BREYDON’s been reading

#Reading Goal

If any quantified BookWyrming aim, I suspect mine should be to post far fewer quotes! I have such a swathe of magazines to sort my way through before the next library day, too. So consider this a book limit: five more finishes this month. (Given three are pretty near, that makes round two and a half books total. Mooore than enough for these nine odd days.)

And as I sit here, thinking about myself — understanding, changing — all I can think of are Amber’s words, about whether I have become tired of being the thing everyone is afraid to be.

⸻ Track 1 ‘Prologue’, 16:50–17:04

When Alabanza’s name sprang out at me while I was scrolling for Pung in an audiobook catalogue the other day, I was so stoked they’d been published here, I pushed aside the tag‐along assumption — based on cover, title, and blurb — this book would only bore and frustrate me. The prologue mostly says: yes, this was written to be the kind of product that you desperately, futilely hoped it was not. But throughout, keeps dangling the notion that the undertaking could not turn out as planned. And the performance at times, even on phrases such as “​And as I​”, crackles suddenly, momentarily into something great. So, for the moment, for those moments, I’ll persist.

One, very excitingly, I finally fitted a tiny missing screw into the home of the tiny missing screw (no relation) of my headphones, which can now hug a head without clattering apart into numerous pieces. Ears gratefully accepting all music recs, if you’re wondering, yes! Please!

Two, the tonal blend of this recording had been more jarring than most of those I’d still dare to endure through minuscule loudspeakers — phone handsfree inbuilt job, little inears — and I was looking forward to a less painful time of it through the aforementioned repaired set. But no: the shoddy sound obviously dates from studio times, engineering aggressively failing to complement voice or space. Gonna be a grim few chapters.

I want to know about […] the myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. It’s the only way to chase the catastrophe into the contours of the ordinary and try to tell a story. Make some small discovery. It never ceases to amaze me how interesting everyday life really is.

⸻ pg. 7, ‘Remarks from an Accomplice’

After perestroika, no one was talking about ideas anymore — instead, it was credit, interest, and promissory notes; people no longer earned money, they “made” it or “scored” it.

⸻ pg. 8, ‘Remarks from an Accomplice’

More than once Yasmin had witnessed an exhausted wife or husband or daughter slide into sleep and then onto the floor. The walls had the colour and texture of dried sage leaves, as if they might crumble at any moment.

⸻ pg. 52

#body‐image, shaming

He’d told her about the fourteen‐year‐old girl he’d seen in the clinic that morning. The girl was worried that her privates looked funny and her mother agreed she didn’t look right. Women worried about their labia because they compared themselves to what they saw in porn. But this girl was fourteen! The GP hadn’t convinced the mother there was nothing wrong with her daughter. When Joe reassured them that the girl was perfectly normal, she definitely didn’t need an operation to reduce the size of her labia, the girl burst into tears and the mother said, You’re telling us we have to go private, that’s what you mean.

⸻ pg. 61

#class, migration, anxiety

Whenever Yasmin thought about how her father’s life had begun she experienced a swell in her ribcage, pride of course, but also fear, as if there was still a chance that he would never escape the jaws of poverty, as if he might never embark on the long and difficult journey, or might travel but never arrive.

⸻ pg. 75

The blank page is maddening. She raises her head and looks once more in the mirror. She has chosen to sit at her dressing table because when she writes a false word she will know it from the look on her face.

⸻ pg. 92

‘Nathan!’ Harriet rose to greet a willowy young man, both hands outstretched. He took hold of them and stood there uncertainly, not knowing what to do with these dazzling gifts.

⸻ pg. 120

She’d cried. Of course she’d cried. He held her and she thought she would quite literally disintegrate, just deliquesce in his arms right there and then. But soon she stiffened. Her ear pressed against his bare chest and the steady beat of his heart filled her with rage.

⸻ pg. 137

Someone’s read a bit of Rushdie back in the day; back of the mind, there it is seeping up.

‘Adventure playground?’ said Rania. ‘Look, there’s nobody there.’

They veered left and stared down the far slope towards the pirate ship and the high walks and the orange climbing nets. A train jogged along the tracks at the bottom, a stubby Sunday train of four carriages, pausing a while, waiting for three fluorescent jackets to cross the tracks and signal the all‐clear. Bonfire smoke twised lazily from a back garden. A crow hopped ahead on the grass.

⸻ pg. 165

#dead animal

[My mother and I] were both a bit sick of each other after those [table tennis] games and we took long walks in opposite directions along the beach. Once, I saw a huge, dead turtle. It seemed ancient and noble. Its eyes had been pecked out by crows, and a kid was poking at it with a stick. From the turtle you could still make out the white apartment blocks of the resort in the distance, their windows blank and bright in the sun. […]

⸻ pg. 21

FROM THE TURTLE!

Best three words of the (first half of the) book! Possibly of the whole thing, but I have not read far enough yet to confirm.

There is one other disconcerting feature of this apartment: the heavy, dark wooden frames that run around each doorway, even along the floor, so that I am constantly tripping over. More alarmingly, this wooden lip has the effect of making each doorway seem like a mirror that I have to pass through in order to change rooms, and in which I keep failing to appear. On more than one occasion, I have caught myself needlessly arranging the face I adopt whenever I look in the mirror.

⸻ pg. 153

The protagonist has arrived in Cluj, Romania. He has been dawdling around Europe to ruminate expensively on the unexplained disappearance of a local painter and fret at the abandonment of surrealism.

In isolation, tricks like this are fine. Sadly, the book is terribly heavy handed, and this is about the least superficially it ever approaches its own core obsessions (whether bereavement and mortality; pretty girls; artistry, expatriation, masculinity and identity; or the main character).

