[quotes] Stokely Speaks: from Black Power to Pan-Africanism - Stokely Carmichael 1965

 

"Because revolutionary theories are based on historical analysis, one must study. One must understand one's history and one must make the correct historical analysis. At the correct moment you make your historical leap and carry the struggle forward. Not only that, you cannot rap if you really don't believe what you're saying, or if you don't know the answers."

"I think Stokely's class can stand on its own. Not only that, I think it is better than anything I could say. Just two things: he spoke to where they were at, and they were at different places, and the places changed during the movement of the discussion. Secondly, he trusted them and he trusted himself... and they trusted him."

"The panacea for lack of opportunity is education, as is the panacea for prejudice. But just how available is it? If every sixteen-year-old in the nation were motivated to attend high school, he could not: there are not enough schools, not enough physical space. As for college, less than one-quarter of the population ever gets there. The financial barrier is too high; even the cheapest state college charges fees which are impossible for the poor."

"Civil rights protest has not materially benefited the masses of Negroes; it has helped those who were already just a little ahead. The main result of that protest has been an opening up of the society to Negroes who had one of the criteria for upward mobility... In a sense, the Negroes helped by protest have been those who never wanted to be Negroes."

"There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice has adapted to an audience of liberal whites. It served as a sort of buffer zone between them and angry young blacks. None of its so-called leaders could go into a rioting community and be listened to."

"We had to begin with politics because black Americans are a propertyless people in a country where property is valued above all. We had to work for power, because this country does not function by morality, love, and nonviolence, but by power."

"For racism to die, a totally different America must be born. This is what white society does not wish to face; this is why that society prefers to talk about integration. But integration speaks not at all to the problem of poverty - only to the problem of blackness. Integration today means the man who 'makes it,' leaving his black brothers behind in the ghetto."

"If they are liberals, they complain, 'What about me - don't you want my help any more?' These are people supposedly concerned about black Americans, but today they think first of themselves, of their feelings of rejection."

"One of the most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities - which is where the racism exists - and work to get rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley. They admonish blacks to be nonviolent; let them preach nonviolence in the white community."

"You can integrate communities, but you assimilate individuals. Even if such a program were possible its result would be, not to develop the black community as a functional and honorable segment of the total society, with its own cultural identity, life patterns, and institutions, but to abolish it - the final solution to the Negro problem. Marx said that the working class is the first class in history that ever wanted to abolish itself."

"The missionaries came with the Bible, and we had the land; when they left, they had the land, and we still have the Bible."

"The question is, How can white society begin to move to see black people as human beings? I am black, therefore I am. Not: I am black and I must go to college to prove myself. I am black, therefore I am."

"What is your responsibility, black students of Morgan? Do you know about Du Bois? Have you read Douglass? Do you know Richard Wright? Can you quote J. A. Rogers? Do you know Claude McKay?... Why is it that you haven't read this stuff? Is it that you don't want to read anything about being black because you, too, are ashamed of it and are running from it? So you want to run to your debutante ball. So you want to run to your Kappa fraternity ball and forget all else."

"And I think Lewis Carroll is right: those who can define are the masters. White Western society has been able to define, and that's why she has been the master. The white youth of my generation in the West today starts off with subconscious racism because he accepts the writings of the West, which have either destroyed, distorted, lied about history. He starts off with a basic assumption of superiority that he doesn't even recognize."

"Capitalism, by its very nature, cannot create structures free from exploitation."

"We are fighting a political warfare. Politics is war without violence. War is politics with violence."

"Our people are a colony within the United States, and you are colonies outside the United States. It is more than a figure of speech to say that the black communities in America are the victims of white imperialism and colonial exploitation - in practical economic and political terms it is true."

"But what happens is that the poverty program sends a couple of hundred dollars into the community and groups start fighting over that money. So, automatically you've got splits in the community. Watts is the best example that we have to date. It was the first one to get the poverty program after the rebellion and today it is the most divided black community in the country."

"Now there are two dreams I have in my life. My dreams are rooted in reality, not in imagery. I dream, number one, of having coffee with my wife in South Africa; and number two, of having mint tea in Palestine."

"Therefore we must begin to understand those three concepts. (1) We must have an undying love. We must have an undying love for our people. (2) Every Negro is a potential black man. (3) For black people the question of community is not simply a question of geographical boundaries but a question of our people and where we are."

"It is simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence. In Vietnam our violence is legalized by white America. In Washington, D.C., my violence is not legalized, because Africans living in Washington, D.C., do not have the power to legalize their violence."

"What the liberal is really saying is that he hopes to bring about justice and economic stability for everyone through reform, that somehow the society will be able to keep expanding without redistributing the wealth."

"What the liberal really wants is to bring about change which will not in any way endanger his position. The liberal says, 'It is a fact that you are poor, and ti is a fact that some people are rich; but we can make you rich without affecting those people who are rich.' I do not know how poor people are going to get economic security without affecting the rich in a given country, unless one is going to exploit other peoples. I think that if we followed the logic of the liberal to its conclusion we would find that all we can get from it is that in order for a society to become equitable we must begin to exploit other peoples."

"With an undying love for black people wherever we may be, Stokely."

"Before you decide where you want to go, before you find your ideology, you must analyze what your problems are."

"Merely because one has a gun in his hands does not make one revolutionary. What makes one revolutionary is not only having the gun, but the political ideology to go along with the gun. And that political ideology must speak the needs and aspirations of the masses of our people. Once you have that, plus the gun, then you have a revolutionary, because revolutionaries always fight on two levels: the political and the military."

"Always we must understand our history, because we will see how it moves - from Garvey to Malcolm's father, on to Malcolm, on down the line."

"America and Canada are settler colonies, but it is difficult for us to understand that because they are close to being successful settler colonies. In order to be a successful settler colony, one must commit genocide against the traditional owners of the land. This is exactly what Europeans have done. After committing genocide, they changed the name to America. When you call them Americans, you make it sound as if they belong here. You do that because you want to call yourselves black Americans and you want to feel that you belong here too. But if we analyze historical analysis, we will see that they are not Americans, they are in fact European settlers. That's what they are."

"If you're not studying, you're doing nothing but fooling yourself. If you are a revolutionary today in the black community you must know Marx, you must know Lenin, you must know Malcolm X, Mao, Che, Fidel, Sekou Toure, Ho Chi Minh, you must know DuBois, you must know Nkrumah, you must know Lumumba, you must know Huey P. Newton, you must know LeRoi Jones, Robert Williams, you must know Fannie Lou Hamer, you must know a whole lot of people, a whole lot. Their ideas and their ideologies. Aside from that you must know what is going on in the world at the same time."

[quotes] Angela Davis an Autobiography - Angela Davis 1974

 

"There was the possibility that, having read it, more people would understand why so many of us have no alternative but to offer our lives - our bodies, our knowledge, our will - to the cause of our oppressed people."

"The isolation units which had existed in the past had been dismantled years ago, in an effort to remove from view the most blatant stances of inhumanity. Needless to say, that had not succeeded; inhumanity seethed from all the cracks and crevices of that place."

