The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 122, September 11, 2022 (V3 #18)
“Once you have the courts you can pretty much do whatever you want.”-- Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works
“Inside every woman is two wolves. One wolf want long gorgeous mermaid hair. The second wolf wants to just chop it all off. There is also a crow pulling the tails of both wolves saying to get bangs. The crow is the most dangerous.”—Ellie Devine
“In the one term Trump’s three justices have been on the court, they have decimated the legal landscape under which we have lived for generations, slashing power from the federal government, where Congress represents the majority, and returning it to states, where a Republican minority can impose its will. Thanks to the skewing of our electoral system, those states are now trying to take control of our federal government permanently.”—Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 9/8/22
I am the wine and bread.
I keep the law,
I hold the mysteries true,
I am the vine,
the branches, you
and you.
—from “The Mysteries Remain,” H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, born 9/10/1886)
Books and Culture
A Vermont Train Journey – 1953, Bill Schubart, Opinion & Fiction: “I stare into the moving undercarriage of the massive steam engine. A last stygian blast of escaping steam obliterates my view as the engineer applies the brakes and the massive engine stops, the steam condensing in the cold air and enveloping everyone on the platform.”
John Waters on Filmmaking, Felonies, Fox News, and Fucking, Conor Williams, LA Review of Books, 8/31/22
Thoughts on the origins of wokeness: The ideology of 2010s America, and where it came from, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 9/10/22: “I think that if you let your rhetorical opponents constantly chase you away from terms you invent, it signals weakness and forces you to do the labor of coming up with new terms.”
Memories of the Holocaust are fading – my fiction helps me preserve the past, Richard Zimler, The Guardian, 8/28/22: “I realised – with a feeling of despair in my gut – that in another decade, nearly everyone like her dad, with direct experience of the Nazis’ plans to murder every last European Jew, will be dead.”
The trouble with viewing 9/11 and the pandemic through a wartime lens: When we use military metaphors to make sense of domestic tragedies, we blind ourselves to the realities of human suffering, Lila Nordstrom, Sarah Senk, Washington Post, 9/9/22
The Black mothers finding freedom in mushrooms: ‘They give us our power back,’ Maya Richard-Craven, The Guardian, 8/28/22: “Psilocybin can help to heal trauma, users say, but the racialized history of drugs in the US has long fueled fear.”
Remembering the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound: an absurd feat of technological engineering, Luka Osborne, Happy Magazine, 4/22/21: “Those who heard it say it was the best live sound ever.”
He played with Dylan, Clapton and Lennon: the unsung genius of guitarist Jesse Ed Davis: He was the go-to session guitarist for some of the biggest music stars of all time yet his incredible highs and tragic lows have often been overlooked, Jim Farber, The Guardian, 9/7/22
He’s a love child running wild —“Washita Love Song,” Jessie Ed Davis
Did you know that in 1962, the Rolling Stones made a commercial for Rice Krispies?
On John Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017), Geoffrey Young, Best American Poetry, 9/3/22: Asked once where his poetry came from, he answered, “Well, it’s just like television, there’s always something on.”
“….exquisite mind cartoons that could be heard with eyes closed, the voice perfectly ordinary with the slight edge of extravagant conversational camp, a mind artifice not unnatural to hypnagogic revery, deceptive, till you hear the chasm landscapes and awkward universes created and contradicted in vast gas-deposit shocking trivial universal mind.”—Allen Ginsberg, from an introduction to a reading by John Ashbery, at Naropa Institute, 1975. --The Allen Ginsberg Project #332, 9/8/2017
The Lesbian Luminaries of the South: Six lesbian feminist writers living in the South – Minnie Bruce Pratt, Mab Segrest, Barbara Grier, doris davenport, Suzanne Pharr, and Ann Allen Shockley – wrote and published about lesbian lives beginning in the 1970s. Their work reimagined the South as a vibrant place where queer women could live and thrive in the midst of racism, sexism, and homophobia, Julie R. Enszer, The Bitter Southerner, 9/1/22
Mood Indigo
Now you have been blue, yes but you ain’t been blue
Till you’ve had that mood indigo
—Duke Ellington
How many times has this catcher’s mask
been knocked off my head? Oh, those concussions
of love. What is this crazy thing that shakes me now
into a perfectly thrown loneliness?