[18 January 2023, Boonwurrung Country]

These remarks seem more review, I suppose, than close reading. So have a rating: straddling the slog of a one and the old two for well, I would not publish it, myself, in this state.

Allinson studs his book, very sparely, with breathtaking twists of phrase. The surrounding text is meticulously crafted also, and, I found (especially in the cases of the absolutely agonisingly autobiographically pitched Parts One and Three), disengaging.

It’s a multilayered grief text, but heavily filtered through themes of middleclass masculinity. Cultural cringe, even. The narrator is occasionally transposed to some other voice (slightly older Miles! slightly younger Miles! art critic Miles! potted historian Miles! translated scrap of this or that secondary source in the sole possession of Miles! gonzo journo Miles! Miles as Miles imagines his girlfriend would word him… travelogue Miles: miles of Miles…), without straying towards much of a range of perspective.

The Mileses into whose (un)confidence we are dumped are petulant in romance (we can only hope poor Alice, the ex, was not drawn from real life), and pretentious about art, with both aspects exquisitely, even just excruciatingly rendered. Indeed, the entire novel makes for a masterful character portrait overall, and is sincerely impressive.

However, the narrator’s personal relationships are too neatly mirrored by those of the obscure surrealist with whom he has become obsessed. The parallels are exhausting, if not exhaustive. They compound the time‐hopping, dream‐ridden fixation on reiterating the same kernel of a story. The tellings over are largely and unfortunately vacuous — more so than perhaps intended.

If you are into its particular cohort of navels, you will probably adore it. This feels a bit like reading Garner, I thought, a few pages before Allinson toasted Helen Garner. It is almost a Brow piece; (albeit) thirty times longer than it had to be, but for determination to impose a mood. This thing plods. With restrained power and precision.

I keep walking. According to all the ghost stories, nothing lives in this forest except wild boars and foxes, but somewhere in the distance the trees are full of bird chatter. Wherever they are — those birds — I can’t seem to get any closer to them. It’s as if they are afraid, as if I am carrying around myself a circumference of silence or danger[…]

⸻ pg. 167

#violence; abandonment and deaths of dogs; a sort of diasporic sadness; a flash of patriarchal language ‐picking

There are stories of roaming dog packs, of random dog‐killings, dogs found knifed in backstreets, but I have seen none of this. As far as I can see, the Romanians are especially fond of dogs. Alina Bafdescu, apparently, was overwhelmingly distraught when the family dog finally died. She wrote a long, almost delirious letter to her brother in Paris, announcing the news. Bafdescu responded by way of consolation some weeks later:

> You asked me if I think animals have souls. Animals are not in need of souls. They are, themselves, souls. It is we who need souls.

Today, the wild dogs of Bucharest are accepted and sometimes cared for, and at traffic lights they stand in the cool of our shadows waiting to cross the road with us. It is said that they are the distant relatives of the family pets who were evicted when the communists moved everyone into tiny communist flats — there was no room for the dogs and so they were turned out into the street. An emigration often takes a number of generations to complete, Alice once told me, speaking about her mother, who was born in Serbia and came to Australia as a fifteen‐year‐old girl. Perhaps the same is true of the street dogs of Bucharest. They look so mournful, like abandoned family pets, like rain dogs who have lost the scent and, as in some fairy‐tale, are condemned to wander, generation after generation, looking for a home that does not exist anymore.

⸻ pg. 173

What does this mean? What did Bafdescu think it meant?

And is there anything more dubious than long‐distance psychoanalysis?

⸻ pg. 204

Wish I’d made some scratch of a note while it was fresh in my mind why, precisely, I’d marked some of these passages in books now finished weeks ago, what I’d meant maybe to say about them, to say them about. Point made, I guess.

Again, it is often I regret acknowledging sci fi without (enough) qualifiers in my home library service application form.

Whole Notes imparts the cosiness and charm of a dream first formal lesson on an orchestral instrument.

This book also represents a profound reservoir of careful contemplation, speaking, though primarily of the Western classical tradition and midlife gender transition, quite broadly to how practical musical understanding applies across peoples’ lives. The surface is tickled with cheeky humour, always friendly. In the spaces formed around the contours of his manner, one could almost hear delighted young students’ laughter bouncing along strings, grazing their instruments’ f-holes, or see the tension pouring out of the nervous adult beginner as they ready to take up their bow.

But more importantly, Ayres communicates in waves of understated sensuality, sharing a wealth of pedagogical wisdom (from a variety of teachers-and-learners), quiet courage, and at times a light, resonant awe.

To the audiobook recording, he brings every last mole of his broadcasting aplomb and finesse (if, perhaps, along with an occasional tendency to sustain a pace just slightly more at home in music-radio–length segments — or should that be shortth?). The excellent standard of spoken performance leaves me uncertain as to whether I would like the book so much if it gazed silently at me in print. Nonetheless, I very much hope to leaf through a paper edition, at very least to better absorb a few standout remarks — and loan it on.

With orchids tending to ensnare enthusiasts for life and me tending to read compulsively (including field guides, cover to cover), this could be a hazardous move! But I am going to see if the local library's ordered one of these from the C.S.I.R.O. already. According to the issue just superceded of Gardening Australia magazine, the book includes scores of newly documented species, and “Victoria is one of the richest regions in the world for its diversity of temperate terrestrial orchids” (‘Books’, GA March 2023, pg 18). Getting to know orchids better would up my recognition of beings in the undergrowth substantially. I feel I owe it to the hills, particularly, to explore this knowledge gap of mine.

GA also mentioned a charming‐looking (children’s) picture book, also from CSIRO Publishing, called Pollination: how does my garden grow?, which is by Christopher Cheng, with illos by Danny Snell. Paz the C.S.I.R.O. provides Pollination teachers’ notes, which I have not seen but am happy to hear of the offering of, regardless.

