[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."

[quotes] Parable of the Talents - Octavia E. Butler 1998

 

[The back cover has this quote from the New Yorker: "In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Octavia Butler's 'Parable' books may be unmatched." I can't agree with that more. I consumed this book in two days and it made me very paranoid about where the world can be headed under the wrong influence - we are already seeing symptoms of that now. This series also inspires me to build something with community. What can we learn together? How can we nourish each other? How else do we need to prepare the earth and ourselves for the Destiny we define? Oh Octavia Butler, thank you for entering my life.]

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

"Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all ack to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can't read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them."

"Indenturing indigents, young and old, is much in fashion now ... Indenturing indigents is supposed to keep them employed, teach them a trade, feed them, house them, and keep them out of trouble. In fact, it's just one more way of getting people to work for nothing or almost nothing. Little girls are valued because they can be used in so many ways, and they can be coerced into being quick, docile, disposable labor."

"Yet Earthseed is not a fatalistic belief system. God can be directed, focused, speeded, slowed, shaped. All things change, but all things need not change in all ways. God is inexorable, yet malleable. Odd. Hardly religious at all. Even the Earthseed Destiny seems to have little to do with religion."

"We moved Dan's cot so that he could use the garden trowel and watering can, and we let him plant his own seedlings. He, too, did what he had to do without help. The ritual was already important to him. It was something he could do for his sisters and his parents. It was all he could do for them."

"If my mother had created only Acorn, the refuge for the homeless and the orphaned... If she had created Acorn, but not Earthseed, then I think she would have been a wholly admirable person."

"None of us wanted an empty man like Smith in the White House, but even a man without an idea in his head is better than a man who means to lash us all back to his particular God the way Jesus lashed the money changers out of the temple. He used that analogy more than once."

"It shouldn't be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction."

"How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tormented - reeducated - before it begins to matter to the majority of Americans? How does this penning people up look to other countries? Do they know? Would they care? There are worse things happening here in the States and elsewhere, I know. There's war, for instance."

"On the other hand, one way to make people afraid of you is to have a crazy side - a side of yourself or your organization that's dangerous and unpredictable - willing to do any damned thing."

"Kindness eases Change. Love quiets fear."

"I will go with the first ship to leave after my death. If I thought I could survive as something other than a burden, I would go on this one, alive. No matter. Let them someday use my ashes to fertilize their crops. Let them do that. It's arranged. I'll go, and they'll give me to their orchards and their groves."

[poems] catalog of unabashed gratitude - ross gay 2015

 

[ross gay has such a unique talent of being able to string different scenes and thoughts together in a coherent and beautiful way - moving from one thought to another seamlessly. Here are a few of my favorite poems and phrases. And I dream of one day being able to write about my garden as welcomingly as ross gay writes about his orchard.]

to the fig tree on 9th and christian 

ode to buttoning and unbuttoning my shirt

feet

ode to sleeping in my clothes

c'mon!

"beneath which you are now too the canopy of a fig its arms pulling the September sun to it." - to the fig tree on 9th and christian 

"Feel the small song in my chest swell and my coat glisten and twitch." - becoming a horse

"when his loneliness dragged him to a carpeted room in an apartment building in Chinatown" - sharing with the ants

"marching across the long plains of the calf and the meticulously unnamed zone behind the knee over the hamstring into use your imagination for Chrissakes but I will tell you it is dark there and sweet" - sharing with the ants

"the way Myself had made unwittingly a habit of slathering mortar everywhere, almost by accident, for fear of what might forever slip in and be felt;"- the opening

"for jumping and grabbing at once like this a soft thing is hard be gentle she said emerging from the dugout beneath the mulberry tree" - to the mulberry tree

"I can't stop my gratitude, which includes, dear reader, you, for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak. Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it." - catalog of unabashed gratitude

"thank you the ancestor who loved you before she knew you by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long journey, who loved you before he knew you by putting a walnut tree in the ground, who loved you before she knew you by not slaughtering the land" - catalog of unabashed gratitude

"I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward, the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems slipping into your eyes." - catalog of unabashed gratitude

[quotes] When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago 1993

 

"I had my last guava the day we left Puerto Rico."

"My own grandparents, whom I was to respect as well as love, were said to be jibaros. But I couldn't be one, nor was I to call anyone a jibaro, lest they be offended. Even at the tender age when I didn't yet know my real name, I was puzzled by the hypocrisy of celebrating a people everyone looked down on."

"A bubble of rage built inside my chest and forced out a scream meant for Mami's harshness and Papi's indifference but directed at Delsa who was smaller. I pushed her off the stump."

"'Well, it is the soul of a person that writes poetry ... The soul lives inside a person when he's alive. It's the part of a person that feels. A poet's soul feels more than regular people's souls. And that's what makes him write poetry."

"There was no rice on the chart, no beans, no salted codfish. There were big white eggs, not at all like the small round ones our hens gave us. There was a tall glass of milk, but no coffee. There were wedges of yellow cheese, but no balls of cheese like the white queso del pais wrapped in banana leaves sold in bakeries all over Puerto Rico. There were bananas but no plantains, potatoes but no batatas, cereal flakes  but no oatmeal, bacon but no sausages."

"And I wished that I knew how to pray, because then I could speak to God and maybe He or one of His saints could explain things to me. But I didn't know any prayers, because Mami didn't believe in church or holy people, and Papi, even though he read the Bible and could lead novenas for the dead, never talked to us about God."

