Today I read this book, What Belongs To You, by Garth Greenwell. Greenwell’s first novel, it is one of the best books in any genre I have read about desire and sexuality. The sentences are both fastidious and luxurious. The structure of the book works perfectly. And somehow Greenwell always puts the main character in encounters with people, places and objects that are perfect symbols— and yet remain thoroughly people, places and objects. I highly recommend it.
This is the first time the actor’s union and the writer’s union have been on strike since 1960. The average hourly pay for an actor is $12.63. The CEO of Disney, who makes $30 million a year, has called the demands of both unions “unrealistic”, “repugnant”, and “very disturbing”.
A quality consistent in what was formerly called the ‘avant-garde’, and is characteristic of experimental work in general, is a refusal to allow the spectator to forget that they are witnessing a work of art. They may be entertained (or not, as many artists would seem to prefer), but it is this refusal to allow forgetting that differentiates such art from entertainment. In my poetry, this is a concept I wish to adopt entirely. If the reader is immersed in the work, that means they are among the familiar. I want to de-familiarize.
Katy Didden, considering Mt. Rainier (or Tacoma, or Tahoma), from her essay ‘The Poetics of Tectonic Scale’:
The more I see the mountain, even from thousands of miles away, the more I trust that nothing’s mine, that to be is to belong to infinity. If this desire to perform distance requires moving and uprooting, can a poem, with its time-folding rhythms, be a home? Can an hour be? The more I move, the less certain I am of a fixed self, except as one who needs to share what I see: the white volcano with no weather side. When it erupts, we will know the mountain was nowhere near what we imagined it was. It will alter its shape, slip the rigging of its names, and it will rename us.
reasons to compose entirely in lowercase:
-works to decenter the “I”. removes the speaker’s centralized position.
-allows all words to be equivalent. no privileging of certain words over others.
-helps eradicate the subject/object binary.
From de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, after meeting Arshile Gorky:
“(de Kooning) would talk about even the oldest art as if it were made yesterday. From the academy in Rotterdam, de Kooning had gained an impression of hte history of art as forbidding, an imposing edifice to whihc one might aspire after many years of humble apprenticeship. At the same time, he was taught that to be modern meant to reject the past. Gorky did not share these views. Art belonged not to hisotry, Gorky thought, but to the present. What de Kooning found liberating was that Gorky treated past art as if it were alive and speaking to modern artists as if it were '“news that stays news,” in Ezra Pound’s famous formulation. Gorky understood that the challenge for Americans—especially immigrants shorn of their countries—was to acquire the authority of a great tradition and not retreat into provincial ideas like nationalism and social justice or succumb to mere novelty.”
Dissent
On a day of parades, flag waving, drinking, and setting off fireworks which upset the veterans with PTSD we are purporting to celebrate, I thought it appropriate to share the conclusion to Justice Sotomayor’s dissent from the Supreme Court’s recent wedding site case:
Although the consequences of today’s decision might be most pressing for the LGBT community, the decision’s logic cannot be limited to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. The decision threatens to balkanize the market and to allow the exclusion of other groups from many services. A website designer could equally refuse to create a wedding website for an interracial couple, for example.
How quickly we forget that opposition to interracial marriage was often because “‘Almighty God . . . did not intend for the races to mix.’ ” Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, 3 (1967). Yet the reason for discrimination need not even be religious, as this case arises under the Free Speech Clause. A stationer could refuse to sell a birth announcement for a disabled couple because she opposes their having a child. A large retail store could reserve its family portrait services for “traditional” families. And so on.
Poetry’s not a box for storing unexamined experience, but a space instead—a field, really—within which to examine experience and to find that the more we examine it the more we’re surprised or disturbed by what we see, things that don’t go away. I think that’s the resonant part. But I understand that it’s harder to write that kind of poem. Harder, too, to read it. —Carl Phillips, from the Paris Review, The Art of Poetry #103
Killer Heat Waves by David S. Jones
from the Boston Review:
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/heat-death/?utm_source=Boston+Review+Email+Subscribers&utm_campaign=78113ebd11-roundup_april_23_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2cb428c5ad-78113ebd11-41224870&mc_cid=78113ebd11&mc_eid=2cfd0a714d
“The divorce between thought and thing is mainly the work of the Critical Philosophy, and runs counter to the conviction of all previous ages, that their agreement was a matter of course.” —G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Preliminary Notion (1830)
A recent report from the International Labour Association finds that American workers spend more time on the clock than employees in other developed countries. U.S. workers typically work 400 more hours every year compared to workers in Germany.
Americans, however, work on average 400 hours less than workers in some so-called ‘developing countries’, such as China and India.
Today […] the image of the worker is not the image of the person at the assembly line; it’s the immigrant. […] This […] has to do, I think, with [this broad] corporate move to basically take control, possession, of every important resource for the reproduction of people across the world. I think there is a plan, for example, to separate people from land, from access to independent means of reproduction, […] so that you’d have companies that will control all the soil, the subsoil, that will control the trees, the seas […] (Capitalism’s exploitative forces ) “destroy the condition of existence, and […] impose lives that are non-lives. —Silvia Federici
Working for free is common in the restaurant industry, particularly among more fine-dining restaurants. Part of that I think is the history of kitchens as a guild. There is so much to learn as a cook, that an apprenticeship—even in the past, when cooking from scratch was an everyday occurrence—was necessary. I, personally, would be much less developed as a cook if I had never had mentors.