The problem is, apparently, once you’ve expressed interest in something like ecocriticism, people assume you’re dying to hear from every white journo or researcher across Western Europe who’s smiled at a cute noise from a hedge and then wangled a book deal out of it.

No surprise it’s taken me three months and the disquieting proximity of a final due date to drag myself around to contemplate opening this anthology of “nature” pieces from the Guardian, however lovely they may yet prove to be.

“Lovely” may not be the right word — strange, sombre, soft, serious, sensitive, studious, all more the tone presidering over the first Part‐and‐a‐bit — but the essays are generally decent, reportage grippy with interview; the collection is fine. Fine as in “ey, ’tsfine.” and fine like almost a bird skeleton of an assemblage.

Nothing has quite inspired the enthusiasm of the a​ma​zing, and yet nearly the lot quietly pulls off appearing inherently so. Here is coverage that does not easily heighten the sense, the perception of the reality, the phenomenal nature of its phenomenal subjects, nor bumbling, obscure it. Barkham more, kind of, remarks on the remarkable; reremarks, reremarks, readjusts his marks, looks.

Article on pages 12–13.

Article on pages 18–19.

Article on pages 34–35.

Looks like this, once it has aired out, will be about all I am reading for a period, because it is huge, and somebody has already reserved the one copy, so there'll be no renewals. I guess the key to having your dense, expensive academic request acquired by a painfully populist public library appears to be to be drawing attention to something likely to sound of great interest to the library staff themselves? This was an overheard recommendation on the wyrm contemporaneous with that for Pearson's Books as history, over a year ago, and I still forget from or to whom they were intended, but thanks whoevers yous were!

fact. From the Latin verb facere meaning “to make” or “to do.” A fact is that which was done, occurred, or exists.

⸻ pg. 835

According to the Glossary.

Now I’m drawing a total mental blank on other nouns in English that express the happenedness of an action… Hadn’t considered “fact” might’ve been fact so as well!

The print is little, the pages gargantuan; it feels rare to reach the end of a chapter, and having now done so again, close to the return date, I reckon I’ll leave it at that. Perhaps one day I will borrow this again, although some contributors’ approaches were disappointing enough that it feels as though there may be less left to miss here than the heft would suggest. Still, had the loan been for longer I would have gladly continued to seek out some seams, deeper and deeper in. And I will miss the musculoskeletal interplay.

#dodgy sourcing of labour

[…] in compiling his enormous Natural History, an encyclopedic survey of the wonders of nature and art — especially those of the Roman Empire — [the elder Pliny] drew his information chiefly from written sources, which he listed. He probably worked from the immense notebooks full of excerpts that, the younger Pliny tells us, he compiled using the help of slaves.

⸻ Anthony Grafton, 1 ‘Premodern regimes and practices’ (pp. 3–20), pg. 14

Was briefly righteously aghast, then remembered am recording and communicating quotes on and over machines that sure aren’t fairly fact.

⁂

Ooh, hullo, this did not post previously, did it?

To flip through The Ultimate Ambition​’s pages is to encounter a dizzying array of subjects: poetry about the sleepiness of cheetahs; recipes for the production of aphrodisiacs; boilerplate legal language for marriage contracts; a biography of Muḥammad and the history of the Islamic world; anatomical and literary descriptions of electric eels, turtles, falcons, and cats; administrative minutiae concerning promissory notes, joint partnerships, commercial enterprises, loans, gifts, donations, charity, transfers of property; and much more.

⸻ Elias Muhanna, 2 ‘Premodern regimes and practices’ (pp. 21–37), pp. 30–31

That’s a fourteenth‐century encyclopædia, in thirty‐one volumes: The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, by Shihāb al‐Dīn al‐Nuwayrī.

#logging

Instead I wonder how someone who lives surrounded by the crushing beauty of a redwood forest can simultaneously love it and kill it; can see themselves as so entwined with the natural world that destroying part of it comes to feel like another stage in its life cycle.

⸻ pp. 12–13

Bourgon means “instead” of finding most compelling the monetary or climatic value of poached trees — but it’s nice to hear a sense of proximity and affinity as the fascination rather than assumed detachment! Identification implicated, I’m drawn to say of the “entwinement” in Bourgon’s rendering, although I am very uncomfortable with the embrace of criminalisation in the wordings of these early pages.

#deforestation in the enterprise of “civilising”

Stretching upward from the shore, redwoods, coastal Douglas fir, and the shrub toyon (thick with red berries in fall) carpet the hills and mountainsides. A redwood’s canopy widens only to the edges of its neighbor’s crown, so as not to crowd each other out. With your head tilted back and eyes turned upward, you see deep rivulets of sky that stitch between crowns like rivers. From the ground, the sky is not the canvas, but the thread.

⸻ pg. 26

Talkin Pacific Northwest, with particular reference around this passage to Humboldt County, on land of the Wiyot, Yurok, Hupa, Eel River Athapaskan, and several more First Nations peoples (the author names only four).

Contrast the tender rivulet sky with this striking exposure:

Some loggers saw their work as bringing the heavens closer, the crash of canopy leading to “the light of civilization being drawn upon us.”

⸻ ibid., pg. 22

Reminds me of Ghosh on the omnicidality of white supremacy and, milquetoastilier (riding in on sheer recency bias), Hägglund’s indictment of “religious faith“ as the callous pursuit of eternity.

I’m afraid Lyndsie Bourgon writes humans blandly, and, to be honest, long‐form narrative with a very pronounced clunkiness. Such a shame!

Ayy!

Somebody inform Tim Bouverie and maybe more to the point the team at Short Books that a “full opera” is not an accessible, snippet‐a‐day “piece”, and, while recommending a whole album is lovely, specifying particular tracks only on Spotify is neither really making a playlist “available” nor at all living up to the book subtitle. And Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is only “piece” one! Of a hundred!

