That Asterisk

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Through my mother's sensibility we learned to find likeness everywhere, an alternative network of things. Somehow these jubilant comparisons only underscored, rather than undermined, the ultimate dignity of our subjects. Our wayward metaphors, those runaway vehicles, heralded the inadequacy as well as the delight of language. In their ludicrous frenzy to define, they revealed the impossibility of absolute definition. They were a way of paying attention to people, of studying mannerisms and situations, but their partiality, ambiguity and absurdity were all admissions that people are only ever themselves, and that there aren't really words for that. For me, there was real peace at the centre of this metaphoric whirl, where the unsaid existential question wasn't "who are you?" but "who are you sort of like?" The plurality of the second question's possible answers was a kind of freedom.

Laurence Scott, Picnic Comma Lightning (156-157)

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The ability of digital technologies to produce and store evidence--maps, videos, paperless trails durably catalogued in vast databases--is warping our concept of trust, making it stand, ironically, for its opposite.

Laurence Scott, Picnic Comma Lightning (100)

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Feel Free by Nick Laird

To deal with all the sensational loss I like to interface with Earth. I like to do this in a number of ways. I like to feel the work I am exerting being changed,

the weight of my person refigured, and I like to hang above the ground, thus; hammocks, snorkeling, alcohol. I also like the mind to feel a kind of neutral buoyancy

and to that end I set aside a day a week, Shabbat, to not act. Having ceded independence to the sunset I will not be shaving, illuminating rooms, or raising

the temperature of food. If occasionally I like to feel the leavening of being near a much larger unnatural tension, I walk off a Sunday through the high fields

of blanket bog, saxifrage, a few thin Belted Galloways, rounding Lough Mallon to stand by the form of beauty upheld in a scrubby acre at Creggandevsky, where I do

duck and enter under a capstone mapped by rival empires of yellow feather-moss and powdery white lichen. I like then to stop, crouched, and press my back on a housing

of actual rock, coldness which lives for a while on the skin. And I like when I give you the nightfeed, Harvey, how you’re really concentrating on it: fists clenched, eyes shut, like this is bliss.

II

I like a steady disruption. I like it when the solid mantle turns to shingle and water rushes up it over and over, in love. My white-noise machine from Argos is set to Crashing Wave

but I’m not averse to the presence of numerous and minute quanta moving very fast in unison; occasions when a light wind undulates the ears of wheat, or a hessian sack of pearl-

barley seed is sliced with a pocket knife and pours. I like the way it sounds pattering on stone. I like how the starlings over Monti cohere and separate their bodies into one cyclonic

symphony, and I like that the hawk of the mind catches at their purse, pulse, caul, arc. I like the excitation passing as a shadow-ripple back and how the bag is snatched, rolls

slack; straight, falciform; mouthing; bulbing; a pumping heart. I like to interface with millions of colored pixels depicting attractive people procreating on a screen itself

dependent on rare metals mined by mud-gray children who trudge up bamboo scaffolding above a grayish-red lake of belching mud. I like how the furnace burning earth instills

in me reflexive gestures of timidity and self-pity and deference as I walk along the kinder surfaces, grass, say, or sand, unable ever to meet with my eyes the gaze of the sun.

III

I can imagine that my first and fifth marriages will be to the same human, a woman, the first marriage working well enough that we decide to try again as soon as it’s,

you know, mutually convenient. I can see that. I like the fact that we’re “supercooled star matter,” even if I can’t envisage you as anything other than warm and bleating. The thing is

I can be persuaded fairly easily to initiate immune responses by the fake safety signals of national anthems, cleavage, family photographs, country lanes, large-eyed mammals, fireworks,

the King James Bible, Nina Simone singing “The Twelfth of Never,” cave paintings, coffins, dolphins, dolmens. But I like it also when the fat impasto of the canvas gets slashed by a tourist

with a claw hammer, and a glimpse is caught of what you couldn’t say. Entanglement I like, spooky action at a distance analogizing some little thing including this long glance across the escalators

or how you know the song before you switch the station on. When a photon of light meets a half-silvered mirror and splits one meets the superposition of two, being twinned: and this repeats.

Tickling your back, Katherine, to get you to sleep, I like to lie here with my eyes closed and think of my schoolfriends’ houses, before choosing one to walk through slowly, room by sunlit room.

