things making my head swim

as it turns out, I don't know how to read.

Certainly challenging myself with the reading material this week. I’m going to work my way through these again. I’ve noticed that I’m very good at bullshitting, by gathering a cursory understanding of a subject by re-phrasing what I’ve just encountered. What I’m not very good at (sometimes) is being patient enough to go slowly, ask questions, and develop a deeper understanding. Maybe we can make sense of these together. These articles are interesting. Let me know what you think.

What the Meadow Teaches Us - Andreas Weber

“If you want to understand the extent to which your own existence results from the collective work of diverse organisms, you must go outside on nights such as this, when the moonlight on the diaphanous hillsides makes them seem almost translucent and fireflies tumble through the gloaming like tiny stars gone astray.”

Puppies, Instars and the Kingdom of the Mind - River Kenna

“Most of us born in the past couple centuries are born into a world where our minds rule our lives. The mind has conquered and suppressed the body, the heart, the soul, basically everything about us. If you have an emotion without a rational basis—smoosh it down. If your soul stirs and shouts that your career is destroying it—crush that uprising right away. Your body has persistent aches and pains—take some pills or find a mechanical solution, but under no circumstances should you ask the body about its needs.”

The Futurist Manifesto - Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

“Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire, hatred and speed! Does this surprise you? it is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world's summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!”

Violent Antagonisms - Tobi Haslett and Jessica Swoboda

“The implicit understanding is that if you’re committed, if you’re too overtly political, then you’ve made some Faustian pact with vulgarity. Am I overstating that? I have no idea. But in reviews, novelists actually get bonus points for not having a political perspective. There’s a long history to this that I can’t summarize well here. But even today certain kinds of critics—sometimes very established—are invested in displaying their exhaustion with politically inflected art. And I think: What are you exhausted with? Where did this twee McCarthyism come from? You’re an American. You’ve barely ever consumed any left-wing cultural production. You grew up middle-class in the most philistine capitalist state there has ever been, but you’re acting like you were raised on a diet of socialist realism and state radio broadcasts. Your closest experience to agitprop is Sesame Street. Your fatigue is so unearned, I can’t stand it. The neo-aestheticist boredom with social critique? That’s vulgar. And self-professed aesthetes should write good sentences, frankly. I guess some of them probably do. I end up thinking exactly what they think of people like me. I get snobbish about their snobbery. I read that sort of thing and go—oh dear. Pleasure? Profound feelings? How reductive. What a boorish, mechanical view of what art does and is for.”

I Am for an Art - Claes Oldenburg

“I am for the art of punching and skinned knees and sat-on bananas. I am for the art of kids’ smells. I am for the art of mama-babble.
I am for the art of bar-babble, tooth-picking, beer-drinking, egg-salting, in-sulting. I am for the art of falling off a barstool.”

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And, as a salve, I’ll include some old favorites that have popped back onto my radar:

For the Love of Mayonnaise - Rick Bragg

“This is a story of tragic romance.

I love that condiment, love it the way Odysseus loved Penelope, Samson loved Delilah, Lancelot loved Guinevere. I know, as they all must have known, that this will not end well, but I am not ashamed.

When I am on my deathbed, probably from a lifetime of bad cholesterol, I hope someone gives me a little packet of Hellmann’s, or Kraft, or Duke’s, or Bama, so I can slip it underneath my pillow like a scrap of scripture or a family photo. It will comfort me, I believe, as darkness falls. Then again, someone could just make me a sandwich.”

Marrying Absurd - Joan Didion

“Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobsters and call girls and ladies’ room attendants with amyl nitrite poppers in their uniform pockets.”