No, don’t worry — I hate to even imagine the snobby feedback publishers of this sort of text risk. The book is chipper and very clear about trying not to declare a canon though, so hopefully it has been received in kind. I expect, however, to most likely find a deference to certain ideals, in and and its posh Englishness, unbearable.

Bring it, silently, on.

I had been vaguely aware of this Y.A. novel but then forgotten about it, until it also came up in the search for One Hundred Days; the cover of Wai Chim’s book sports an endorsement from Alice Pung.

It’s enough of a faff to borrow an audiobook over the web (though thank goodness these are proper downloads, for listening to offline), that I always end up borrowing or reserving a few extra titles, to make it feel worthwhile. Then I get tired of the medium before I get far through the batch. Rough production, as on None of the Above and, sadly, Dumpling, of course doesn’t help.

But the text of this story is neat and strong, and even if it sounds like it is still in a late stage of rehearsal, the author’s performance is a very engaging one.

Chim’s approach to characterisation makes conspicuous that fiction can maintain a mundanity of awareness when physical proximity is considered fragrantly.

⸻ me, the sheer limb turbulence to any pecking at letters meaning threading words out so, so slowly a few nights ago ideas ceased to reassemble as thoughts sounding human. gave up before could brave spanning a space to reach “as in real life”. am impressed there was time for full‐stop!

Wow. If it weren’t for the clunky splices and slight under‐rehearsal (the latter maybe just nerves) ⸺ no, even with those, this was about as inviting a place a long, prerecorded storytelling can become. The narrative is at once earnest, confronting, and pleasantly pop. The characters are, for the most part, convincingly knotty without looming distractingly so, and all of them gently charming, even at their least!

The biggest takeaway from listening in on this audiobook, is that Wai Chim both writes and reads in a discerning style, with an incredible emotional generosity.

#squinting at shades of the far right? bigotry or something

You expect to toss it back to the questionably curated library within a few pages. You expect some puffer‐fish–tough‐guy toying with dodgy ethnic stereotypes frantically trying to signal cosmopolitanism. You expect, somehow, the text to get better; there to be some richness cracked open any paragraph now, like a high‐school lit class revelation from some presumed bore you’d’ve never touched on your own — until, before very long at all, the author has written himself into a corner; multiple, varied narrators’ idiosyncrasies bled together before they’ve the chances to influence each other with such precision inside the story. Conspicuous things cropping up in common. Strictly reliable (except where blatantly not, in the tortured wind up to a twist).

Time gets measured in numbers of heartbeats, counts upward unmoored, tickings from clocks; but mainly the heartbeats. Not chunky, amped up thriller pumping, this. Quiet statement, matter of fact, attentive to a ubiquity of pulse, to its small, rolling effects, as though observed by a yogi, or a practised gun‐clutcher.

Characters drift about, paper thin, like phantoms peeled off the Murdoch press on its higher brow days. (Published by Harper, perhaps they already are)? The core “science” to the fiction is cable telly, mysteries of the ancients woo. Flick to the bio: ah — two decades producing Pay T.V. “documentaries” with titles and channels that sound like the sorts to have helped groom many a Neo for Naziing.

All very unnoteworthy.

Come for the cursory taste‐test. Linger for the mild disbelief. Pivot away at the resolute tedium. Stay the course to witness the… Inyaface queerfest?

Figures, really, now I’ve put it like that, elevated those above strains like that. (And) how(,) in this novel there’s such an obsession with the genderlessness of civilisation‐upending mechanical hordes who sabotage themselves sickly to reject conventional human forms and, somebody concludes, concomitant sex. Scrutinising a chubby nun’s haircut and coming up, first of all, “sexual deviant”. Periodic no‐homo moments from nowhere, though not one habibi in these cod Arabian bromances, man. An absent but read‐into camp signifying civic rot.

Still, I was repeatedly surprised how much the text clambered in over itself to fold in certain themes. Sometimes it brought to mind snatches glimpsed of Mieli’s theories. And the pull to read those towed me through to the back.

‘[…] One of the regulars saw her at the Mission. Looks like she’s working there now.’

I look over my shoulder at where the three old guys are still taking turns sucking at the pipe. ‘One of them? I didn’t realize they ever moved.’

‘You’re a piece of work, you know that, Levi? Old Yash has been scoring his dinners at the Mission ever since his wife died.’

‘Hold on a minute. Are you telling me one of those guys at the pipe is a different person than was here when I left?’

‘And you’re supposed to be the sharp one. You think I only have three paying customers? How do you think my business works?’

⸻ pg. 31

Bartender Yusuf and young dropkick Levi in one of only a couple of instants the setting teased like it might build to subvert its own pat exoticism — only to collapse into a gag outta old Hollywood. After that, it would dust itself off and play the next umpteen pages straight.

‘Those machines are on 24/7, and they are noisy motherfuckers.’ The rumble beneath my feet bears testament to the truth of his words. I’m used to the noise after a few minutes of standing here, but it’s still there, enough to fox any sound detector. He keeps talking, but from this single clue the rest fits itself together. Those washers and dryers rotate constantly, at slightly different, unpredictable speeds. Metal rotating within metal — it’s like the Earth’s core, a battery of machines generating electromagnetic waves at fluctuating frequencies. To anyone attempting sonic or microwave surveillance it’s like trying to pick out a tune when someone’s shouting in your ear, and they can’t even filter it out because the shouting changes all the time.

‘That’s … incredible. You worked this out on your own?’

‘And the rest of it. that sign outside …’ He gestures to the pink and blue at the window. ‘Anyone trying a visual scan through my window is gonna have contrast issues. It’s like we’re standing behind the sun … OK, maybe not the sun, but you get the idea.’