"They all explained that they had been driven by necessity to apply for this kind of job. Apparently it was one of the highest-paying jobs in New York that did not require a college education. In a way, these officers were prisoners themselves, and some of them were keenly aware that they were treading ambiguous waters. Like their predecessors, the Black overseers, they were guarding their sisters in exchange for a few bits of bread. And like the overseers, they too would discover that part of the payment for their work was their own oppression."

"The other weekly meeting place was the movies - that is, if the projector was not broken. Not even the curiosity that attracted me to the church services could make me attend one of these insipid Hollywood movies. Needless to say, it was a favorite trysting place for homosexual couples."

"Once I felt settled in the main population, my thoughts naturally turned toward the possibility of collective political activity in jail. Many people are unaware of the fact that jail and prison are two entirely different institutions... Jails are primarily for pretrial confinement, holding places until prisoners are either convicted or found innocent. More than half of the jail population have never been convicted of anything, yet they languish in these cells. Because the bail system is inherently biased in the favor of the relatively well-off, jails are disproportionately inhabited by the poor, who cannot afford the fee."

"Then it occurred to me that anyone in his place would have done the same thing - it was the madness of the institution he served that was driving him to hysterically search the hem of my skirt and the seams of my blouse."

"She seemed a fitting representative of the government of California. That state held the dubious distinction of being one of the most advanced in the country when it came to quelling resistance. California could already claim more than its share of victims. I could trace the history of my political involvement there by the number of funerals I had attended."

"The more steeped in violence our environment became, the more determined my father and mother were that I, the first-born, learn that the battle of white against Black was not written into the nature of things. On the contrary, my mother always said, love had been ordained by God. White people's hatred of us was neither natural nor eternal."

"The white people in the store were at first confused when they saw two Black people sitting in the 'whites only' section, but when they heard our accents and conversations in French, they too seemed to be pleased and excited by seeing Black people from so far away they could not possibly be a threat."

"This was my first introduction to class differences among my own people. We were the not-so-poor. Until my experiences at school, I believed that everyone else lived the way we did."

"On the one hand, there was a strong tendency affirming our identity as Black people that ran through all the school activities. But on the other hand, many teachers tended to inculcate in us the official, racist explanation for our misery. And they encouraged an individualistic, competitive way out of this torment. We were told that the ultimate purpose of our education was to provide us with the skills and knowledge to lift ourselves singly and separately out of the muck and slime of poverty by 'our own bootstraps.'"

"It hurt to see us folding in on ourselves, using ourselves as whipping posts because we did not yet know how to struggle against the real cause of our misery."

"About the time I entered high school, the civil rights movement was beginning to awaken some Black Alabamians from their deep but fretful sleep."

"At fourteen, in my junior year, I felt restless and exceedingly limited. The provincialism of Birmingham bothered me, and I had not yet been swept up into the Civil Rights Movement to the extent that it could forge for me a solid raison d'etre. I could not define or articulate the dissatisfaction I felt. I simply had the sensation of things closing in on me - and I wanted to get out."

"What had seemed a personal hatred of me, an inexplicable refusal of Southern whites to confront their own emotions, and a stubborn willingness of Blacks to acquiesce, became the inevitable consequences of a ruthless system which kept itself alive and well by encouraging spite, competition and the oppression of one group by another. Profit was the word: the cold and constant motive for the behavior, the contempt and the despair I had seen."

"James Baldwin announced that he could not continue his lectures without contradicting his moral conscience and abdicating his political responsibilities."

"In this city of in its position of trying to recuperate from tourists and fleas - in this group of typically American students which without my presence would have been lily-white - my old familiar feelings of disorientation were rekindled."

"When the news broke in Paris that Kennedy had been shot, everyone rushed down to the U.S> Embassy... Nevertheless, I felt out of place at the Embassy, surrounded by crowds of 'Americans in Paris' and it was difficult to identify with their weeping. I wondered how many of them had she tears - or had truly felt saddened - when they read the Herald Tribune story about the murders of Carole, Cynthia, Addie Mae and Denise."

"But each day it was becoming clearer to me that my ability to accomplish anything was directly dependent on my ability to contribute something concrete to the struggle."

"As in the United States, there was a natural inclination to identify the enemy as the white man. Natural because the great majority of white people, both in the United States and England, have been carriers of the racism which, in reality, benefits only a small number of them - the capitalists... When white people are indiscriminately viewed as the enemy, it is virtually impossible to develop a political solution."

"For me revolution was never an interim 'thing-to-do' before settling down; it was no fashionable club with newly minted jargon, or new kind of social life - made thrilling by risk and confrontation, made glamorous by costume. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary's life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime."

"My overall vision of the school I directed was of a place where political understanding was forged and sharpened, where consciousness became explicit and was urged in a revolutionary direction."

"In this way he subtly criticized me for having romanticized something which was really nothing more than terribly hard work. It was then that I began to realize the true meaning of underdevelopment: it is nothing to be utopianized. Romanticizing the plight of oppressed people is dangerous and misleading."

"What he wanted to do was to point the finger at the real criminal: a society which keeps Black people imprisoned in such atrocious conditions of oppression that too often it is a question of stealing or going under."

"Jails are thoughtless places. Thoughtless in the sense that no thinking is done by the administration; no problem-solving or rational evaluation of any situation slightly different from the norm. The void created by this absence of thought is filled by rules and the fear of establishing a precedent (meaning a rule they had not yet digested)."

"One small twist of fate and I might have drowned in the muck of poverty and disease and illiteracy. That is why I never felt I had the right to look upon myself as being any different from my sisters and brothers who did all the suffering, for all of us."

"Mrs. Hemphill's story was the universal story of the Black woman in a world that wants to see her crushed. Mrs. Hemphill had overcome. My mother had overcome. But many others had not. The system was pointed against us. That was what had come through so powerfully in Mrs. Hemphill's words. My own present predicament was, on a different level, evidence of that same politically, economically, socially hostile world which almost every Black women must contend with every day of her life."

"The more the movement for my freedom increased in numbers, strength, and confidence, the more imperative it became for everyone to see if not as something exceptional but as a small part of a great fight against injustice, one bough in a solidly rooted tree of resistance. It was not only political repression, but racism, poverty, police brutality, drugs, and all the myriad ways Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and white working people are kept chained to misery and despair. And it was not only within the United States of America, but in countries like Vietnam, with the bombs falling like rain from U.S. B52's, burning and dismembering innocent children."

"I sank deep into the moment, husbanding this delight, hoarding it. For I knew it would be short-lived. Work, Struggle. Confrontation lay before us like a rock-strewn road. We would walk it... But first the grass, the sun... and the people."

[quotes] Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men - Caroline Criado Perez 2019

"The female-specific concerns that men fail to factor in cover a wide variety of areas, but as you read you will notice that three themes crop up again and again: the female body, women's unpaid care burden, and male violence against women. These are issues of such significance that they touch on nearly every part of our lives, affecting our experiences of everything from public transport to politics, via the workplace and the doctor's surgery. But men forget them, because men do not have female bodies."

