Bax evades a typically satisfying narrative arc for recondite reprints of medical texts and war-time dispatches/memoir peppered among a minor smatter of pro forma obligations to a novel about people surviving large-scale tragedy. But readers should consider this as a book at play with the conventional. Albeit a spirited one. All aboard. I suspect this is will be either a quick read for you, or you’ll drop it quickly into the gift bin.
“wish embroidering” - Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs “the air quicken before rain” - Robert Glück, Margery Kempe “His ears and tongue felt carbonated” - Samuel Delaney, Troble on Triton
I watched Eastern Promises last night and this morning
And Donnie Brasco
And The Departed
Before
Passing along this Mary Oliver poem shared by Nate Mullen last week at the Metaspore Symposium in San Francisco. One of his white lady heroes. It’s the least my soft animal body in the family of things can do. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
It’s a bizarre aesthetic and rhetorical leap from Richard Mayhew’s Delusions to the similar strong chromas, hues, and deep values of Japanese City Pop album art. But how many colors are there in the world. Every visit to SFMOMA I drift to Mayhew. Into his drives, spirals, through landscape that “reclaims the wilderness for the dispossessed” for indigenous and Black planetary citizens, family. Paint deluge over the prospector. Disrupted manifest logic which makes way for the land to announce itself.
What other optimisms lie in wait on the Enterprise NCC-1701-D?
Excerpt from Decision Making in Brainless Organisms by Raechel Anne Jolie from collection Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forests
Just discovered Sun Ra’s recording at Haverford College, 1980. The story of this record is bonkers.
Students running concert series book jazz after previous acts flop - the Talking Heads! (Elvis Costello was also booked but cancelled after said flop) 🤦.
Ra appears suddenly after cancelling two weeks prior. The only available piano is an electric Fender Rhodes. Ra fiddles around on the spot backstage.
Resulting performance is mesmerizing, chill, masterful.
#sunra
But uh oh those summer nights. Right on the heels of a transformative family weekend! When Theo laughs, the world is a single flower. What is your family’s pronoun? Are the flower and Theo the same or different?
Bringing back sweet memories. Atmospheric pressure. La lluvia frames colored paint.
The real miracle is how long Chevron kept the oil burning. Rise Judea.
Upcycled hellenism is my streetwear idolatry. Labneh and cacao soda; another probiotic day with a credit score!
I’m still processing far too much from Week 1. Feminists Against Women: the Politics of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism. This is a course I didn’t realize I needed. It’s been a no-brainer to support the trans community against the likes of J.K. Rowling and other “feminists” of late. Their fear of trans folks' perceived threat to women clearly seeks to (re)establish oppressive regimes over the gender category to which they feel a manifest privilege; through exclusionary membership.
Summer lewks leaked. Sunscreen is a conspiracy, cover up with a shirt or heavy layer of clay. I want to be a bird.
Humans have become meh.
Go lay down.
I want to read space operas with shopping and hair braiding and tea.
Life is maintenance. If you live with others make sure to balance the house contributions equitably. Make a plan! Index cards can help.
With each new day it doesn’t rain I lose hope about the future of our species. I have a good performance review this week. Adding some lemon juice and gojuchang to this breakfast soup was CORRECT.
The slap heard round the world is LAPD riot cops descending on climate scientists in battle armor. Fuck the police. We must stop them.
Coding adapters for payment gateways is also not so easy! I’m in love with programming books that have a smooth narrative arch. Describe the problem in all its complexity, with many dash of subjectivity. There’s not right way! Only what’s CORRECT.
Why do I have such a big attraction to teen fictions (like _Never Have I Ever_)? For a while I've been thinking it was the force of a stream, a soak, a wash of saudade made lighter by revisiting that time from a better place; a chance to relive with empathy for myself, to reclaim that time from the incapacitating fear of being vulnerable, navigating _coolness_ in the 80s/90s (a now more mainstreamed cultural topic since all storytellers are approaching their strength ~40).
Halfway through _Companions in Conversation_ and I'm having this memory of being in college -- clacking away code points on the cheap silicons of a Micron computer -- practicing new knowledges in my class essays just like Haraway admits while writing the _Cyborg Manifesto_: "trying out some of the knowledges that hadn’t been mine that I was getting from my colleagues _[professors (in my case)]_ and the graduate students in the program.
I’ve been reading two texts this week. Side-by-side they offer another reveal of the tragic double standard of black and white life in our America. That truth descends like an ashy film upon reaching 90 pages into Shoe Dog, Phil Knight’s memoir about creating Nike. On the one hand: a story about a white Christian rich kid manifesting a new destiny for himself away from mediocrity using military connections to build a business with a recently conquered nation; 1964, the year Knight starts Blue Ribbon Sports.