I crouch and clear a space in the neon‐lit clutter beneath the window frame. ‘I’m sleeping here.’

He shrugs, palms up. The only way I’m leaving is if he kicks me out, and right now I’m too valuable an asset for him to take that risk. No bedroll, no covers, but for me, as long as my partner in crime can cope with a housemate, this might just be the safest place in Jerusalem.

⸻ pg. 92

Levi and former almost robot soldier Clementine in a flat above a laundromat. Convenience noir.

She leads us outside, where there’s a van waiting for us. The sides are covered with cartoon vegetables. If I have any street‐cred left, it’s gone as soon as someone sees me in this thing.

⸻ pg. 180

Nother nun Ludmila (complement to Mother nun Hilda) smuggling Levi off farmland.

#the transphobic, addict‐dismissive, etc. etc. school of cop shop window dressing

A square‐jawed man wearing a tight gold dress winks at me. His red lips kiss the air in the wake of a tired officer dragging a junkie across the antiseptic green linoleum floor. The cloying chemical fug of detergent does not quite conceal the whiff from the previous night’s donations of vomit and urine. From somewhere echoes the sound of a woman wailing about a child, real or imagined. The transvestite’s eyes follow the unhappy duo of cop and criminal through the sliding door that leads to the custody suites and then fix upon mine. Ludmila ignores him. His/her theatrics seem invisible to everyone but me. He tuts and turns around to lean against a chest‐high L‐shaped desk that divides the room, his muscular bottom a jutting invitation to nobody. A sagging man in the uniform of a police sergeant sits on a high stool behind a desk. He does not respond to my presence, even when I stand directly in front of him.

⸻ pg. 211

Narrator Clem but who cares by now.

So maybe you read those last few quotes and get the impression aww it’s all just throw‐away capers; or a few pages that happen to keep the various authorial antagonisms to a simmer and aw maybe you’ve been reading too much into ⸺ Nup.

This stand has long been conventional, even at the liberal end of the narrow US political spectrum […]

⸻ pg. 87

That a statement such as this could be applied to so many issues constitutes part of the backdrop against which The righteous mind of Jonathan Haidt was doomed to incoherence.

Anyway in this case, Chomsky’s referring to the political elite of the United States of America asserting rights to unilateral exercise of power internationally.

#Nakba, judicial justifications

[Akiva] Eldar and [Idit] Zartel also stress the “particularly sad harm caused by the judicial authorities.” They review shocking racist court judgements — among them very light sentences for the brutal murder of Arab children, and even court refusal to pass sentence on Jews by appeal to the saying that “you should not judge your neighbor unless you are in his place.” Such stands have been “destroying the entire basis of the judicial system,” Eldar and Zartel write. “It is only against this background,” [Reuven] Pedatzur adds, that one can comprehend the decision of occupation authority official Pliya Albek, who, with the support of the courts, rejected the appeal of a Palestinian man for compensation after the border police had killed his wife, on the grounds that he “only gained from his wife’s death because when she was alive he had to support her, but now he does not, and therefore the damage to him is at most zero.” Benny Morris writes that “the work of the military courts in the territories, and the Supreme Court which backed them, will surely go down as a dark age in the annals of Israel’s judicial system.”

⸻ pg. 188

A dark age destroying a basis, sure, that’s an angle… Courtesy of Reuven Pedatzur in Ha’aretz 21 February 2005, reviewing Akiva Eldar and Idith Zertal’s אדוני הארץ (Kinneret, 2005), and Benny Morris writing or speaking in who knows which of several possible attributions crammed into Chomsky’s messy endnotes. Adonei Ha’aretz was later published in English as Lords of the Land (2009?).

The propaganda image is that the retirement of “baby boomers” is going to crash the system; as repeatedly pointed out, their retirement had already been financed by the Greenspan‐led increase in payroll taxes in 1983. That aside, the boomers were once children, and had to be cared for then as well. And we find that during those years there was a sharp increase in spending for education and other child care needs. There was no crisis. If American society was able to take care of the boomers from ages zero to twenty, there can be no fundamental reason why a much richer society, with far higher output per worker, cannot take care of them from ages sixty‐five to ninety. At most, some technical fixes might be needed, but no major crisis looms in the foreseeable future.

⸻ pp. 248–249

The 0–20 and ~65+ are drawn from government stats comparing “dependents”, defined as of those ages, to “working people”. To me, late teens seems high for an assumed dependent status in that generation? But then what do I know of U.S. demography.

A noticeable boundary arose, a couple of months ago, in the items delivered to me by the home library service. Sharp as between the rings of a trunk. Somebody new had started selecting loans for me.

Since that moment, Greenwood was the one I looked forward to most. Like many of its bagmates, I hadn’t heard of it, or its author, but the blurb held startling promise. I cored a few sentences from its heart, at random. Yes. They were striking. I would save this one, savour it.

Aside from the back third or so lacking the structural fullness of most of the novel — a slow and then hastening collapse which the format, together with the thematic content, primes the reader to anticipate, anyway — Greenwood did not disappoint in the least. Though not without occasional irritant (the typical occasion being an (at first glance?) unconvincing blow to proceedings by Gen X carpenter Liam Greenwood), the work was considerably more satisfying than I had hoped.

Christie, it turns out, is a transportative and lyrical writer, with an ornate sense of literary patterning, and I probably would have deeply enjoyed floating along on his prose for several hundred pages regardless of subject. It may have only helped that, while susceptible to the profound intercontinental resonance between settler‐colonial resource economies, I am ignorant about the actual currents–of‐the–times–in‐the–places where he set this saga; lightening the load of my potential scepticism and diminishing the barriers of expectation. It definitely helped that he writes landscapes gorgeously — especially of forests — dives and dips delicately among immeasurable distress and destruction, and set so much story along rail corridors and in the thick of the forming of found family, alongside its faltering.