"It just means that what may seem objective can actually be highly male-biased: in this case, the historically widespread practice of attributing women's work to men made it much harder for a woman to fulfill the Bank's requirements. The fact is that worth is a matter of opinion, and opinion is informed by culture. And if that culture is as male-biased as ours is, it can't help but be biased against women. By default."

"When I pointed out that this was true for him too (he identified as a libertarian) he demurred. No. That was just objective, common sense - de Beauvoir's 'absolute truth'. For him, the way he saw the world was universal, while feminism - seeing the world from a female perspective - was niche. Ideological."

"Incidentally, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the coal mining industry, which during the 2016 election became the shibboleth for (implicitly male) working-class jobs, provides 53,420 jobs in total, at a median annual wage of $59,380. Compare this to the majority female 924,640-strong cleaning and housekeeping workforce, whose median annual income is $21,820. So who's the real working class?

"A UK Department of Transport study highlighted the stark difference between male and female perception of danger, finding that 62% of women are scared walking in multistorey car parks, 60% are scared waiting on train platforms, 49% are scared waiting at the bus stop, and 59% are scared walking home from a bus stop or station. The figures for men are 31%, 25%, 20%, and 25%, respectively. Fear of crime is particularly high among low-income women, partly because they tend to live in areas with higher crime rates, but also because they are likely to be working odd hours and often come home from work in the dark. Ethnic-minority women tend to experience more fear for the same reasons, as well as having the added danger of (often gendered) racialized violence to contend with."

"'Large-scale data for the prevalence of sexual harassment is lacking', explains a 2017 paper, not only because of under-reporting, but also because it is 'often not included in crime statistics'."

"The apparent mismatch between women's fear and the level of violence the official statistics say they experience is not just about the general stew of menace women are navigating. Women also aren't reporting the more serious offenses. A 2016 study of sexual harassment in Washington DC metro found that 77% of those who were harassed never reported, which is around the same level found by Inmujeres, a Mexican government agency that campaigns on violence against women."

"And research conducted by Loukaitou-Sideris in Los Angeles found that there were specific bus stops that were hotspots for gender-based crime, suggesting that costs could be kept further in check by focusing on problem areas. All each transport authority would need is its own data - and the will to collect it. But that will is lacking. In the US, Loukaitou-Sideris tells me, 'there is no federal incentive' for transit authorities to collect data. 'They aren't legally obligated to collect it and so they don't.'"

"Female professors are penalised if they aren't deemed sufficiently warm and accessible. But if they are warm and accessible they can be penalised for not appearing authoritative and professional. On the other hand, appearing authoritative and knowledgeable as a woman can result in student disapproval, because this violates gendered expectations. Meanwhile men are rewarded if they are accessible at a level that is simply expected in women and therefore only noticed if it's absent."

"Thankfully for frustrated women around the world, Rom Schalk, the vice president of voice technology at car navigation system supplier ATX, has come up with a novel solution to fix the 'many issues with women's voices'. What women need, he said, was 'lengthy training' - if only women 'were willing' to submit to it... Just like the women wilful women buying the wrong stoves in Bangladesh, women buying cars are unreasonably expecting voice-recognition software developers to design a product that works for them when it's obvious that the problem needing fixing is the women themselves. Why can't a woman be more like a man?"

"Designing passive tracking apps as if women have pockets big enough to hold their phones is a perennial problem with an easy solution: include proper pockets in women's clothing (she types furiously, having just had her phone fall out of her pocket and smash on the floor for the hundredth time). In the meantime, however, women use other solutions, and if tech developers don't realise women are being forced into workabouts, they may fail their development."

"There is one EU regulatory test that requires what is called a fifth-percentile female dummy, which is meant to represent the female population. Only 5% of women will be shorter than this dummy. But there are a number of data gaps. For a start, this dummy is only tested in the passenger seat, so we have no data at all for how a female driver would be affected - something of an issue you would think, given women's 'out of position' driving position. And secondly, this female dummy is not really female. It is just a scaled-down male dummy."

"The result is that TB kills more women globally than any other single infectious disease. More women die annually of TB than of all causes of maternal mortality combined. But TB is nevertheless often considered to be a 'male disease', and as a result women are less likely to be screened for it."

"Then the Second World War came along, and it was during this period, explains Coyle, that the frame [for GDP] we use now was established. It was designed to suit the needs of the war economy, she tells me. 'The main aim was to understand how much output could be produced and what consumption needed to be sacrificed to make sure there was enough available to support the war effort.' To do this they counted everything produced by government and businesses and so 'what governments do and what businesses do came to be seen as the definition of the economy'. But there was one major aspect of production that was excluded from what came to be the 'international convention about how you think about and measure the economy', and that was the contribution of unpaid household work, like cooking, cleaning and childcare. 'Everyone acknowledges that there is economic value in that work, it's just not part of 'the economy',' says Coyle."

"The failure to measure unpaid household services is perhaps the greatest gender data gap of all. Estimates suggest that unpaid care work could account for up to 50% of GDP in high-income countries, and as much as 80% of GDP in low-income countries."

"The upshot of failing to capture all this data is that women's unpaid work tends to be seen as 'a costless resource to exploit', writes economics professor Sue Himmelweit. And so when countries try to rein in their spending it is often women who end up paying the price."

"The problem is, these cuts are not so much savings as a shifting of costs from the public sector onto women, because the work still needs to be done. By 2017 the Women's Budget Group estimated that approximately one in ten people over the age of fifty in England (1.86 million) had unmet care needs as a result of public spending cuts. Those needs have become, on the whole, the responsibility of women."

"In fact, the best job-creation programme could simply be the introduction of universal childcare in every country in the world."

"We like to think that the unpaid work women do is just about individual women caring for their individual family members to their own individual benefit. It isn't. Women's unpaid work is work that society depends on, and it is work from which society as a whole benefits. When the government cuts public services that we all pay for with our taxes, demand for those services don't suddenly cease. The work is simply transferred onto women, with all the attendant negative impacts on female paid labour-participation rates, and GDP."

"And so the unpaid work that women do isn't simply a matter of 'choice'. It is built into the system we have created - and it could just as easily be built out of it. We just need the will to start collecting the data, and then designing our economy around reality rather than a male-biased confection."

"In short, the current US tax system for married couples in effect penalises women in paid employment, and in fact several studies have shown that joint filing disincentivises married women from paid work altogether (which, as we have also seen, is bad for GDP)."

"Essentially, people tend to assume that our own way of thinking about or doing things is typical. That it's just normal. For white men this bias is surely magnified by a culture that reflects their experience back to them, thereby making it seem even more typical. Projection bias is amplified by a form of confirmation bias, if you like. Which goes some way towards explaining why it is so common to find male bias masquerading as gender neutrality. If the majority of people in power are men - and they are - the majority of people in power just don't see it. Male bias just looks like common sense to them. But 'common sense' is in fact a product of the gender data gap."

"Worldwide, the countries with the highest levels of female political representation tend to use proportional representation... perhaps the UK's Women and Equalities Committee shouldn't have called for quotas in the first place. If they really wanted to see female representation increase in Parliament, perhaps their first demand should be full electoral reform."

"The data accrued from a lifetime of being a woman matters. And this data belongs at the very heart of government."

