The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 113, July 10, 2022 (V3 #9)
“When old cultural assumptions are challenged, innovations are not seen as mere novelties but as a social ill, a critical moral infection, and attacked as such by the upholders of tradition.”—Philip Slater
“Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.”—Ulysses S. Grant
“I don’t always feel robustly hopeful. Depression is something I’ve struggled with. I’ve found the world an unbearable place for months at a time in the last two years. But at the same time I don’t feel like there’s a place in my work for my despair.”—Krista Tippett
All the doubts and hesitations
I built up in my early years
Are under reconsideration
Through the music of the spheres
Which I cannot deny any longer
When every night, I reconvene
With these vibrations givin' proof of
The ghost in the machine
--“Ghost in the Machine,” Dawes
Politics
“We Always Bring a Butter Knife to a Gunfight”: How Democrats Failed to Respond to the Supreme Court, and What They Need to Do Now: A conversation with Brian Fallon, once a top aide to Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, who now runs Demand Justice, an advocacy group dedicated to reforming the courts, Chris Smith, Vanity Fair, 7/5/22
The Glaring Contradiction of Republicans’ Rhetoric of Freedom: Democratic governors are showing the national party how to challenge the red states’ rollback of rights, Ronald Brownstein, Atlantic, 7/8/22: “You cannot focus on kitchen-table issues when the table of our democracy is being lit on fire by the other side … You’ve got to call it out.”
This Good Man, Lucian K. Truscott IV, Newsletter, 7/8/22
Choose your reality: Trust wanes, conspiracy theories rise, David Klepper, AP News, 7/9/22
Civil War is “On the Table”: Jeff Sharlet on the Martyrdom of Ashli Babitt and What’s to Come: The Vanity Fair contributing editor discusses his journey among the Jan. 6 cultists, while contributor Willem Marx breaks down Boris Johnson’s downfall, Emily Jane Fox, Joe Hagan, Vanity Fair, 7/8/22: “The fringe has become the center.”
A Dangerous Theory Will Have Its Day in the U.S. Supreme Court, Marc Elias, Democracy Docket, 7/6/22: “Lies are turning into laws…”
The ‘Independent State Legislature Theory,’ Explained: This dubious legal theory could have dramatic consequences for elections, Ethen Herenstein, Thomas Wolf, Brennan Center, 6/30/22: “The independent state legislature theory is a reading of the Constitution, pushed in recent years by a small group of advocates, that would give state legislatures wide authority to gerrymander electoral maps and pass voter suppression laws. It has even been used as political cover to try to overturn elections.”
The Supreme Court's EPA ruling was the beginning of something bigger, Maxine Joselow, Washington Post, 7/6/22
A Crisis Historian Has Some Bad News for Us: Adam Tooze, a historian of economic disaster, sees a combination of worrisome signs, Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic, 7/5/22: “As Tooze sees it, the forces of central-bank tightening, war, inflation, and climate change are reinforcing one another. He is offering no reassurance about where that might head—only the hope that perhaps this polycrisis might be knowable to us.”
The Trump Family Behaves Exactly How You’d Expect in Documentary Subpoenaed by Jan. 6 Committee: Vapid, unhinged, and in potentially compromising positions that could come back to haunt them, Bess Levin, Vanity Fair, 7/5/22
Ron Johnson Lied, Jedd Legum, Popular Information, 6/28/22: “Despite Johnson's apparent involvement in a plot to subvert the election results by delivering a slate of fake electors to Pence, his reelection campaign is supported by major corporations.”
Can a corporation "own" a color? A handful of companies have pushed the boundaries of intellectual property law by laying claim to individual colors, Zachary Crockett, The Hustle, 6/25/22
COVID as Metaphor: Beware the disabling potential of facile comparisons, Robert Kuttner, American Prospect, 7/6/22: “COVID, consciously or subconsciously, has become a metaphor for our helplessness in the face of the broader calamities afflicting our polity, society, and planet.”