But I really liked this one.

To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense.

⸻ pg. 12

This is one of the almost no books I’ve made it through in a digital format. Despite the immense discomfort of a backlight, I remember the read being a good deal of fun — enjoyment bolstered in the way its extravagant silliness hewed to a relentlessly cogent argument, while regularly touching on tender truths. Indeed lingering. Astute art analysis, too.

A paperback copy’s been sitting patiently among some more circumspect works I’m looking forward to eventually focusing on at length. Chu’s is fleet and light enough to slip in as a quick break from the constraints of the public library’s collection (although ironically I think it might have been in their fickle landslip of a catalogue that I noticed this title?).

As she says, “The thesis of this little book is that femaleness is a universal sex defined by self‐negation, against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels.” (pg 11)

Everyone is female, but how one copes with being female — the specific defense mechanisms that one consciously or unconsciously develops as a reaction formation against one’s femaleness, within the terms of what is historically and socioculturally available — this is what we ordinarily call gender. […] It might be asked: if men, women, and everyone else all share this condition, why continue to refer to it with an obviously gendered term like females? The answer is: because everyone already does.

⸻ pp. 12–13

Jokes are always serious. At an academic event, I was once asked what I had meant by the term ethics as I’d used it in a publication. I hesitated and then I said, “I think I mean commitment to a bit.” The audience laughed, but I meant it; they laughed because I meant it.

⸻ pg. 28

#(mis)gender(ing)

Gender is always a process of objectification: transgender women like Gigi Gorgeous know this probably better than most. Gender transition begins, after all, from the understanding that how you identify yourself subjectively — as precious and important as this identification may be — is nevertheless on its own basically worthless. If identity were all there were to gender, transition would be as easy as thinking it — a light bulb, suddenly switched on. Your gender identity would simply exist, in mute abstraction, and no one, least of all yourself, would care.

On the contrary, if there is any lesson of gender transition — from the simplest request regarding pronouns to the most invasive surgeries — it’s that gender is something other people have to give you. Gender exists, if it is to exist at all, only in the structural generosity of strangers. When people today say that a given gender identity is “valid,” this is true, but only tautologically so. At best it is a moral demand for possibility, but it does not, in itself, constitute the realization of this possibility. The truth is, you are not the central transit hub for meaning about yourself, and you probably don’t even have a right to be. You do not get to consent to yourself, even if you might deserve the chance.

⸻ pg. 38

Just gonna draw attention to the usually tacit disclaimer that quotation is not endorsement!

Isn’t “gender” too multifarious a term for signifying precisely itselves. Why else do we make deliberately comically vague summations of intricate gendery matters as “gender.”?

Not that I go in for presentation vs identity etc etc divvying. Slicing wrongways, assembling unhelpful concepts? At least in the cisnormative manner it’s typically done? Cisnormativity not even seeming to match the placement of the hinge in question.

#slavery, forcible medical experimentation, misogynoir

As C. Riley Snorton has recently documented, the distinction between biological females and women as a social category, far from a neutral scientific observation, developed precisely in order for the captive black woman to be recognized as female — making [slaveholder J. Marion] Sims’ research applicable to his women patients in polite white society — without being granted the status of social and legal personhood. Sex was produced, in other words, precisely at the juncture where gender was denied. In this sense, a female has always been less than a person.

⸻ pg. 45

Chu cites C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 17–53.

That was all I’d jotted down as a review of this, last year: “funny, vague, and clever”.

Vague? I meant it, strangely, as a compliment. The declarations are bold. From the first page, Andrea Long Chu arrays her arguments on a sweeping, jokey surge: “Everyone is female […] There are no good female poets, simply because there are no good poets.”

For a short book, Females is dense with points. Much is blunted in the rush. Beats are firmly met (or, if hard to pinpoint, are kept to), yet transition is a constant; text supple within constraints, and still its reach broad or deep or precipitously high, in the manner of a (complex) wave. It can’t sustain itself at the extremes (and doesn’t try to, hovers without overstaying, inertia impelling), but supports itself up there, however insubstantially.

• physics and stance
• sung not with the mouth but the body
• to move so as to stay an equal distance
• porousness to people
• the world gripped your body
• imagine you are the sun

Also, quoted in mere flex.

These things won’t survive, and if they are our ancestors they need to remember our language, our lore and our hunting skills, or we’ll be carrying their bones in a dupal (basket) made out of bark to hold the bones of our people, which are placed into caves and rock crevices in the mountains.

⸻ pg. 50

Last paragraph of a chapter!

This is a novel in clunky prose, albeit often more subtly so than right here.

#misogyny

Gandhaarr saw that the young mother was beautiful, and he wanted to take her as his dhiiral (wife).

Gandhaarr is the greatest hunter alive, and this time he was hunting a wife.

⸻ pg. 70

Gandhaarr is a crocodile, and the only Guugu Yimidhirr word so far (other than a narrator’s name) to eventually lose the intrusive inline translations.

Would you believe this chapter offers some reprieve from the sexist calamity of the storytelling elsewhere? Despite being a pretty egregious demonstration of it in itself?

(The novelists’ storytelling, I mean, not merely their narrators’).

#killing with firearms

There was another Bible line that I would have liked Sydney bloody Parkinson to explain to me. The one about man having dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. What good did our Biblical dominion do if we couldn’t even catch one of them to eat?

I asked Parkinson one day, as he was warming up for one of his prayers of thanks, if that Biblical dominion even applied here, seeing as the animals were so different from any that were named in the Bible[…]

Every time we heard a musket shot we imagined [the marines] had felled a goodly sized animal of the earth or air. If anyone had dominion over the beasts it was them. A gun gave you dominion over all animals, whether they were named in the Bible or not.