"Closing the gender data gap will not magically fix all the problems faced by women, whether or not they are displaced. That would require a wholesale restructuring of society and an end to male violence. But getting to grips with the reality that gender-neutral does not automatically mean gender-equal would be an important start."

[quotes] On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong 2019

 

"To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger."

"Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past. What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?"

"How I fled my shitty high school to spend my days in New York lost in library stacks, reading obscure texts by dead people, most of whom never dreamed a face like mine floating over their sentences - and least of all that those sentences would save me."

"To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched - and alive. And name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield."

"As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all - but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war."

"For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense - that three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family."

"He feels for the protrusion but, as usual, finds nothing. It's receded, he thinks. It wants to stay inside me. It is nothing without me. Because a bullet without a body is a song without ears."

"Your hands a hideous - and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream. How you'd come home, night after night, plop down on the couch, and fall asleep inside a minute. I'd come back with your glass of water and you'd already be snoring, your hands in your lap like two partially scaled fish."

"Up until then I didn't think a white boy could hate anything about his life. I wanted to know him through and through, by that very hate. Because that's what you give anyone who sees you, I thought. You take their hatred head-on, and you cross it, like a bridge, to face them, to enter them."

"Because submission, I soon learned, was also a kind of power. To be inside of pleasure, Trevor needed me. I had a choice, a craft, whether he ascends of falls depends on my willingness to make room for him, for you cannot rise without having something to rise over. Submission does not require elevation in order to control. I lower myself. I put him in my mouth, to the base, and peer up at him, my eyes a place he might flourish. After a while, it is the cocksucker who moves. And he follows, when I sway this way he swerves along. And I look up at him as if looking at a kite, his entire body tied to the teetering world of my head."

"We sang, nearly shouting the lyrics, the wind clipping at our voices. They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it's also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. We sing to keep ourselves."

"We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another."

"I'm broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two."

"It's in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do - how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you."

"They say every snowflake is different - but the blizzard, it covers us all the same. A friend in Norway told me a story about a painter who went out during a storm, searching for the right shade of green, and never returned. I'm writing you because I'm not the one leaving, but the one coming back, empty-handed."

"They say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It's the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don't get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, 'It's been an honor to serve my country.'"

"They will tell you that to be political is to be merely angry, and therefore artless, depthless, 'raw,' and empty. They will speak of the political with embarrassment, as if speaking of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny."

"I remember walking with you to the grocery store, my father's wages in your hands. How, by then, he had beaten you only twice - which meant there was still hope it would be the last. I remember armfuls of Wonder Bread and jars of mayo, how you thought mayo was butter, how in Saigon, butter and white bread were only eaten inside mansions guarded by butlers and steel gates. I remember everyone smiling back at the apartment, mayonnaise sandwiches raised to cracked lips. I remember thinking we lived in a sort of mansion."

"All this time I told myself we were born from war - but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence - but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it."

Adulthood Rites - Octavia E. Butler 1988

 

[Here I learn about human contradiction and what makes us human. And about how open I am to change that redefines who I am.]

[quotes] The Anthropocene Reviewed - John Green 2021

 

[this book was gifted to me a good friend of mine. I've been going through a pretty nihilistic period in life - my work doesn't seem to have a point. Even worse, no work seems to have any point. Thus, I really appreciated the chapter "Sycamore Tree". Maybe the point really is to just witness - even it is to witness the destruction we are causing and the brief bursts of joy at the attempts of making things better. Going through my quotes again I am in awe at how John Green can hold so much witness and sorrow and hope at the same time. And I think that's a lesson I need to learn to live into.]

"From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires."

"And yet I feel as if I'm committing a sin whenever I drink Diet Dr Pepper. Nothing that sweet can be truly virtuous. But it's an exceptionally minor vice, and for whatever reason, I've always felt like I need a vice. I don't know whether this feeling is universal, but I have some way-down vibrating part of my subconscious that needs to self-destruct, at least a little bit."

"So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose."

"I wonder if you have people like that in your life, people whose love keeps you going even though they are distant now because of time and geography and everything else that comes between us. Todd and I have both floated down through the decades - he's a doctor now - but the courses of our lives were shaped by those moments we shared upstream."

"Rivers keep going, and we keep going, and there is no way back to the roof of that hotel. But the memory still holds me together."

"It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it, through the Claude glass."

"I am thoughtful - full of thoughts, all the time, inescapably, exhaustingly. But I am also mindless - acting in accordance with default settings I neither understand nor examine."

"Now, like all places that survive on nostalgia, it is mostly a memory of itself."

"When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you're just kidding. It's so easy to take refuge in the 'just' of just kidding. It's just a joke. We're just doing it for the memes. But the preposterous and absurd can still shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And ridiculous cruelty is still cruelty."

"I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them - and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us."

"We live in hope - that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. And between now and then, we are here because we're here because we're here because we're here."

"The fact that our political, social, and economic systems are biased in favor of the already rich and the already powerful is the single greatest failure of the American democratic ideal. I have benefitted from this, directly and profoundly, for my entire life... But if I don't grapple with the reality that I owe much of my success to injustice, I'll only further the hoarding of wealth and opportunity."

"I don't believe we have a choice when it comes to whether we endow the world with meaning. We are all little fairies, sprinkling meaning dust everywhere we go. This mountain will mean God, and that precipitation will mean trouble. The vacuum of space will mean emptiness, and the groundhog will mean nature's scorn for human absurdity. We will build meaning wherever we go, with whatever we come across. But to me, while making meaning isn't a choice, the kind of meaning can be."

"But for now I'm just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned air and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves, and I realize that I am in the vast, dark shade of this immense tree. I feel the solace of that shade, the relief it provides. And that's the point."

"I feel like I am a human being planting carrot seeds into Earth, but really, as my brother would tell me, I am Earth planting Earth into Earth."

"'I smell the wound and it smells like me,' Terry Tempest Williams writes in Erosion. I live in a wounded world, and I know I am the wound: Earth destroying Earth with Earth."

"What an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth."

Dawn - Octavia E. Butler 1987

 

[I was consumed by this book on a vacation and didn't note any quotes. A lot of similarities with the plot from Parable of the Sower. From this book I learn to learn and to observe how I can be more like the other living things I am surrounded by. I wonder how Lauren would feel if about the trade with the Oankali to achieve the destiny to take root among the stars.]

[quotes] The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 2015

 

[I first heard about this book when listening to Ross Gay's interview in the podcast VS. There is so much to learn about the world through careful observation. The mushroom teaches me to tend to my connections, to grow my tendrils, to find nourishment and possibility where I can.] 

"Making world is not limited to humans. We know that beavers reshape streams as they make dams, canals, and lodges; in fact, all organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water. Without the ability to make workable living arrangements, species would die out. In the process, each organism changes everyone's world. Bacteria made our oxygen atmosphere, and plants help maintain it. Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks. As these examples suggest, world-making projects can overlap, allowing room for more than one species. Humans, too, have always been involved in multispecies world making."

"Without self-contained units, it is impossible to compute costs and benefits, or functionality, to any 'one' involved. No self-contained individuals or groups assure their self-interests oblivious to the encounter. Without algorithms based on self-containment, scholars and policymakers might have to learn something about the cultural and natural histories at stake."

