[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.