Of course this also continues exploitative practices. Especially in certain circumstances. At one restaurant I worked at, I would sometimes work five and a half hours for free each day.
When I “staged” at other restaurants—meaning I would intern for a short period, usually a single day—I would work for free. Some of those days were exceedingly long, from nine in the morning to one-thirty or so in the morning. But I was fed staff meal. And those experiences were absolutely worth it. You can learn so much in such circumstances. It gives you an opportunity to see if you would like working there, and for the chef to see how well you might fit there.
Another reason for expecting cooks to work for free is the slim profit margin of even successful restaurants. Two of the most famous restaurants in the world, El Bulli, in Spain, and Noma, in Denmark, though both have been awarded Pellegrino’s #1 restaurant in the world award multiple times, could not remain open. They would not have been able to operate at all if they had actually paid everyone to work there. El Bulli, for example, had 30 interns at all times…and paid not a single one of them.
This is even more pronounced in places like Japan, where cooks at higher-end restaurants are essentially indentured servants for about a decade. Often at Kaiseki restaurants in Japan the cooks live in bunks in a building attached to the restaurant. They work exceedingly long hours. The last thing they do during the workday is deep-clean the kitchen. The first thing they do every morning is sharpen their knives. The only days they have off are those days the restaurant is closed.
I had a friend who worked at one of the most renowned restaurants in Japan. The chef there would invite his friends over after the restaurant closed. But it was unacceptable that the cooks should go home before the chef. So they would have to wait around till the chef and his friends got done drinking, at whatever time that might have been, three AM or not…and then clean up after them.
From a chef’s perspective, though, this is why cooks from such places are so disciplined and so skilled.
Such internships, unfortunately, favor people coming into the industry with independent wealth. Usually an unpaid internship lasts about three months. But there are places where the cook may have to wait six months before they start getting paid for their work. I know one restaurant that expects cooks to work for a year before being offered a paid position. This restaurant is located in Napa—not a cheap place to live, for anyone.
A restaurant I worked at briefly in Los Gatos had an intern that lived in the Santa Cruz mountains, in a tent, for the six months of his internship. Because he could not afford to do it any other way. The chefs at the restaurant were quite proud of this fact. I was only able to work there because my mother happened to live in Santa Cruz. I would drive home over the 17 sometimes at two AM, absolutely exhausted. The highway there is quite windy. The mist from the nearby ocean would hide the sharp turns. Semi-trucks barreling down the mountain would suddenly appear behind or ahead of me. I had taken that road the other way seventeen hours earlier. I was not sleeping well already because I was nervous about working there. I was always afraid I was going to crash.
The restaurant industry has changed dramatically. Particularly in the last couple decades. The last restaurant I worked at has begun paying their interns a nominal fee at the start of their internship. Still, $700 is not half enough to even rent a room in the Bay Area anymore. Many cooks, in addition to their normal college debts, also have debts from culinary school. So those with more resources continue to have more opportunities.
I wonder, writing this, if there are any similarities in other industries, which industries might that be, and how and what changes are occurring to hopefully make things better for people working in them.
Rachel's Chair
Once, many
years ago, we made
love at a friend’s
house. We were over-
night guests, not
perverts (on the whole)
but what I am
trying to say is she
owned a chair so
perfect for lovemaking
we joked about asking
to take it home. If
I had only known then
how rarely we would find
such objects
I would have.
Katie Farris (2021)
Excited to discover the work of Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker:
by the second, itself, and have to
hurry GET MOVING before the sun rears up, REVOLTS etc.,
I stand by the window or crouch in a ball : a bundle in
the corner. Large butterfly geranium leaf
on the flagstones in the corridor : pressed flat / like
the past – (I’d like this sentence in the tiniest print!).
Here and there the innermost plantations, look, the orangerie!,
writes Marcel Beyer : smells of camel, or movable
baptismal angel. And thus Artaud’s face thought-body or -blood,
Artaud’s anemone hand.
THIS IS 1 LOVE-LETTER!, the points of the mountains, the sharp
eyes like needles pinned to my nature, alas! Nature, pi-
nned to my own body-skin, alas, woe is me! I scream
writhe finish myself off, the flooded eye the feathered
eye, this nature or what!, this chiffre full moonlight –
you come into the room, I’m waiting for your voice
I’m writing deluded letters which you’ll never receive,
such thin and vulnerable skin-intercourse, this is 1 merciful
weather, the whitethroat’s kiss in the gardens . . this
word in the wire in communion I’m dreaming of you, and
ecstasy itself, this magpie,
have just invented language raving language. (tr. Richard Dove)
“In poetry, all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities.” —W.H. Auden
Sci-Hub
I discovered a wonderful resource which gives public access to scientific articles. This is from their home page:
Sci-Hub is the most controversial project in today science. The goal of Sci-Hub is to provide free and unrestricted access to all scientific knowledge ever published in journal or book form.
Today the circulation of knowledge in science is restricted by high prices. Many students and researchers cannot afford academic journals and books that are locked behind paywalls. Sci-Hub emerged in 2011 to tackle this problem. Since then, the website has revolutionized the way science is being done.
Sci-Hub is helping millions of students and researchers, medical professionals, journalists and curious people in all countries to unlock access to knowledge. The mission of Sci-Hub is to fight every obstacle that prevents open access to knowledge: be it legal, technical or otherwise.
https://sci-hub.st/