"Scalability requires that project elements be oblivious to the indeterminacies of encounters; that's how they allow smooth expansion. Thus, too, scalability banishes meaningful diversity, that is, diversity that might change things."

"Capitalism is a system for concentrating wealth, which makes possible new investments, which further concentrate wealth. This process is accumulation. Classic models take us to the factory: factory owners concentrate wealth by paying workers less than the value of the goods that the workers produce each day. Owners 'accumulate' investment assets from this extra value."

"Wal-Mart pioneered the required use of universal product codes (UPCs), the black-and-white bars that allow computers to know these products as inventory. The legibility of inventory, in turn, means that Wal-Mart is able to ignore the labor and environmental conditions through which its products are made: pericapitalist methods, including theft and violence, may be part of the production process."

"But Open Ticket's buying competition has the explicit goal of raising prices. Everyone says so: pickers, buyers, bulkers. The purpose of playing with prices is to see if the price can be increased, so that everyone in Open Ticket benefits. Many seem to think that there is an ever-flowing spring of money in Japan, and the goal of competitive theater is to force open the pipes so that the money will flow to Open Ticket."

"When they came back after the war, most had lost access to their possessions and their families. (Juliana Hu Pegues notes that the same year Japanese American farmers were sent away to camps, the United States opened the Bracero program to bring Mexican farm laborers.) They were treated with suspicion. In response, they did their best to become model Americans."

"Thus, too, matsutake is an ideal gift to give to someone with whom one needs a long-term relationship. Suppliers give matsutake to the firms that give them business.One grocer commented that religious converts had begun to purchase matsutake for presentation to their spiritual leaders. Matsutake signals a serious commitment."

"Accrumulation is important because it converts ownership into power. Those with capital can overturn communities and ecologies. Meanwhile, because capitalism is a system of commesuration, capitalist value forms flourish even across great circuits of difference. Money becomes investment capital, which can produce more money. Capitalism is a translation machine for producing capital from all kinds of livelihoods, human and not human."

"Fungi break them down into nutrients that can be recycled into new life. Fungi are thus world builders, shaping environments for themselves and others."

"Meanwhile, fungi are famous for their symbiotic attachments. Lichen are fungi living with algae and cyanobacteria. I have been discussing fungal collaborations with plants, but fungi live with animals as well."

"Indeed, one could say that pines, matsutake, and humans all cultivate each other unintentionally. They make each other's world-making projects possible. This idiom has allowed me to consider how landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design, that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human. The design is clear in the landscape's ecosystem. but none of the agents have planned this effect. Humans join others in making landscapes of unintentional design."

"If you ever wanted to be impressed by the historical force of plants, you might do well to start with pines. Pines are among the most active trees on earth. If you bulldoze a road through a forest, pine seedlings will likely spring up on its raw shoulders. If you abandon a field, pines will be the first to colonize it. When a volcano erupts, or a glacier moves back, or the wind and sea pile sand, pines may be among the first to find a foothold."

"Although historians rush to differentiate the modernization achieved by Japan's Meiji Restoration and the failures of China's Great Leap Forward, from the perspective of a tree, there may not be much difference. If peasant forests are viewed differently in each context, it may be in part be contrast between close and distant, and forward- and backward-looking views."

"In a bureaucracy that sees only trees, a mushroom companion has made a splash appearance. Mistakes were made... and mushrooms popped up."

"'In 1944, as fears of Japanese fire bombs over Oregon forests circulate, Smokey Bear becomes a symbol of fire protection as homeland security.'"

"The effects of industrial ruins on living things depends on which living things we follow. For some insects and parasites, ruined industrial forests proved a bonanza. For other species, the rationalization of the forest itself - before ruination - proved disastrous. Somewhere between these extremes lie the world-building proclivities of matsutake."

"The singularity of interspecies gatherings matters; that's why the world remains ecologically heterogenous despite globe-spanning powers. The intricacies of global coordination also matter; not all connections have the same effects. To write a history of ruin, we need to follow broken bits of many stories and to move in and out of many patches. In the play of global power, indeterminate encounters are still important."

"One Pacific Northwest researcher told me that Japanese studies are not very useful because they are 'descriptive.' In untangling what 'descriptive' might mean, and what is wrong with it, the cultural and historical specificity of U.S. forestry research comes into focus. Descriptive means site-specific, that is, attuned to indeterminate encounters and thus nonscalable. U.S. forestry researchers are under pressure to develop analyses compatible with the scalable management of timber trees. This requires that matsutake studies scale up to timber. Site selection in Japanese research follows patches of fungal growth, not timber grids."

"Furthermore, Japanese science explores how humans can manage forests to increase the yield of matsutake mushrooms. In contract, Americans explore how the mushroom harvest should be regulated to keep harvesters from destroying their resource. Japanese forest management promises more mushrooms for the market; American science promises fewer."

"Yet, one Crusader admitted to me, matsutake might not appear in his lifetime. The best he can do is disturb the forest - and hope the matsutake come."

"Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It's not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes - the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons - and the elusive autumn aroma."

[quotes] Minor Feelings - Cathy Park Hong 2020

 

[I bought my copy at a bookstore in Culver City with my mom. The stories in the book resonated a lot with me. I have so much rage at the world.]

"I decided to see a therapist to treat my depression. I wanted a Korean American therapist because I wouldn't have to explain myself as much. She'd look at me and just know where I was coming from."

"This screening process, by the way, is how the whole model minority quackery began: the U.S. government only allowed the most educated and highly trained Asians in and then took all the credit for their success. See! Anyone can live the American Dream! they'd say about a doctor who came into the country already a doctor."

"There was a transparency in comedy that I wasn't finding in poetry. Comedians can't pretend they don't have identities. They're up there, onstage, with their bodies against a brick wall like they're facing a firing squad. There's nowhere to hide, so they have no choice but to acknowledge their identities ("So you might have noticed I'm black") before they move on or drill down."

"As the poet Prageeta Sharma said, Americans have an expiration date on race the way they do for grief. At some point, they expect you to get over it."

"The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? I don't think, therefore I am - I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it's 2, maybe it's not worth telling my story. If it's 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller."

"Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, "Things are much better," while you think, Things are the same."

"In my search for an honest way to write about race, I wanted to comfort the afflicted, but more than that, I wanted to afflict the comfortable; I wanted to make them squirm in shame, probably because I too identify with the comfortable. But I had nothing to show for this search but a trail of failed forms."

"More than 30 percent of those who died from the riots were Latinx and more than 40 percent of the destroyed businesses were Latinx-owned, yet they are the least mentioned group because they don't fit the tidy dynamic of the 'good' Korean merchants versus the 'bad' black community."

"When they immigrated here, they didn't simply travel spatially but through time, traveling three generations into the future."

"White boys will always be boys but black boys are ten times more likely to be tried as adults and sentenced to life without parole."

"One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent being debased like a child is the deepest shame. I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended to or mocked by white adults... To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you."

