Tag: books

Oluo speaks

Speaks to me:

When people met my mother, they would look at her with pity, imagining the story of a white woman lost—lured and abandoned by Blackness and left with two Black children to forever remind her of her fall.

Ijeoma Oluo, page 12, “Whipped for Lying with a Black Woman”, 400 Souls.

Speaks to me:

“There was no record of the Black woman in question being punished for polluting herself with whiteness. [Hugh] Davis was whipped for polluting whiteness—his own and that of his community. This was the first recorded case … and that “pure” whiteness must be protected through law.” (12).

But I am not white—I’m not even half-white. My mother is white. I am Black.

I explained to her: “You cannot become part white.” // Whiteness sis a ledge you can only fall from. // The fact that whiteness was something that could exist only in purity, not in percentages, was something reinforced throughout my entire life.

Speaks truth to future power

I’m only on page 18 and historian Alfred McCoy has me excited inside a nonfiction tome as if I’m reading a fiction epic:

Born of war and conquest, empires are unstable, even volatile forms of governance that often exhibit contradict attributes — they are constant yet changing, idealistic but barbaric, and powerful yet fragile.… When a ruling political party retreats from rationality into delusional politics, that nation forfeits both its claim to and capacity for global leadership.

Alfred W. McCoy. To Govern the Globe: World Orders & Catastrophic Change. Haymarket Books. 2021. page 18.

The writing synthesizes disparate stimuli and phenomena that I’ve witnessed and bundled them in ways that better explain for me what’s happening. How what is occurring right now is not unique, as I’ve know it isn’t. McCoy is unsparing in his analysis and descriptions of the arrogance and corruption that constitute delusion. This is most refreshing when the common self-congratulatory statements tend to be “how America’s greatest days are ahead.” We know they are not.

The sooner the people decouple their sense of self from their nationality and the nationalist tendencies in state building, the clearer we will be about meaning, vitality, and who’s decline this is.

Some maxims:

“the concept of geopolitics has proved more useful for those who prefer to analyze empires rather than build them.” (24)

geopolitics is essentially a method for the management of empire through the use of geography (air, land, and sea) to maximize military and economic advantage. (19)

an exploration of world orders requires an understanding of the term “empire,” which has carried an ideological taint that long barred its serious study in the United States. (15)

lacking the boundaries of a nation-state or the powerful, visible presence of an empire, world orders might seem intangible or even imagined. (15)

world orders are much more deeply rooted, resilient global systems created by a convergence of economic, ideological and geopolitical forces…. Lacking the sovereignty of nations and the raw power of empires, world orders are essentially broad agreements about relations among nation-states and their people’s, lending them an amorphous, even elusive quality. (9)

Pages 60 to 70 are some of the best consecutive pages I have read in a long time as they situate the circumstances of what is unknown and what is being grasped to become known and familiar.

The personal transformation that arrives through day after day of dedication and not being dissuaded by a dearth of the right materials nor by the lack of skills or absence of familiarity. But the affirmation and realizations that come with continuing to be, do, and become.

The escalation of the story builds my anticipation and the end of a chapter has me feeling giddy, as I recall the euphoria of childhood and boyhood and being able to rise to some new level that has been unreachable in prior days.

The sentences are beautiful how they carry the feelings, the tastes, the smells and the sounds coming from inside his body, the impacts of his body with the ice and the air and the sun and the routines at dusk and nighttime culminating in abilities that come from continuously being imperfect yet persistent.

How there is joy inside in spite of the most horrendous set up.

These are some of what I experience and ride in pages 60-70 of Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese.

Great Mystery we honour

My grandmother had always referred to the universe as the Great Mystery.

Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse, page 65.

“We need mystery. Creator in her wisdom knew this. Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. They are the foundations of humility, and humility, grandson, is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel this. We honour it by letting it be that way forever.”

Ibid.

The transformation that comes from practice and doing the same tasks over and over for many days. The chores build strength and speed and competency. The isolation fosters individuation and delight at the ability to accomplish and notice the changes that come with being able to simply do and with time master at what was once impossible.

This or that or that other that

The opportunity cost of the last hour has been:

  • to read the fiction by Kaitlyn Greenidge
  • read about how to plant a tree
  • write this blog post
  • write toward the other writing projects I’ve got marinating and fermenting inside.

Fortunately, the tree transplant needs a few days before replanting so that gives me until tonight or mañana. Now this blog post is nearly done. And the fiction is before me. And the writing projects is still marinating.

I’m aware of this at this moment as I seek to be intentional and rigorous about doing more of the things that have particular significance though they are also things that I’m less adept and less innate to do on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Sometimes I’ll do something but not more it or remember it and when I do remember it I don’t think of myself as having done so as frequently as I might have done it. That is one way that I belittle myself and make myself less small by not recalling when and what I did. So if I’m not doing something so frequently to know that I’ve done it, then I need to figure out the place and way that I’m writing it down so I can find that place where I wrote it says/weeks/month ago to quiet the inner critic that is so omnipresent to diminish the actions and moves and complete cycles that I have done.

It’s tricky this tendency to do something and be someone and then forget that was what I did or who I was such that I don’t remember thy about myself at all. It’s a simple way to erase who I am and what my recent history was. There’s some who write that forgetting is essential to the functioning of our brains but this habitual forgetting makes me smaller in my own cognition and my consciousness.