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The more I focus on remembering, the more details I am likely to provide, but those particulars may well be invented. And so, I will not expound on the appearance, for example, of the potatoes that lay on the plates in front of me thirty-eight years ago. I will not tell you whether they were pale and boiled or sauteed lightly or au gratin or fried because I do not remember them. If you are one of those readers who relishes memoirs filled with impossibly specific memories, I have this to say: those authors who claim perfect recall of their hash browns decades later are not to be trusted.

Siri Hustvedt, Memories of the Future

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That One Time I Stayed Up All Night Making Excuses to Talk to Danger by Tarfia Faizullah

Maybe it was my old friend Fascination

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But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhabiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the same margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again--not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (112)

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If any of us 'become' a normative ideal once and for all, we have then overcome all striving, all inconsistency, all complexity. That is, lost some crucial dimension of what it is to be living.

Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (39)

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How we say each other's names out loud is one of the ways in which we position ourselves, publicly, in relation to each other, to other people, to languages, to cultures, to knowledge, and to power--consciously, as well as inadvertently. It's how we intimidate each other, patronize each other, how we surreptitiously deny each other the right to speak. It's also how we approach each other, show affection, show our care and our love. It's how we get close and bear witness to our closeness, our long-term or short-lived bonds. It's how we create these relations, one-directional, or reciprocal, passing names like warm pebbles amongst ourselves. It's how we work out who we will have conversations with, how we decide who we can and who we want to talk to.

Kate Briggs, This Little Art

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We have to dance, and fight, and make love, and fight, and live, and fight, all with the same ferocity. There are no half measures to be had. It is true, yes, that joy in a violent world can be rebellion. Sex can be rebellion. Turning off the news and watching two hours of a mindless action film can be rebellion. But without being coupled with any actual HARD rebellion, without reaching our hands into revolutionary action, all you've done is had a pretty fun day of joy, sex, and a movie.

Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (101)

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What Hero loved most wasn't the cadre names people chose, but the word kasama itself: kasama, pakikisama. In Ilocano, the closest word was kadwa. Kadwa, makikadwa. Companion, but that English word didn't quite capture its force. Kasama was more like the glowing, capacious form of the word with: with as verb, noun, adjective, and adverb, with as a way of life. A world of with-ing.

Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart (109)

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Why romantic comedies matter

Vox’s Culture team examines the past, present, and hopeful future of the rom-com.

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Clara Balaguer of Hardworking Goodlooking and the Office of Culture and Design discusses the potential for brand "wokeness," the role of design in equity movements, and her timely research project—a close look at political trolls in the Philippines at a time when the alt-right is ascending internationally. She also issues a challenge for designers critical of Black Lives Matter's use of a certain typeface: "Use Comic Sans, Curlz, Brush Script, Papyrus. Understand why people respond to it."

“A tiny toolbox: mutual reinforcement, aggressively crediting sources (or aggressively encoding the ones who desire anonymity), relinquishing authorship when advantageous, welcoming the artful error, workshopping the uncomfortable, idea echoing (memetics), asking for help, making time and making room for others, identifying existing local structures to be reinforced rather than alien ones to be imposed, smaller scopes but well-documented, grassroots qualitativeness, speed of execution and prototyping (to elude detection, control, co-optation), low fidelity, listening to the frontline, repeat tacticality, demanding the right to rest, shift labor, skill pooling, collective authorship, (domestic) space sharing, small-scale and/or ethical piracy.”

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When I think of the sort of light that is a woman--when I think of each woman's particular contours and colour and way of burning--the idea of trying to make that light burn persistently at exactly the same wattage and intensity over decades seems to me a terrifying task to set oneself, not unlike lighting a candle and expecting no wax to ever melt. We melt, we melt, and finally we're extinguished. But what interesting shadows we throw on the wall, depending on the hour, and how various are the ways that wax can melt, how many different forms and shapes it can take! Some pretty, some not so pretty...oh, it's not easy, ageing, but it is consistently interesting.

Zadie Smith in Elle India’s June issue

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Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from the impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented (e.g. the creation of representation itself), but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.

Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

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Opinion | Decolonizing the Art Museum: The Next Wave

Museums must stop seeing activists as antagonists. They must position themselves as learning communities, not impenetrable centers of self-validating authority.

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I bet the steady well never complains about all the flash dipping in, coins, coins, and more coins. This life is a fist of fast wishes caught by nothing but the fishhook of tomorrow's tug. I shoved my money in the water once, threw it like a guaranteed ticket to cash; it never came true, not the wish, nor the towering person I was bound to be. But the back-of-the-throat thrill was real, when the surface's shine broke. It was enough to go back again and again, and throw my whole jonesing body in.

Ada Limón, “The Plunge”