"Their delusion is also tacit in the commonly heard defensive retort to Black Lives Matter that "all lives matter." Rather than being inclusive, "all" is a walled-off pronoun, a defensive measure to "not make it about race" so that the invisible hegemony of whiteness can continue unchallenged."

"I have to address whiteness because Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country. We are so far from reckoning with it that some Asians think that race has no bearing on their lives, that it doesn't 'come up,' which is as misguided as white people saying the same thing about themselves, not only because of discrimination we have faced but because of the entitlements we've been granted due to our racial identity."

"I was raised by a kind of love that was so inextricable from pain that I fear that once I air that love, it will oxidize to betrayal, as if I'm turning English against my family."

"I can't speak for the Latinx experience, but I can write about my bad English nearby Toscano's bad English while providing gaps between passages for the reader to stitch a thread between us."

"The greatest gift my parents granted me was making it possible for me to choose my education and career, which I can't say for the kids I knew in Koreatown who felt bound to lift their parents out of debt and grueling seven-day workweeks."

"The poet is a net that catches the stutters, the hesitations, rather than the perfectly formed phrase. Attention to silence is itself an interrogation."

"But I grew up in a culture where to speak of pain would not only retraumatize me but retraumatize everyone I love, as if words are not a cure but a poison that will infect others. How many Asian women would then feel bold enough to report sexual assault in their cultures of secrecy and shame? Denial is always the salve, though it is merely topical, since the indicant mushrooms back in dreams and other deadlier chronic forms."

"Writing is a family trade like anything else: you are more entitled to the profession if your ancestors have already set up shop."

"I sometimes avoid reading a news story when the victim is Asian because I don't want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention. I don't want to care that no one else cares because I don't want to be left stranded in my rage."

"The whole takeaway from the crowd-pleasing opening scene in the novel and film Crazy Rich Asians is the following: if you discriminate against us, we'll make more money than you and buy your fancy hotel that wouldn't let us in. Capitalism as retribution for racism. But isn't that how whiteness recruits us? Whether it's through retribution or indebtedness, who are we when we become better than them in a system that destroyed us?"

"Blade Runner 2049 is an example of science fiction as magical thinking: whites fear that all the sins they committed against black and brown people will come back to them tenfold, so they fantasize their own fall as preventive measure to ensure that the white race will never fail."

[quotes] How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy - Jenny Odell

 

[this book made me want to learn more about my local community - people and other earthlings. Finishing this book on Fourth of July is making me think about what narratives we are compelled to pay attention to through the attention economy.]  

"This book is about how to hold open that place in the sun. It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy, with all the stubbornness of Chinese "nail house" blocking a major highway. I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough."

"I fully understand where a life of sustained attention leads. In short, it leads to awareness, not only of how lucky I am to be alive, but to ongoing patterns of cultural and ecological devastation around me - and the inescapable part that I play in it, should I choose to recognize it or not. In other words, simple awareness is the seed of responsibility."

"I've also learned that patterns of attention - what we choose to notice and what we do not - are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time."

"That's because this kind of thing always seems to be happening: those spaces deemed commercially unproductive are always under threat, since what they 'produce' can't be measured or exploited or even easily identified - despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides."

"In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for commercial evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on 'nothing.'"

"Even with the problem of the filter bubble aside, the platforms that we use to communicate with each other do not encourage listening. Instead they reward shouting and oversimple reaction: of having a 'take' after having read a single headline."

"How could accusations of selfishness be leveled on a school that taught altruism to the degree that one was expected to die for a friend? More practically, in order to build the kind of world that Epicurus wanted, he needed to close it off from the world. But his critics didn't see it that way. Clearly the students of The Garden felt deep responsibility to one another, but responsibility to everyone else was left out of the question. They had forsaken the world."

"Politics necessarily exist between even two individuals with free will; any attempt to reduce politics to design (Thiel's 'machinery of freedom') is also an attempt to reduce people to machines or mechanical beings. So when Thiel writes of 'new technologies that may create a new space for freedom,' I hear only an echo of Frazier: 'Their behavior is determined, yet they're free.'"

"Do you pack all your things in a van, say, 'Fuck it,' and never look back? What responsibility do you have to the world you left behind, if any? And what are you going to do out there? The experience of the 1960s communes suggest that these are not easy questions to answer."

"The story of the communes teaches me that there is no escaping the political fabric of the world (unless you're Peter Thiel, in which case there's always outer space). The world needs my participation more than ever. Again, it is not a question of whether, but how."

"But most important, standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal."

"Suspicious of abstractions and education that prepared young people for careers in a diseased world rather than show them how to live a good life, he was once seen gluing the pages of a book together for an entire afternoon."

"Refusal requires a degree of latitude - a margin - enjoyed at the level of the individual (being able to personally afford the consequences) and at the level of society (whose legal attitude towards noncompliance may vary)... Differences in social and financial vulnerability explains why participants in mass acts of refusal have often been, and continue to be, students."

"If we're built top-to-bottom to struggle against each other for the smallest of edges, to cooperate not in our collective interest but in the interests of a small class of employers - and we are - then we're hardly equipped to protect ourselves from larger systemic abuses." - from Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris

 "In contrast to I-it, I-Thou recognizes the irreducibility and absolute equality of the other. In this configuration, I meet you 'thou' in your fullness by giving you my total attention; because I neither project nor 'interpret' you, the world contracts into a moment of a magical exclusivity between you and me... All of this makes for a being that cannot be 'understood' or 'interpreted' (I-it), only 'perceived' (I-Thou). And that which cannot be understood - a once-and-for-all matter - demands constant and unmixed attention, an ongoing state of encounter."

"Let's not forget that, in a time of increasing climate-related events, those who help you will likely not be your Twitter followers; they will be your neighbors."

"At least until everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses 24/7, you cannot opt out of awareness of physical reality. The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliché of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to."

"I remember that not only is my mother an immigrant, but that there is something immigrant about the air I breathe, the water I drink, the carbon in my bones, and the thoughts in my mind."

"Marwick and boyd describe how context collapse creates a 'lowest-common-denominator philosophy of sharing [that] limits users to topics that are safe for all possible readers.'"

"'You have one identity,' Mark Zuckerberg famously said. 'The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.' He added that 'having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.' Imagine what Audre Lorde, with all her different selves, would have to say to him."

"Before I got older and started carrying around a heavy black rectangle of potentiality and dread, it worked like this: You thought about the call you needed to make, you went to the phone, made the call, and then you walked away. If you decided you had something more to say, you called back later. Not only that, the interaction was with the other person you had decided to contact. Even calling someone to chat aimlessly had more intention than many of the ways we communicate now."

"I would be surprised if anyone who bought this book actually wants to do nothing. Only the most nihilist and coldhearted of us feels that there is nothing to be done."

"If, as if I've argued, certain types of thought require certain types of space, then any attempt at 'context collection' will have to deal not only with context collapse online, but with preserving public and open space, as well as the meeting places important to threatened cultures and communities."

"Really, these are all forms of the same question. They are ways of asking: Where and when am I, and how do I know that?"