A 13-Year-Old Wearing a Bisexual Flag Was Arrested While Protesting in Florida “Just don’t resist, it’s okay, I got you, mom’s right behind you,” the 13-year-old’s mother said on video, James Factora, Them, 7/6/22
What Discourse Regulation by Social Media Giants Means For Democratic Societies: Free Speech and Disinformation in the Digital Age, Jamie Susskind, LitHub, 7/5/22
There’s an antifeminist backlash silencing women – more and more literally: Powerful men are using defamation lawsuits to shut down allegations against them, and anti-choice groups are trying to pass laws criminalizing speech about abortion, Moira Donegan, The Guardian, 7/7/22
By order of the Prophet
We ban that boogie sound
Degenerate the faithful
With that crazy Casbah sound
But the Bedouin, they brought out
The electric camel drum
The local guitar picker
Got his guitar-pickin' thumb
As soon as the Sharif had cleared the square
They began to wail
—from “Rock the Casbah,” The Clash, by Mellor John/Jones Michael Geoffrey/Headon Nicholas Bowen
Science and Environment
Climate Change Breaks Plant Immune Systems. Can They Be Rebooted? When temperatures rise, plants mysteriously lose their ability to defend against invading pathogens—but there may be a fix, Gregory Barber, Wired, 7/5/22
Bringing Back the Beasts: Global Rewilding Plans Take Shape: With a growing number of studies demonstrating the importance of large mammals to healthy ecosystems, scientists are proposing concrete plans to reintroduce these animals to the wild. The return of just 20 species to native habitats, they say, could be a boon to biodiversity, Janet Marinelli, Yale Environment 360, 7/5/22
Ancient Nautilus, Uncertain Future: The nautilus’s lineage made it through all five of Earth’s previous mass extinctions. But can it survive the Anthropocene? Kate Evans, Hakai, 7/5/22
New Study Identifies Rapidly Emerging Threats to Oceans: The push to extract materials and food from the oceans at industrial scale menaces vulnerable communities and biodiversity, Rachel Rodriguez, Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News, 7/7/22
Fin whales return to historic feeding grounds in conservation win, Ivana Saric, Axios, 7/7/22: “a sign that if you enforce management and conservation, there are chances for species to recover.”
Could This Ancient Farming Technique Be a Climate Solution? Terracing has been used for centuries to help prevent fire, moderate temperatures, and make farming possible even when water is scarce, Guia Baggi, Yes Magazine, 7/7/22
Time for Solar Energy to Shine: President Biden made waves with recent actions to boost solar manufacturing, but states have been busy, too, Tara Lohan, The Revelator, 7/5/22
Under Bolsonaro policy, invaders seize control of 250,000 hectares of Indigenous lands: part of the Jair Bolsonaro administration’s wider refusal to demarcate Indigenous lands, and has resulted in an increase in invasions even in states with regularized territories, such as Mato Grosso, Pará and Roraima, Caio de Freitas Paes, Monga Bay, 7/7/22
Huge underground search for mysterious dark matter begins, Seth Borenstein, AP News, 7/7/22: “In a former gold mine a mile underground, inside a titanium tank filled with a rare liquified gas, scientists have begun the search for what so far has been unfindable: dark matter.”
The worst virus variant just arrived. The pandemic is not over, Editorial Board, Washington Post, 7/7/22
The BA.5 story: The takeover by this Omicron sub-variant is not pretty, Eric Topol, Ground Truths, 6/27/22: “The Omicron sub-variant BA.5 is the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen. It takes immune escape, already extensive, to the next level, and, as a function of that, enhanced transmissibility, well beyond Omicron (BA.1) and other Omicron family variants that we’ve seen (including BA.1.1, BA.2, BA.2.12.1, and BA.4).”
Let me tell you, let me tell
you, it
is the repetitions
keep us going anyway
—from “Ritual VIII,” Paul Blackburn
Birds
Climate change complicates a precarious relationship between birds and farmers: New England songbirds often nest in farm fields, where they’re threatened by mowing and other farm equipment, YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections, 7/4/22
Bird Poop: The Next Frontier of Avian Conservation: Far from waste, a splotch of feces contains valuable information about a bird’s diet, Jenny McKee, Audubon, Summer 2022
How the Great Salt Lake’s dropping water level is affecting a Utah bird refuge, Mike Anderson, KSL-TV, 7/9/22
In Nebraska’s Loess Canyons, Setting Trees Ablaze Gives Prairie Birds a Boost: For generations Great Plains ranchers saw fire as a foe. Now they’re banding together and embracing it as a tool to restore grassland habitat, Brianna Randall, Audubon, Summer 2022
Knife in the Water
The vampire as symptom of industrialist-capitalist civilization—
not as harmless a joke as may appear. “you don’t mess with the
powers” –or, you do mess with them, every minute: “strictly your
own risk.”
think of those two, the beauty & the wit, so destroyed one in
body, the other in spirit for all we know—by the very “beast,” or
collective agglomerate of most certainly human activity in
exploitation they did their as it then seemed charming & elegant bit
to extend: roman, & his Sharon, a rose—“the fearless vampire
killers.”