"But he didn't, and when Abuela came out from her prayers, we sat by the door, working our needles in, around, up, and out, silently making patterns with thread that might have told a story had either one of us known how to transform our feelings into shape."

"I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences."

"I buried my face in the soft space between her neck and shoulder and sought there the fragrance of oregano and rosemary, but all I could come up with was Cashmere Bouquet and the faint flowery dust of Maybeline."

"Someone down there can look up through the hole and see my private parts, I thought. There is someone down there. A dead person is in that water waiting for me to squat so that it can claw me in and drown me in turds and pee. There are eyes looking up from that black pool, seeing parts of me that even I can't see."

"I tossed until dawn, unused to so much room on the bed, while on the other side of the wall, my sisters and brothers slept, their bodies gently rising and falling in rhythm with one another's breathing."

"I crouched against the wall and watched them injure each other without touching each other, hurling words that had the same effect as acid on metal."

"For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created. The Puerto Rican jibara who longed for the green quiet of a tropical afternoon was to become a hybrid who would never forgive the uprooting."

"I dozed, startled awake, panicked when I didn't know where I was, remembered where we were going, then dozed off again, to repeat the whole cycle, in and out of sleep, between earth and sky, somewhere between Puerto Rico and New York."

"They dressed like Americanos but walked with a jaunty hop that made them look as if they were dancing down the street, only their hips were not as loose as Puerto Rican men's were. According to Mami, they too lived in their own neighborhoods, frequented their own restaurants, and didn't like Puerto Ricans."

"Men only want one thing, and until then, I thought it was up to me to give it up. But that's not the way it was. A little girl leaning out a window watching the world fulfilled the promise Marilyn Monroe made with her eyes. I who had promised nothing, who knew even less, whose body was as confusing as the rock and roll lyrics accompanying the trucker's hand pumping up and down to words yelled, not sung."

"We could count on her in a way we had never been able to count on Papi, Tata, or Francisco, who had made everyone happy for such a short time before dying and becoming a ghost that haunted us all for the rest of our lives."

"The men they beat up; the women, they raped. I couldn't stop thinking about it as I walked to school, or home from the library: every man was a potential rapist, and every dark doorway was a potential hiding place for someone waiting to hurt me."

"'You'll be exposed to a different class of people,' she assured me, and I felt the force of her ambition without knowing exactly what she meant."

[quotes] Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals - Alexis Pauline Gumbs 2020

 

[This book was apparently started as a series of Instagram posts and that's just so inspiring to me. I love how accessible and welcoming transformative knowledge has become. Also passages of this book read like beautiful poems.]

"I have to do some work to disrupt the violent colonizing languages of almost all the texts in which I have accessed information about marine mammals and their lives, and families and super-powers and struggles."

"There are at least three ways to love you: as you were, as you are, as you will be. I love you. That means I choose all three."

"I wonder what it means for an ocean dolphin to swim up a river. The bottlenose has a range across the whole planet, the whole open ocean and yet sometimes they will choose the boundaries and specificity of a river, brackish water, narrow shores. Why?"

"And for all of you, ocean dolphins, wondering 'What am I doing in this river full of mud?' Remember why Harriet Tubman went south. She didn't have to. She was skilled, untraceable. She could have been individually free. Unencumbered. But if she wanted to tell an everlasting truth about freedom that would ring across the planet, a message for the ages, she had to live free in unfree spaces. It was the only way to bring us all with her."

"Legally and narratively, our society encourages small, isolated family units and an anti-social state reluctant to care. So care becomes the unsustainable work, the massive unpaid labor that breaks backs, hearts, and the visionary will of multitudes on a regular basis... What can we learn about the failure of the imagined ideal household? What could we learn if we cared to learn?"

"I do know that sometimes people have seen a part of themselves in me too messy to beat. Do I cherish my wildness more than I fear their rejection? Sometimes if I feel all my emotions in public I can't make myself speak. But sometimes I speak anyway."

"Sometimes when someone is avoiding you, they are just avoiding you. We have the right to be obscure. It is not an invitation to colonize us. It is not seduction. Boundaries can be so beautiful. Teach so much."

"The fact that you grew up not knowing that narwhals were a real animal swimming around in the Arctic right now, is not a coincidence. It is the result of a long and lucrative conspiracy. Turns out, since the Middle Ages, whalers, traders, explorers, and even chemists collaborated to hide the existence of the narwhal as a real animal, while selling their tusks as 'unicorn horns' at a huge profit."

"At just the right moment, the scholar Tavia Nyong'o reminded me that to conspire means to breathe together. Like narwhals do by the hundreds every summer. It's happening now. May we activate and renew the oldest conspiracy, remember all the thick impossible breathing before us and after us and with us, too real to be for sale. Too beautiful to be forgotten. Too magical for theft."

"I'm sure neither Moana nor the WWF are perfect, and no, I don't believe that capitalism can heal the Earth, but there is something for me to learn from this rare collaboration across these particular sectors."

"I love the way you live a layered Blackness where Black meets Black across itself as Black. How you make family out of need and tradition out of what is left and found."

"Sometimes when you love the coast enough you become shoreline. Move so steady on the floor algae grows on you. Sometimes the way you love is perfectly on time and very slow is fast enough. So keep on breathing."