"It's a concept I call manifest dismantling. I imagine another painting, one where Manifest Destiny is trailed not by trains and ships but by manifest dismantling, a dark-robed woman who is busy undoing all of the damage wrought by Manifest Destiny, clearing up her mess."

"Somewhere between over-engineering and abandonment, Fukuoka found the sweet spot by patiently listening and observing. His expertise lay in being a quiet and patient collaborator with the ecosystem he tended to."

"When we pry open the cracks in the concrete, we stand to encounter life itself - nothing less and nothing more, as if there could be more."

[quotes] Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami 2005

  

[I am so puzzled. I think this book is about obsessions and being stuck on a memory or a loss or a prophecy. How we become obsessed with things we cannot change and become empty shells - giving our contents to feed the past. Perhaps the opening of the stone offers opportunities to people living this half life to fully give themselves to their obsession or to finally escape and live a full life. But I could be totally wrong. And now I have a dream of opening a private library open to the public and serve community meals.]

"After changing into shorts and a T-shirt in the locker room, I do some stretching exercises. As my muscles relax, so do I. I'm safe inside this contained called me. With a little click, the outlines of this being - me - fit right inside and are locked neatly away. Just the way I like it. I'm where I belong."

"'You can appreciate Schubert if you train yourself. I was the same way when I first listened to him - it bored me easily. It's only natural for someone your age. In time you'll appreciate it. People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring. Go figure. For me, I might have the leisure to be bored, but not to grow tired of something. Most people can't distinguish between the two."

"Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just like Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just like we see with Eichmann."

"I yank my headphones and listen. Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear."

"There are lots of books on the shelf I'd like to read, still plenty of food. But I know I'm just passing through and will have to leave before long. This place is too calm, too natural - too complete. I don't deserve it. At least not yet."

"She still smiles from time to time, definitely a charming smile, but it's always limited somehow, a smile that never goes beyond the moment."

"It's Monday and the library's closed. The library is quiet enough most of the time, but on a day like this when it's closed it's like the land that time forgot. Or more like a place that's holding its breath, hoping time won't stumble upon it."

"'The kind that T.S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heatless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to.'"

"'Symbolism and meaning are two different things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.'"

"'The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.'"

"'Having an object that symbolizes freedom might make a person happier than actually getting the freedom it represents.'"

"'The strength I'm looking for isn't the kind where you win or lose. I'm not after a wall that'll repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that outside power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things - unfairness, misfortune, sadness, mistakes,  misunderstandings.'"

"As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the line it all changed. Living turned me into nothing. Weird... People are born in order to live, right? But the longer I've lived, the more I've lost what's inside me - and ended up empty. And I bet the longer I live, the emptier, the more worthless, I'll become."

"Beethoven, he learned, was a proud man who believed absolutely in his own abilities and never bothered to flatter the nobility. Believing that art itself, and the proper expression of emotions, was the most sublime thing in the world, he thought political power and wealth served only one purpose: to make art possible."

"I'm better prepared, so I'm not as afraid. I'm nervous, sure, but my heart's not pounding. Curiosity's what's leading me on. I want to know what lies down this path. Even if there's nothing there, I want to know that. I have to know. Memorizing the scenery as I pass by, I move steadily forward, step by careful step."

"Huge black mosquitoes buzz me like reconnaissance patrols, aiming for the exposed skin around my eyes. When I hear the buzz I brush them away or squash them. Whenever I smush one it makes a squish, already bloated with blood it's sucked out of me. It feels itchy only later. I wipe the blood off my hands on the towel around my neck."

"'Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.'"

[quotes] Safekeeping - Abigail Thomas 2000

 

lent the book to someone before I could copy the quotes here. Coming soon...

[poems] Soft science - Franny Choi 2019

 

[this book reminds me poetry is such a gift in my life. How can Franny use the cyborg as a vessel to take us so deep into the human experience.]

from TURING TEST

//do you believe you have consciousness 

sometimes / when the sidewalk / opens my knee / i think / please / please let me / remember this

from ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When the woman scrapes 

a sample of my skin into her petri dish, it's too late

to stop smiling. Butch who corrects my hip

at the crosswalk to convince me I'm no mollusk, thank you.

from AFTERLIFE

Should hunger for the fish that ate

the fish that are the plankton

that took his once-body dust

into its gullet. The boy whose body 

was first to enter mine is breathing

from too many mouths now.

 

from & O BRIGHT STAR OF DISASTER, I HAVE BEEN LIT

outside the bathroom. i pick up the accent

of whoever i'm speaking to. nobody wants

to fuck a sponge. nobody wants to crush

on a ghost. o sure, we all do it anyway

from CHI

Wow! Can you show me how to [stay in one piece; stay clean; speak in a straight line; speak so others listen; speak before someone else fills my mouth]?

from I SWIPED RIGHT ON THE BORG

until I was laid flat. (Not that I'm opposed to a little pressure, someone to remind me what I'm worth.) The Borg's favorite number: zero, of course. Favorite angle: 180. Favorite film: the strip of black after it's over.

from PERIHELION: A HISTORY OF TOUCH

No moon in sight, so I howled at the exit sign instead. Red runes, electric. Telling an old story of escape, of wind, a wide cold.

[quotes] Poor Economics, a Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty - Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo 2011

 

"So it is not that the lack of food could not be a problem or isn't a problem from time to time, but the world we live in today is for the most part too rich for hunger to be a big part of the story of the persistence of poverty. This is of course different during natural or man-made disasters, or in famines that kill and weaken millions. As Amartya Sen has shown, however, most recent famines have been caused not by lack of food availability but by institutional failures that led to poor distribution of available food, or even hoarding and storage in the face of starvation elsewhere."

"Is is probably the same reason that in Kenya, traditional healers and preachers have been particularly in demand to cure HIV/AIDS (their services are proudly advertised on hand-painted billboards in every town). There was not much that allopathic doctors could really do (at least until anti-retrovirals became more affordable), so why not try the traditional healer's herbs and spells?"

"In the end, the mistrust of incentives for immunization comes down to an article of faith for both those on the right and the left of the mainstream political spectrum: Don't try to bribe people to do things that you think they ought to do. For the right, this is because it will be wasted; for the conventional left, which includes much of the public health community and the good doctors from Seva Mandir, this is because it degrades both what is given and the person who gets it. Instead, we should focus on trying to convince the poor of the benefits of immunization."

"For the same reason that those who live in rich countries live a life surrounded by invisible nudges, the primary goal of health-care policy in poor countries should be to make it as easy as possible for the poor to obtain preventive care, while at the same time regulating the quality of treatment that people can get... All this sounds paternalistic, it certainly is. But then it is easy, too easy, to sermonize about the dangers of paternalism and the need to take responsibility for our own lives, from the comfort of our couch in our safe and sanitary home. Aren't we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it?"

"The curriculum and organization of schools often date back to a colonial past, when schools were meant to train a local elite to be the effective allies of the colonial state, and the goal was to maximize the distance between them and the rest of the populace."

"The school Abhijit went to in Calcutta had a more or less explicit policy of expelling the bottom of the class every year, so that by the time the graduation exam cam around, it could claim a perfect pass record."

