Trees are plants that people call trees—a term of dignity, not botany.
Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees, Jared Farmer
Submitted by Charlie via Liat.
History gives Sih Hsuin a rash, the random ebb and flow.
The Overstory, Richard Powers
Appropriate to the previous sentence, I re-read this novel on Friday because I've been trying to write about minerals kind of from the perspective of a mineral and The Overstory's approach to writing about trees is an inescapable point of reference. In some ways I think it's harder to write the lives of minerals than trees because minerals are generally understood as enabling biological life rather than part of it—passive, incidental witnesses to the emergence of cellular life, not themselves agents. This isn't to say Powers had an easier task—writing about/as trees is not an easy task! And yes, Powers absolutely has some incredible tree sentences, e.g.:
A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.
Its cones, small, downward sleigh bells content in constant silence.
Nearby lodgepoles and jack pines demur: Long answers need long time.
But! The bottom line is the reason Powers could pull off the incredible tree stuff is because he's already a poet. The non-tree sentences, like the one above, are so exceptionally crafted. Here's some more:
Every hug is a small, soft jail.
(This sentence describes how a child feels about being hugged by his mother!! Fucking legend, conveying layers of complexity in seven words!!)
Somewhere in all these boundless, compounding, swelling canyons of imprinted paper, encoded in the millions of tons of loblolly pine fiber, there must be a few words of truth, a page, a paragraph that could break the spell of fulfillment and bring back danger, need, and death.
There was a brief pause, so pregnant that anyone would have given it a seat on a tram.
This Mastodon thread by @marccold@glammr.us
Submitted by Jaime.
Alongside the greedy appetite of my mind, I am an all-in or all-out kind of bitch in terms of heart and body.
"Why It's Taking So Long", Johanna Hedva for Topical Cream
Read this essay via Maeve reposting it, I think. There is an Ackeresque capaciousness to Hedva's work and this sentence is an excellent encapsulation of that. Incidentally, they published a novel last month.
Oh great, heckles from the mystics.
I'm not sure which early-aughts indie band would have an obscure b-side titled Heckles from the Mystics but I would probably have loved it.
In the meantime, Microsoft plows ahead with its attempts to humanize computing as demonstrated by its multibillion-dollar faith in OpenAI and its GPT large langue model technology, which was recently fed into an AI-powered version of Bing, Microsoft's long-suffering search engine.
"Clippy designer was too embarrassed to include him in his portfolio", Richard Currie for The Register
Submitted by Wesley. Is any kind of faith more hollow than a multi-billion dollar faith?