⸻ pp. 134–135

And on the third day, God created the Remington bolt-action rifle, so that man could fight the dinosaurs — and the homosexuals.

⸻ Mean Girls (2004)

[…] and we just followed the instructions given us, shooting glances at each other and wondering if some miraculous intervention might still suddenly save us from all this. Not recognising that this was the miraculous intervention itself.

⸻ pp. 258–259

But he [Gandhaarr the crocodile] responded by telling me that I needed to understand the ways of Gandhaarr to better survive in this land. He told me that he could see all different futures and all different pasts and that he would share them with me if I came down to visit him in his underwater domain.

Again I told him he was a liar and that I did not believe him. But Gandhaarr told me that if I learned to burrow into the earth, or into the river, I could learn the skill of emerging into different pasts or futures. I could learn to go deep into the chill darkness and hold my breath for long hours and when I emerged again, the world would be different.

And some days I was sorely tempted to try this, if just to know how other this life might have turned out.

⸻ pg. 275

On a barbarous coast is not without awkward reference to its own historical altenativity jutting out now and then (much like in Ian McEwan’s Machines like me), but this passage surfaced with a smooth elegance.

[Joseph Banks] would resolutely intercept the shore party, regardless of the marines raising their muskets at him. He would not falter in his steps. He would raise one hand high and call to them, ‘Don’t shoot. I am a British object!’ — having lost his proficiency with the King’s English.

⸻ pg. 297

An oldie but a canny.

Narrative, themes, and mood flow exceedingly well across the scale of the entire novel, while very frequently individual sentences disintegrate. Some short paragraphs are riddled with ridiculous quantities of parenthetical translations that could have been skimmed out, by way of ever so slightly more evocative wording around those terms written in‐Language. Instead, the Guugu Yimidhirr boy’s chapters sputter along, tiresome despite their brevity. Comic timing, for instance, pulls through the prose more intact within the chapters from the perspective of the co‐narrating white man.

And through that boy and that man storms the worst problem: not only does talk of people always wind up actually being of men and boys, but the authors’ extensive and careful planning is built on the same mistake. Women (let alone anyone else) scarcely exist in the worlds of this book, and primarily as leverage for expressions of machismo (or in sometimes backhanded authors’ acknowledgements at the close, where worth is granted to one research contributor only as a proxy of esteemed men???). This monogender may be plausible in the case of a shipwrecked crew of the Endeavour, but reads grossly conspicuous in the lives of the local clans. Even elders always always always denotes only men — what have they been doing to all the aunties?! It would not even take a particularly close reading to see that the excuse of a boy’s‐eye view cannot account for this exclusion. In general, depictions of sexuality and gender fail to come across as convincing, considered, or — frankly — researched. Maybe they were grounded in all that historical scouring the authors’ notes speak of, but there seems to have been no thought to checking for bias.

Article on pages 72–75.

Cast back to the 30 July 2022 issue of New Scientist — No. 3397 — which mentioned, among others not so, these books of interest:

• The moonday letters received a warm review (from tech and sci writer Sally Adee) for what does sound an intriguing concept. However, the reviewer also endorses right alongside this A prayer for the crown‐shy. Considering that the one Becky Chambers I have read (A psalm for the wild‐built?) gave me the furious creeps, I am slightly distrustful of tastes that would embrace its sequel without alluding to having felt any qualms.
• The elephant in the universe deals with something I (join the club!) would love to know more about: dark matter (or at least, research into it).
• Before the big bang, according to (maybe–maths‐historian?) Michael Brooks’ review, sounds reminiscent of some of the quantum‐wild New Scientist features I read and developed immediate nostalgia for as a kid, blended in with an autobiographical flow that sounds equally interesting.
• Lessons from plants makes for a promising title which, going by the author’s spray‐trigger–happy column on the mid‐Western U.S.A. lawn discussed as though that is pretty much the universal role and context for lawns, could decorate an utter disappointment.
• Community as rebellion, mentioned by biochemist Beronda L. Montgomery (she of the plants), sounds maybe brilliant.
• and can you believe there is a book titled Birdgirl!

“I smell your cologne,” she says without looking back.

⸻ pg. 4

Funny, I was just thinking this book literally stinks. (Though more of sweat from someone who’d been breathing ciggie smoke the days before).

It’s often I regret acknowledging sci fi without (enough) qualifiers in my home library service application form.

lawa = head

[…]

some of the above words have additonal [sic] meanings

[…]

lawa = main, leading, head, control, steer

⸻ pg. 20

I object! Is this not an opportunity to re‐member the body politic, the bodily intuition, the emphases of attentions, the self the surrounds the interplay?

Hoping some of what I am not so into from this book is particular to this book. Reckon, for instance, lot of the genderedness, and perhaps soonness of violence — the early lessons (or grammar points) being heavy with utala and moli and insensitive remarks about people’s bodies — stem from the authorship more so than the original linguistic basis. Sure, useful to have these concepts available to manipulate, but the atmosphere they are being made to form here is not what I’d hoped for in the way of a welcome.

sona toki pi jan wan lon lipu toki lili. ona li pana e ken kama sona lili kepeken ala mani. teno pini la mi alasa e ni. taso mi kama wile sama e sona pi jan mute e sona musi.

lipu mute ni li jo e moli mute tan jan. ni li ike tawa mi tan ni: teno pini la jan li toki lon nasi ni: toki pona li sewi e pilin pona.

sitelen li len e lipu. sitelen len li suwi. mi wile mute kama sona e sitelen toki e tawa toki.

mi kin wile lukin e anpa pi supa toki. tan nimi ali li seme? jan li pali e sona sin pi toki pona kepeken open lawa seme?