"In the treatment areas in Matlab, this change was faster than elsewhere - the community health worker, who tended to be a relatively well-educated and assertive woman, was both the embodiment of the new norm and the carrier of news about the shifting norms in the rest of the world."

"The right space for policy is not so much to replace the family as it is to complete its action and, sometimes, protect us from its abuses. Starting from the right understanding of how families function is crucial in being able to do so effectively."

"It is too hard to stay motivated when everything you want looks impossibly far away. Moving the goalposts closer may be just what the poor need to start running toward them."

"The emphasis on government jobs, in particular, suggests a desire for stability, as these jobs tend to be very secure even when they are not very exciting. And in fact, stability of employment appears to be the one thing that distinguishes the middle classes from the poor."

"This statement was a good reflection of an institutionalist view that has strong currency in development economics today. The real problem of development, in this view, is not one of figuring out good policies: It is to sort out the political process. If the politics are right, good policies will eventually emerge. And conversely, without good politics, it is impossible to design or implement good policies, at least not on any scale. There is no point in figuring out the best way to spend a dollar on schools, if 87 cents will never reach the school anyway. It follows (or so it is assumed) that 'big questions' require 'big answers' - social revolutions, such as a transition to effective democracy."

"Acemoglu and Robinson define institutions as follows: 'Economic institutions shape economic incentives, the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. Political institutions determine the ability of citizens to control politicians."

"As a result, the agents of the government (the bureaucrats, the pollution inspectors, the policemen, the doctors) cannot be paid directly for the value they are delivering to the rest of us - when a policemen gives us a ticket, we complain, but we don't offer him a reward for doing this job well and keeping the roads safe for everyone. Contrast this with the grocery store owner: She delivers value by selling us eggs, and when we pay her for the eggs, we know we are paying for the social value she is delivering."

"This simple observation has two very important implications: First, there is no easy way of assessing the performance of most people who work for the government. This is why there are so many rules for what bureaucrats (or policemen, or judges) should and shouldn't do. Second, the temptation to break the rules is ever present, both for the bureaucrat and for us, which is what leads to corruption and dereliction of duty."

"This is one important reason why government programs (and similar programs run by NGOs and international organizations) often do not work. The problem is inherently difficult and the details need a lot of attention. Failures are often not the result of sabotage by a specific group, as a lot of political economists would have it, but come about because the whole system was badly conceived to start with and no one has taken the trouble to fix it. In such cases, change can be a matter of figuring out what will work and leading the charge."

"The rules were (obviously) not designed with the objective of undermining the effectiveness of the entire health-care system in India. On the contrary, they were probably put on paper by a well-meaning bureaucrat, who had his own views of what the system should do and did not pay too much attention to what that demanded on the ground. This is what we call, for short, the 'three I's' problem: ideology, ignorance, inertia. This problem plagues many efforts to supposedly help the poor."

"We have no lever guaranteed to eradicate poverty, but once we accept that, time is on our side. Poverty has been with us for many thousands of years; if we have to wait another fifty or hundred years for the end of poverty, so be it. At least we can stop pretending that there is some solution at hand and instead join hands with millions of well-intentioned people across the world - elected officials and bureaucrats, teachers and NGO workers, academics and entrepreneurs - in the quest for the many ideas, big and small, that will eventually take us to that world where no one has to live on 99 cents per day."

[quotes] How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee 2018

 

"And, of course, what was he thinking about? Which was a way of hoping he was thought about me."

"I can say that love and money are what most of my querents wanted to know about... It's the shadow on every kiss and every dollar, that it might not be there tomorrow. If there's a demon lurking when you read your cards, it is inside the querent when they ask about love or money. And it is inside you too, as you read."

"I felt shallow, but I was there because my father had always said, Whatever it is you want to do, find the person who does it best, and then see if they will teach you."

"I was someone who didn't know how to find the path he was on, the one under his feet. This, it seems to me, is why we have teachers."

"You are only one of you, she said. Your unique perspective, at this time, in our age, whether it's on Tunis or the trees outside your windows, is what matters. Don't worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything's been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing it makes it possible."

"Talent isn't enough, she had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they're dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between me and them is that I'm writing. Talent might give you nothing. Without work, talent is only talent - promise, not product. I wanted to learn how to go from being the accident-at-the-beginning to being a writer, and I learned that from her."

"Go to the place in the bookstore where your books will go, she said. Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there."

"I found in it a pattern for the history of half-breeds hidden in every culture: historically, we are allowed neither the privileges of the ruling class nor the community of those who are ruled. To each side that disowns us, we represent everything the other does not have."

"He hollowed his desire to die with the knowledge that other people were dying who wanted to live, and this was the single strongest motive for his participation in direct-action AIDS activism. Being an activist meant, among other things, never being alone, and being alone was when he got in trouble. And so be made sure he was never alone."

"Finding them had made me want to live, and I did. I feel I owe them my survival. The world is not fixed, and the healing is still just part my imagining, though perhaps it is closer than it was."

"I wasn't rich in here in New York, but if I stayed at the magazine, I knew I could get by. I could afford, for example, this meal I was having. I could make my way up the New York magazine-world ladder, a thought that instantly felt hollow."

"The lesson for me at least - and I think of as the gift of the garden, learned every year I lived in that apartment: you can lose more than you thought possible and still grow back, stronger than anyone imagined."

"I think writers are often terrifying to normal people - that is, to nonwriters in a capitalism system - for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that can provoke widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, which of course means access to money, which then becomes time."

"I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was. My longstanding love for singer Roland Gift, for example, came partly from finding out he was part Chinese. The same for the model Naomi Campbell. Unspoken in all of this was that I didn't feel Korean American in a way that felt reliable. I was still discovering that this identity - any identity, really - was unreliable precisely because it was self-made."

"The difference between a historian and a poet is not a matter of using verse or prose: you might put the works of Herodotus into verse and it would be a history in verse no less than in prose. The difference is that the one relates what actually happened, and the other the kinds of events that would happen."

"It is hard to be with someone in the closet, because you are never sure which version of the person you are with - the one who is hidden or the one trying to be free."

"I loved him, in part, for what he might be someday, which is never a good way to love someone. It was in fact a way of rejecting him, a way of rejecting who he is now, and I think in some way we both knew this."

"I could see I had been very angry with her. A child's anger. The child in me had wanted her to figure out what had happened. I had hoped to avoid the humiliation of having to tell her, wanting her to guess my thoughts. The adolescent wish that the mother knows your pain without your having to describe it. But children have to learn to say they are in pain. To name it. The naming even helps heal it."

"The therapist gave me an exercise. You can't get rid of the guardians who've kept you safe until now, he said. You have to give them new jobs. The jobs they have, they've been doing since you were a child."

"You are up against what people will always call the ways of the world - and the ways of this country, which does not kill artists so much as it kills the rationale for art, in part by insisting that the artist must be a successful member of the middle class, if not a celebrity, to be a successful artist. Should you decide that writing is your way to serve your country, or to defend it, you are almost always writing about the country it could become."

"What would you read to someone who was dying? Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell?"

"Conservatism's oldest con is getting a voter to yell 'thief' at someone the thief chooses, the thief they voted for. And now we are in the final phase."

"Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine."