility acutely tuned to the vulnerability of the physical body and of the emotions or spirit within it.
— Anne Carson
So my argument there is that you have to break analogies because a lot of the ways we build the world is to make this is like this and this is like this and this is like this.
Why Chasing The Good Life Is Holding Us Back With Lauren Berlant [Ppdd2R46Eh4] transcribed via zamzar
And then you can just start refusing analogies, right?
Like you could say, well, actually, it’s not like this.
Like you, that whole, there’s a normativity to the kinds of connections that you make.
But I’m interested in like the rhetorical question and the kind of the politics of refusing the rhetorical question.
Because someone will often say, well, why, like Milton Friedman would say, why would we, why would we give the state the opportunity to organize our lives?
The state is like the worst possible institution for organizing our lives.
And he thought it was a rhetorical question and it isn’t.
You could say, oh, for these 10,000 reasons.
And then you would have to have the argument, you know, you break normativity by refusing.
It’s right to ask a rhetorical question.
You break normativity by refusing its sense that we know what the evidence of democracy is because we can put different objects near it.
And that’s a thing that I think is so important about why scholarship matters and why scholarship and the humanities matters and why just experimental thought matters is the way you break something
isn’t to just find a better object.
It’s to loosen up the object and transform it from within itself.
And so what we have to do, kind of as artists and writers and teachers is to ask the question, are there other concepts of the good life that would be more satisfying than the ones that you have been trained to pay attention to?
Today ~ I found a squirrel ~ dreaming ~ the sleep of the young and unknowing ~ I pray for a world ~ scatter-starred with that kind ~ of tenderness ~ Nothing hears me ~ Let’s pretend
[…]
I write these words ~ a lifetime away ~ at the foot of the mountains ~ another sea ~ vaster galaxy ~ primordial and without memories
Dear Sister, Emma Trelles
All this beauty is tinder.
[…]
In Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building Production in the Vernacular City, the architect and urban planner John Chase describes LA as a city that follows no design or aesthetic ambition but insolently unspools from the desires of its people. LA has no Haussmann or Frederick Law Olmsted; it has Angelenos, and in the ‘mad and wonderful’ architecture of the city, with its stucco box houses alongside its faux Swiss chalets, its Tudor cottages, bungalows, faded pink apartment complexes and ancient auto repair shops, glittering strip malls and shabby hotels, there is a romantic stubbornness, at once dogged and extravagant, tender and brash.
[…]
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, … A fawn stumbled out of the smoke, and a horse ran back into it to nudge two other horses onward, faster.
Under the Santa Anas, Anahid Nersessian
Behold, I send thee to the heights of song,
My brother! Let thine eyes awake as clear
As morning dew, within whose glowing sphere
Is mirrored half a world; and listen long,
Till in thine ears, famished to keenness, throng
The bugles of the soul, till far and near
Silence grows populous, and wind and mere
Are phantom-choked with voices. Then be strong—
Then halt not till thou seest the beacons flare
Souls mad for truth have lit from peak to peak.
Haste on to breathe the intoxicating air—
Wine to the brave and poison to the weak—
Far in the blue where angels’ feet have trod,
Where earth is one with heaven and man with God.
With a Copy of Shelley, Harriet Monroe
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found directed by Raoul Peck. Written by Ernest Cole, Raoul Peck, featuring Lakeith Stanfield. 2024. 105 minutes.
Ernest Cole: The True America. 2024. Aperture. Contribution by Leslie M. Wilson.
Exhibition at Minneapolis Institute of Art, February 1, 2025 – June 22, 2025.
Your speech evokes a thousand sympathies,
And all my being’s silent harmonies
Wake trembling into music.
Dreams, Amy Lowell
Newcleus, Jam On it. 1984.
The ??launiu breeze lifts voices from the night.
Dogs curl under their houses. The city
burns to the shore, red with distant industry.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons.
Even the dogs curl into sleep. Even the city.
We watch the headlights swipe past our window.
Awake, my baby’s eyes are two dark moons
or their eclipse—night opening to night.
Headlights skirt across our window
trailing the scent of gas. Sometime past 2am,
I feel eclipsed. Night reaches out to night
drawing me back to the hospital room,
the scent of my baby’s matted hair. Past 2am,
I held his tiny body and we floated in a silence
that whirred and pinged. In the dark hospital,
in my exhaustion, I heard singing emerge.
I held his tiny body, floating through a silence
not silent, but a greeting from this other land,
this one long night where we’d emerged.
He opened his eyes and his gaze was steady—
a greeting, a land. I began to weep. His body
against mine was too small for the weight
of his gaze, his steady eyes—a doorway
between our nights, and through it, voices.
Sleepless Pantoum, Laurel Nakanishi
Blue Black, curated by Glenn Ligon, Pulizter, 2017.
Song of Hal: Conclusio in C Minor · Nicholas Britell