—Anselm Hollo, from Sojourner Microcosm (1977)
Books and Kulture
Is it possible to be a mother and pursue a creative life? Yes, but it is never easy: A new book explores how pregnancy and motherhood affected the lives of artists including Audre Lorde and Susan Sontag. At our current moment, the questions it raises take on additional urgency, Sophie Brickman, The Guardian, 7/6/22: Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age
The Deep South’s Dames of Dildos: In a Bible-belt state where sex toys stores are illegal, a church-going grandma, enterprising mom and sassy granddaughter build a booming business hawking penis pumps and butt plugs—and helping every person find their path to pleasure, Hallie Lieberman, Narratively, 6/9/22
The Best Literary Masturbation Scenes of All Time: Rebecca Rukeyser, author of the sleaziest book of the year, recommends stories dripping with lust and existential angst, Rebecca Rukeyser, Electric Lit, 7/1/22
On the Most Ambitious Literary Podcast in the History of the World: How Does Doug Metzger Manage to Do It? Gabriel Pasquini, LitHub, 7/6/22
What Is #Gentleminions? Why Teens Are Wearing Suits to Minions: The Rise of Gru: Credit Tiktok for inspiring young men everywhere to go semi-formal at movie theaters last weekend, Grant Rindner, GQ, 7/5/22
TikTok: Trojan Stallion, Scott Galloway, No Mercy/No Malice, 7/8/22: “The tip of China’s propaganda spear is TikTok, which has a direct connection to the midbrain of a billion people, including nearly every U.S. teenager and half their parents.”
Of Owls and Roses: Mary Oliver on Happiness, Terror, and the Sublime Interconnectedness of Life, Maria Popova, The Marginalian, 7/6/22 “The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world.” (from Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays)
A Book Explodes: I got carried away by the world-building, Elvia Wilk, N+1, 7/7/22: “LIKE A LARP, a book is supposed to be a kind of magic circle, a covenant that requires mutual suspension of disbelief, but in its standard form it has only two participants. Author and reader. The author’s thought process might be elaborated through interviews and paratexts, and turned into serials or adapted for other media; there is also a tradition of books being cowritten, or anonymously written, or sourced from oral histories. Fan fiction is one clear counterexample to single authorship, with fandom producing its own crowdsourced multiverses. Some authors revise and rewrite forever, republishing updated versions. And translation between languages is an act of rewriting. But in general, and even in most of these cases, the book has a writer with an implied reader, consumption goes in one direction, and everything that happens in the book happens in the book. It is hermetic; it contains itself.”
Elvia’s novel is Oval and her new book is Death by Landscape. I may be biased (we are related), but I think she is brilliant, and her writing shimmers with audacity and intelligence. You should read her books.
Poetry and publishing friend Michael Wolfe has produced a documentary series that is airing on PBS – The Great Muslim American Roadtrip! Watch the trailer here.
It's always we rambled, that river and I
All along your green valley, I will work till I die
My land I'll defend with my life if it be
Cause my pastures of plenty must always be free
—from “Pastures of Plenty,” Woody Guthrie
Happy Birthdays to Oscar Hammerstein II (July 12) and Woody Guthrie (July 14), Mari Evans (July 16)
where have you gone
with your confident
walk your
crooked smile the
rent money
in one pocket and
my heart
in another . . .
—from “Where Have You Gone,” Mari Evans (New & Selected Poems)
Obituary
Clifford Alexander’s fight remains unfinished, Colbert King, Washington Post, 7/9/22: “You see us as less than you are. You think that we are not as smart, not as energetic, not as well suited to supervise you as you are to supervise us.”
“I learned innumerable things from my father, Clifford Alexander. The greatest of those is love.”—Elizabeth Alexander
“The anti-dropbox decision is egregiously wrong and drips with partisan motives. It’s a blatantly antidemocratic exercise of nakedly results-driven, barely reasoned, transparently groundless judicial power. The WI supreme court did this because they could.”—Lawrence Tribe
Election deniers have taken their fraud theories on tour — to nearly every state, Miles Parks, Allison Mollencamp, Nick McMillan, All Things Considered, 6/30/22
The effort to subvert democracy has become viral. In case you missed it, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that ballot boxes are illegal in that state with language that has inspired election deniers to call for the 2020 election to be decertified. The Republican dominated Pennsylvania legislature just passed an omnibus bill with five constitutional amendments, including language affirming no right to an abortion and requiring voter ID (vetoed by the Democratic governor). Conspiracy theory adherents all over the country continue to build an infrastructure to undermine elections and in thirty states where Republicans control the legislatures, anti-democratic, anti-progressive legislation continues to be passed. National leaders seem immobilized by the threats we face, unable to act with the energy and commitment this moment demands. Buckle up. The 2022 election will determine our future
Awake north wind
Blow south wind
Come from the four winds, breath
I am their song
I am their music
I have been young and now am old
And I live deliciously.
—Mary Oppen
Much love and best wishes to all who read TWT. Your support means everything.—David