So I’m practicing and building my memory and skillsets to track and therefore remember. When I cannot remember with my internal gauges I will have to write it down either on paper, a smartphone, a journal or a hash mark on a wall.

I suppose that the tracking, too, is a form or practice.

All the things

How once everything—the good and the bad—seemed like a reflection of the place you were born and how these days, instead, everything—the good and the bad—seems written in the depth of our flesh.

Trick, by Domenico Starnone, page 109.

The decade inside of —

The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight. There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice. May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs.

Bayo Akomolafe

Dozens of questions

I was looking for an interview of/with Dorion Sagan revolving around Notes from the Holocene, which I’d borrowed from the library a few weeks ago. I have yet to read a page, though sometimes these internet-parallel searches offer just enough carrot to lead me to open a book tomorrow. So, for Dorion, there is tomorrow.

I cannot recall how I came to learn about Dorion Sagan though it was following the reading about his mother, Lynn Margulis.

Not finding any interview, I did encounter a summary and review of the Powell’s bookstore website that included these 12 questions lifted from the book:

  • Why does life exist?
  • Why do we drink water?
  • Can we save the Earth from global warming?
  • Are human beings central and special?
  • Is it possible that we’ve arisen by pure chance?
  • Is the Earth an organism?
  • Are we part of it’s exo-brain?
  • if it is alive, can it reproduce?
  • Can the universe?
  • What does the future hold in store for us?
  • Does God exist?
  • What is the nature of ultimate reality?

Earlier tonight, I spent 10 minutes flipping through pages of the online encyclopedia better known as Wikipedia where I read about: the Holocene, the Pleistocene, the Meghalayan stage and the caves of Meghalaya, the Younger Dryas, regolith, and the Mid Pleistocene Transition or Mid Pleistocene Revolution.

All of this after the weekend’s atmospheric events surrounding the Hunga Tonga Volcano that was somehow heard in Alaska (5,000 miles across the Pacific) and initiated some 70,000 lightning bolts in some short span of time (maybe 60 minutes) where there were 15 lightnings per second and seemingly 1/50th the severity of the 1991 explosion of Mount Pinatubo.

I read decades ago that something along the lines of, “the universe is so big, human brains are so small” was attributed to Osho.

Working with what is happy

Ooh. It’s been a long, often lost voyage to come to more feeling and emotion. In my 40s, I’m beginning to experience rage and acknowledge anger when anger is something different than sadness because as a child I knew sadness when it occurred but I avoided eye contact with anger and fled from rage.

So, it is stirring, a slightly scary sort, to read this question:

“What would you like to put into a book that would make you happy?”

https://miamirail.org/literature/widening-the-horror-genre-a-conversation-with-victor-lavalle/

I would put into a book are: justice; heartbreak and some redemption or newfound life following such ache; death, and the accompanying despair and disappearing that is colloquially ghosting but in fact is so much more than a brash decision; humor, wit; overlooked and underrepresented adjectives in current vernacular.

Just today, I read in a novel how genie derives from jinn. I may have read that genie cokes from this Islamic mystical and spiritual type but I’d forgotten that even though I’d only read about jinn a few months ago.

I’d also write about intuition and the bizarre occurrences that are not coincidence. And the magic of the outdoors and the wild and the minute being that we humans are yet we are holons on earth.

From the oven to my belly

7 of the 19 windows currently open are on the smittenkitchen.com domain, those being:

Earlier today, I baked the corn pudding recipe for the first time. But that page is no longer open so it isn’t in the list above though it was the gateway to a number of these other sweet, baked things. The estimated cook and prep time was 40 minutes but between bathroom assistance and reading two books, it was closer to two hours before that was finished. It took about two hours for all of the dish to be gone, too.

As the list above reveals, I like to bake. And I like chocolate. And I keep coming back to SK and Deb Perelman because the simplicity and the reductions in how to prepare is a relief and the food when finished is devoured.

Deb Perelman’s website is up there with Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food cookbook as a few of the constants that I return again and again. I only began to use Perelman after a friend’s recommendation of World Peace Cookies in December 2016 whereas I’ve had Bittman’s cookbook since 2002.

I frequent the site for Saveur and Food52 as well but not with the frequency of the others.

Blowback: haunts the future

From the 2000 book Blowback: the costs and consequences of American Empire (published by Metropolitan Books) by Chalmers Johnson, who was in the Navy, stationed in Japan, researched China, then did intelligence work or informant with and for federal agencies.

“There is a logic to empire that differs from the logic of a nation, and acts committed in service to an empire but never acknowledged as such have a tendency to haunt the future.” (pg 8)

“The United States, however, is the world’s most prominent target for blowback, being the world’s lone imperial power, the primary source of the sort of secret and semi secret operations that shore up repressive regimes, and by far the largest seller of weapons generally.” (pg 11)

Staying this after acknowledging how Russia, Japan, and Israel had received blowback in the 1990s, none of which compared with the magnitude of energy and animosity directed at the US.

“Blowback itself can lead to more blowback, in a spiral of destructive behavior. A good illustration of this lies in the government’s reaction to the August 7, 1998, bombings of American embassy buildings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (pg 10)