—E. Ethelbert Miller. This poem is from How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask, the third book in his baseball trilogy, that includes If God Invented Baseball and When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery and Other Baseball Stories.
More new books from City Point Press:
You Should Smile More: How to Dismantle Gender Bias in the Workplace, by the Band of Sisters, 9/6/22
Heroes Are Human: Lessons in Resilience, Courage, and Wisdom from the Covid Front Lines, by Bob Delany, with Dave Scheiber, 9/27/22
Ruin: A Novel of Flyfishing in Bankruptcy, by Leigh Seippel, 9/27/22
In last week’s TWT, I forgot to note that Ama Codjoe’s poem, “On Seeing and Being Seen” is from her new book Bluest Nude.
The earth has feelings
some killed others in its mud and it has lots of mud
The earth builds a scrapyard, a sequence of them to tell
of this, a seam on its embalmed glabella future galaxies caress
—from “Geodes of the Western Hemisphere,” Jana Prikryl (her new book is Midwood)
Politics
These Disunited States: It is time to consider a radical solution to stave off the prospect of political violence and even civil war in the US, Steven Simon, Jonathan Stevenson, NYRB, 9/22/22 issue: “The reality is that the states are no longer united—if, other than during the world wars and the cold war, they ever really were. The sooner some process of matching political form to political substance gets underway, the less likely the transition is to be violent.” Ed. note: it is well worth reading this article in full.
‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan: Kohei Saito’s book Capital in the Anthropocene has become an unlikely hit among young people and is about to be translated into English, Justin McCurry, The Guardian, 9/9/22
How conservative Facebook groups are changing what books children read in school: Parents are gathering online to review books and lobby schools to ban them, often on the basis of sexual content, Tanya Basu, MIT Technology Review, 9/9/22
The history of book bans—and their changing targets—in the U.S.: From religious texts and anti-slavery novels to modern works removed from school libraries, here’s how the targets of censorship have changed over the years, Erin Blakemore, National Geographic, 9/6/22
Humanity Is Doing Its Best Impression of a Black Hole: Daniel Holz studies the universe’s ultimate catastrophes. And he knows a thing or two about existential threats on Earth, since he helps set the Doomsday Clock, Matt Simon, Wired, 9/6/22
The World Putin Wants: How Distortions About the Past Feed Delusions About the Future, Fiona Hill, Angela Stent, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2022
How to Fight Putin, Climate Change, and Your Energy Bills, Tomas Pueyo, Uncharted Territories, 9/6/22: “If we continue our pressure, Putin will run out of fossil fuels to sell and money to fund his war. Ukrainians are dying for our values. We’re not on the frontline, but we can help back at home.”
Yes, sanctions on Russia are working: They are limiting war production and weakening Russia's industrial base, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 8/31/22
U.S. Approval of Labor Unions at Highest Point Since 1965, Justin McCarthy, Gallup, 8/30/22
Science and Environment
Oldest human-made structure in the Americas is older than the Egyptian pyramids: The grass-covered mounds represent 11,000 years of human history, JoAnna Wendel, Live Science, 8/27/22: “To find the oldest known human-made structures in the Americas, you don't need to hike into the wilderness or paddle down a raging river — all you need to do is visit Baton Rouge, Louisiana.”
