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@ikobel
The stunning diamond drop Faberge tiara of Queen Maria Jose of Italy.
November, 1916 Ad for Standard Patterns. Click to enlarge!
Passionate about little baby potatoes baked with garlic, butter, rosemary, and sea salt
Just spent a couple hours digging into this book. I'm not even sure what has worse environmental impacts, the paper the book is made of or the opinions printed within.
Is "post-colonial" literary theory a joke? It's distressing that a book printed in 2021 by a reputable academic press can be so painfully Eurocentric, and I mean PAINFULLY. The philosophical and literary frameworks drawn upon in most chapters are like what some British guy in 1802 would come up with. In most of the chapters, every framework, terminology, and example is inseparably fused to Latin, Greek, and/or Christian philosophers, myths and texts, even down to the specific turns of phrase. You would think only Europeans had history or ideas until the 20th century.
Don't get me wrong, non-european and even specifically anti-colonial sources are used, and I don't think all the writers are white people, but...that's what's so weird and off-putting about it, most of the book as a whole utterly fails to absorb anything from non-European and in particular anti-colonial points of view. The chapters will quote those points of view but not incorporate them or really give their ideas the time of day, just go right back to acting like Plato and Aristotle and Romantic poets are the gold standard for defining what it means to be human.
In brief, the book is trying to examine how literature can shed light on the climate crisis, which is funny because it completely fails to demonstrate that literature is good or helpful for the climate crisis. Like that is for sure one major issue with it, it shows that people *have* written stuff about climate change, but it sure doesn't convince you that this stuff is good.
Most of the works quoted are rather doomerist, and a lot of the narrative works specifically are apocalypse tales where most of Earth's population dies. The most coherent function the authors can propose that literature fulfills is to essentially help people understand how bad things are. One of the essays even argues that poetry and other creative work that simply appreciates nature is basically outdated, because:
“One could no longer imagine wandering lonely as a cloud, because clouds now jostle in our imaginations with an awareness of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other atmospheric pollutants” (Mandy Bloomfield, pg. 72)
Skill issue, Mandy.
The menace of doomerism in fiction and poetry is addressed, by Byron Caminero-Santangelo, on page 127 when he references,
the literary non-fiction of a growing number of authors who explicitly assert, some might even say embrace, the equation between fatalistic apocalyptic narrative and enlightenment…they are authoritative in their rejection of any hope and in their representation of mitigatory action as the cliched moving of deckchairs on a sinking ship
He quotes an essay “Elegy for a country’s seasons” by Zadie Smith, who says: “The fatalists have the luxury of focusing on an eschatological apocalyptic narrative and on the nostalgia of elegy, as well as of escape from uncertainty and responsibility to act." Which is spot-on and accurate, but these observations aren't recognized as a menace to positive action, nor is the parallel to Christian thought that eagerly looks forward to Earth's destruction as a cathartic release from its pain made fully explicit and analyzed. Most of the creative works referenced and quoted in the book ARE this exact type of fatalistic, elegiac performance of mourning.
I basically quit reading after Chapter 11, "Animals," by Eileen Crist, which begins:
The humanization of the world began unfolding when agricultural humans separated themselves from wild nature, and started to tame landscapes, subjugate and domesticate animals and plants, treat wild animals as enemies of flocks and fields, engineer freshwater ecologies, and open their psyches to the meme of the ‘the human’ as world conquerer, ruler and owner.
This is what I'm talking about when I say it's dripping Eurocentrism; these ideas are NOT universal, and it's adding nothing to the world to write them because they fall perfectly in line with what the European colonizing culture already believes, complete with the lingering ghost of a reference to the Fall of Man and banishment from the Garden of Eden. It keeps going:
“Over time, the new human elaborated a view of the animal that ruptured from the totemic, shamanic and relational past.”
Okay so now she's introducing the idea of progression from shamanic nature-worshipping religions of our primitive past...hmm I'm sure this isn't going anywhere bad
“While humanity has largely rejected the colonizing project with respect to fellow humans, the occupation of non-human nature constitutes civilization’s last bastion of ‘normal’ colonialism. A new humanity is bound sooner or later to recognize and overthrow a colonialism of ‘nature,’ embracing a universal norm of interspecies justice.” (pg. 206)
OKAY????
Not only denying that colonialism still exists, but also saying that humans' relationship with nature constitutes colonialism??
Embracing limitations means scaling down the human presence on demographic and economic fronts…(pg.207)
ope, there's the "we have to reduce the human population"
Embracing limitations further mandates pulling back from vast expanses of the natural world, thus letting the lavishness of wild (free) nature rule Earth again” (pg. 207)
aaaaaaand there's the "we have to remove humans from wild nature so it can be freeeeeee"
don't get me wrong like I am a random white person with no particular expertise in anti-colonialist thought but I think this is an easy one. I'm pretty sure if your view of nature is that colonialism involving subjugating humans doesn't exist any more and actually humans existing in and altering nature is the real colonialism so we should remove humans from vast tracts of earth, your opinion is just bad.
Anyways y'all know I have an axe to grind against doomerism so it was probably obvious where this was going but good grief.
Climate activism is never going to get anywhere until it is widely acknowledged that discomfort is not automatically virtuous, helpful, or productive, and in fact self-harm can be incredibly psychologically rewarding and even addictive.
Despair will not make you better than other people. Despair will not protect you from feeling grief. Despair will not cleanse you of guilt you feel from being human. Despair does not identify you as more informed, smarter, or more mature. Despair definitely does not make your actions more effective and impactful.
Perhaps we do need poems about climate grief, but perhaps we need to also confront the phenomenon of self-centered "grief" over things that are not dead.
As poets grieve the loss of Nature, others are learning to love and be embraced by her for the first time, being changed and shaped by Nature's wonders, being healed by Nature's lessons of possibility, self-compassion, and regeneration. As poets grieve the loss of the forests, protestors protect trees from bulldozers with their bodies. As poets grieve the loss of the amphibians, someone is digging a pond.
it was beautifully sunny and foggy this morning & i stopped to take a photo of this white egret
'do you think you're superior for not using AI in your work' thank you for asking! yes i do
Theo van Hoytema (Dutch, 1863–1917), "Three Swallows"
i feel the urgency of not wanting to fail and the pull of just wanting to give up at the same time
born from her mother’s wrath.
russian doll (all gifs from trueloveistreacherous) / on earth we’re briefly gorgeous — ocean vuong / like mother, like daughter — frances kearny / mother — john lennon / I, tonya / shameless / piss river — kevin morby / camille preaker & rue bennett / killing eve / the witch / pearl — mitski / spellbinding photos of a mother and daughter lost in their own fantasy world — sahara borja / poplar street — chen chen / kyoto — phoebe bridgers / the unbearable lightness of being — milan kundera / ladybird, thirteen, sex education / black swan / elektra / hurt — nine inch nails
to me this website is for reblogging pictures of candles and graveyards and cathedrals and streets and statues and jars and the ocean and nebulas and trees and the moon and bones and medical equipment and blood and bats and crows and owls and cats and dogs and wolves and deep sea creatures and vampires and people in leather and goth album art and sublime romantic paintings and abstract art and tasteful erotic photography and old medical diagrams and body horror. And music links also. And some other stuff too
every night before i go to sleep i get on my knees at the foot of my bed and pray to god that he sends me a toxic situationship to consume myself with all winter long