Well, I did pass my qualifying exams last week. I guess that’s good?
In all seriousness, I’m very glad past me insisted on finishing that process before they called the election. If not, it’s a lot more likely I’d be planning to drop out. (Being at the state of all-but-dissertation means I am more inclined to complete the process, if partly out of a slightly childish sense of spite that I will not be broken in this final round by of all things a mediocre state university.)
Like many of you, I am angry and sad and riding waves of both anticipatory and present-tense grief (also, I miss my dog more than ever). I am exhausted from election postmortems and incoming regime pre-catastrophizing, but remain easily seduced by spiraling into both just to feel some sense of control. Spending time with friends this week has helped a bit. Take care of yourselves, and take care of people around you.
Also, commit petty vandalism when you can. On Friday I poured an iced coffee onto the hood of a car parked on my street that had a big Trump banner and it felt really great. Except for the part where I had to buy another iced coffee.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms/ meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to / convey that everything ends up fine in the end.
“When people say, “we have made it through worse before””, Clint Smith
To make earth an object of huckstering—the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence—was the last step toward making oneself an object of huckstering.
The Dialectics of Nature, Friedrich Engels (translated by Clemens Dutt)
Encountered while reading a John Foster Bellamy paper on the concept of the “metabolic rift”, because for some sadistic reason my advisor thought that just throwing the reading group directly into Capital Vol. III on this fucking weeks of all weeks would be fine. I think it’s a bit irresponsible to teach the metabolic rift concept as Marx’s alone and not acknowledge that phrase never appears in any of his writings.
Does the implacable fact of death have any purchase whatsoever on its possum-y heart?
“What Do Animals Understand About Death?” Kathryn Schulz for The New Yorker
Submitted by Travis.
Love is contraband in Hell, / cause love is an acid / that eats away bars
Assata: An Autobiography, Assata Shakur
Via Joe on IG.
It is time for scholars to look out beyond our models to the continuing vitality of life, both terrible and wonderful.
“On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales”, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
I have been thinking a lot about scale this week, especially in the context of Election Takes. Literally and rhetorically, scale dictates parameters of analysis—what kind of questions one can consider and what kinds of answers one can imagine. Making the unit of analysis "America" affords an analysis of who "we" are or have always been, for example. Multiscalar analysis is maybe one of the most important critical thinking skills to cultivate, I think, and it worries me how many seemingly smart people are bad at it.
Fighting the lesser evil would mean recognizing the ultimate unity of the Quiet American and the Ugly American, archetypes of this country from its very origins, when settlers arrived in the Garden of Eden and imagined themselves as Adam and Eve, when they were, in fact, the serpent.
“Lesser of Two Evils? Our Fight Is Against Both, No Matter How We Vote”, Viet Thanh Nguyen for Zeteo
Submitted by Richard.