The Botanic Matchmakers that Could Save Our Food Supply: Undomesticated plants could help their farmed cousins adapt to climate stresses, but that requires tracking them down around the world while also “decolonizing botany,” Mark Schapiro, Inside Climate News, 8/28/22
What will be the fate of Lake Superior’s last, lonely caribou? Facing hungry wolves and a shrinking habitat, Lake Superior’s last caribou were airlifted to island sanctuaries in 2018. But they can’t stay there forever, Emma McIntosh, The Narwhal, 9/3/22
In the Mind of a Whale: How can we make sense of the biggest brains on the planet? Tom Mustill, Hakai, 9/6/22
US lobster put on ‘red list’ to protect endangered North Atlantic right whales: The 1m lines from pots used to catch the crustaceans are one of the two main threats to the whales, of which fewer than 340 remain, Karen McVeigh, The Guardian, 9/8/22
Climate change: Avocados and exotic plants grow in hot UK summer, Ella Hambly, BBC News, 8/28/22
World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds: Giant ice sheets, ocean currents and permafrost regions may already have passed point of irreversible change, Damian Carrington, The Guardian, 9/8/22
U.S. declares disaster for tribal salmon fisheries on the West Coast, Erin Blakemore, Washington Post, 9/10/22
Remember That Coal Surge Last Year? Yeah, It’s Over: Renewables are now about 25 percent of U.S. electricity generation, leapfrogging coal, Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News, 9/8/22
Why It’s Time to Make Cities More Rural: Enough with the urban vs. rural binary. When rurbanization brings agriculture into cities, everyone benefits, Matt Simon, Wired, 9/8/22
How sustainable are fake meats? Checking whether plant-based burgers may have lighter environmental footprints, Bob Holmes, Ars Technica, 9/4/22
Voyager 1 and 2, Humanity’s Interstellar Envoys, Soldier On at 45: The two probes made flybys of Jupiter and Saturn in the 1970s. Today they’re still doing science way out beyond our solar system, Ramin Skibba, Wired, 9/5/22
A memory prosthesis could restore memory in people with damaged brains: Brain electrodes designed to mimic the hippocampus appear to boost the encoding of memories—and are twice as effective in people with poor memory, Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review, 9/6/22
Electric Fish Genomes Reveal How Evolution Repeats Itself: By studying how electric organs arose in different lineages of fish, scientists gain new insights into a long-standing question of evolutionary biology, Joanna Thompson, Wired, 9/4/22
Fears of a polio resurgence in the US have health officials on high alert – a virologist explains the history of this dreaded disease, Rosemary Rochford, The Conversation, 9/7/22
The Mirror
Seeing is believing.
Whatever was thought or said,
these persistent, inexorable deaths
make faith as such absent,
our humanness a question,
a disgust for what we are.
Whatever the hope,
here it is lost.
Because we coveted our difference,
here is the cost.
—Robert Creeley
Birds
Garden of the Gulls, Hugh Powell, Living Bird, Summer 2022: “Now just shy of 60 years old, the new island of Surtsey, off Iceland, holds clues to a fundamental mystery: What did the Earth look like when it was just born? How does life colonize bare rock?”
Unearthing Australia’s ancient birds of prey, Piecing together the prehistory of Australia’s birdlife reveals stunning insights, Ellen Mather, Cosmos, 9/9/22
The Guam Kingfisher Could Soon Return to the Wild After a 30-Year Absence: Extinct on its native island since the late 1980s, the endangered bird may fly free as soon as 2023—but not on Guam, Jenny McKee, Audubon, 9/9/22
Engineers Study Bird Flight, Andy Fell, UC Davis, 9/6/22: “Gulls can adjust how they respond to perturbations in that axis by adjusting their wrist and elbow joints, and morphing the shape of the wings…”
Record 8 fledged chicks for Louisiana's wild 'whoopers,’ Janet McConnaughey, Washington Post, 9/8/22: “A record eight whooping crane chicks have taken wing in Louisiana after hatching in the wild.”
My famous last words
Could never tell the story
Spinning unheard
In the dark of the sky
“If This is Goodbye,” sung by Emmy Lou Harris/Mark Knopfler, written by Mark Knopfler after reading Ian McEwan’s Only love and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against their murderers (9/15/2001)
Keeping up with all the news is exhausting. There is so much to attend to — not the least of which is self-care. I hope this finds all of you well, being mindful, careful, and finding some joy amongst the rubble of our current times. There is always love. And never forget: “poetry is not a shopping list” (June Jordan).
—David
David, Another terrific issue. I don't know how you DO it. Please, don't stop. Michael Wolfe