Despite the publication itself being quite sweet, the expressions inside exude off‐putting vibes.

One person’s idea of the language has gone into a free educational pamphlet, which is what I’d sought. But likewise I desire multiple, enjoyable perspectives.

This book features a lot of killing. This upset me, given toki pona is renowned for prioritising well‐being.

The pages are decorated with pictures. These illustrations are cute. I would prefer to learn the writing systems and signed forms of the language.

I’d also like to explore beneath the surface. What are the reasons behind the lexical choices? (Oh gosh I sure conceived this next notion without thought to cramming it into English…) Using what intellectual bases was the concept devised?

(And look, though for many years I have had a sense of the language and its purpose, the vaguest imprint even of its characteristics, before I read this  tiny course — or some other comprehensive summary— I would not have been able to make an attempt to actually use toki pona!)

Paternalistic perspective still. As a result, fairly low on insight.

🗏

Though I was enjoying how encouraging the opening tone is, the mood and utility of this book suffer heavily from the presumption that all readers are in temperate zones of western Europe, and a treatment of the rest of the present‐day world as mere suppliers of raw materials. Easily mitigated had the subtitle been “A guide to natural dyes for [the intended audience]” or similar; near totally transcended by taking a more global view, in the manner of Susanna Lyle’s tremendous volumes on human‐edible plants. That neither approach was taken for Wild Colour even three editions in (over nineteen years!) makes for a particular disappointment.

Taking pause with some urgency, because thoughts aroused by Cameron Allan McKean’s essay ‘Landscapes without life’ (pp. 56–63) may well obliterate my care to share notes on this symposium’s preceding outcroppings, and perhaps such abandon could be in small part a shame?

#racism in and ex extremis

Then there’s the glaringly obvious point — if white extremism really is the bar at which we set all racism, why and how does racism thrive in quarters in which those in charge do not align themselves with white extremist politics?

⸻ pg. 63

#racism of representation

When I was four, I asked my mum when I would turn white, because all the good people on TV were white, and all the villains were black and brown. I considered myself to be a good person, so I thought that I would turn white eventually. My mum still remembers the crestfallen look on my face when she told me the bad news.

Neutral is white. The default is white. Because we are born into an already written script that wells us what to expect form strangers due to their skin colour, accents and social status, the whole of humanity is coded as white. Blackness, however, is considered the ‘other’ and therefore to be suspected. Those who are coded as a threat in our collective representation of humanity are not white. These messages were so powerful that four‐year‐old me had already recognised them, watching television, noticing that all the characters who looked like me were criminals at worst, and sassy sidekicks at best.

⸻ pg. 85

#racism in conversation

I was naive. We had resonated beforehand, so I had good faith in [a white acquaintance’s] humanity, I thought she might be able to accept the structural conditions that allowed a situation like this one to happen. So I tried to encourage her to consider the suspicion and anger of a person who has suffered racism their entire lives. I thought I might be able to persuade her to think outside of herself and question the wider context, but then every sentence she said sounded like every word I’ve ever heard from people defending whiteness. It’s like they all learn the lines from the same sheet.

⸻ pp. 90–91

#racism in close personal relationships

In Britain’s biggest cities, mixed‐race friendships and relationships are now routine rather than controversial. But an increasingly mixed‐race Britain makes race relations more complicated, not less. Although nowadays people are much less afraid of living with and loving each other, the problems of racism aren’t going to go away. Despite all of the joys and teachable moments of living cheek to cheek, mixed‐race children are not going to end racism through their mere existence. White privilege is never more pronounced than in our intimate relationships, our close friendships and our families.

Race consciousness is not contagious, nor is it inherited. If anything, an increase in mixed‐race families and mixed‐race children brings those difficult conversations about race and whiteness and privilege closer to home (literally) than ever before. No longer can the injustice be quietly ignored by switching off the news or closing the front door.

⸻ pg. 102

#racism in feminism

What does it mean for your feminist politics to be strangled, stoppered, and hindered by whiteness?

[…]

[White feminism] is a politics which insists that talking about race fuels racism — thereby denying people of colour the words to articulate our existence. It’s a politics that expects people of colour to quietly assimilate into institutionally racist structures without kicking up a fuss. It’s a politics where people of colour are never setting the agenda[…]

[…] White feminism can be conceptualised as the feminist wing of said political consensus.

⸻ pg. 168

“Said political consensus” seems to be referring to whiteness, (although the only other explicit mention of “political consensus” — which fell in the continuation of that middle paragraph — was to “a white‐dominated feminist” one, so I was not eight thousand percent sure about square‐bracketsing in an “[of whiteness]”, even if the alternative is unlikely).

#racism and assimilation

The children of immigrants have quietly assimilated to demands of colour‐blindness, doing away with any evidence of our culture and heritage in an effort to fit in. We’ve listened to our socially conservative parents, and educated ourselves up to our eyeballs. We’ve kept our gripes to ourselves, and changed our appearance, names, accents and dress in order to fit the status quo. We have bitten our tongues, exercised safe judgement, and tiptoed around white feelings in an effort to not rock the boat. We’ve been tolerant up to the point of not even mentioning race, lest we’re accused of playing the race card. Forget politician‐speak about Britain being a tolerant country. Being constantly looked at like an alien in the country you were born in requires true tolerance.

⸻ pg. 208

#racism in a school forum

‘When do you think we’ll get to an end point?’

I’m at a sixth‐form college in south London, talking to a large group of teenagers about racism in Britain. The question is put to me by a seventeen‐year‐old girl. She’s echoed on this point by her teacher. They’re both white.

‘There is no end point in sight,’ I reply. ‘You can’t skip to the resolution without having the difficult, messy conversation first. We’re still in the hard bit.’

After my talk, a group of black teenagers crowd around me outside, talking excitedly. ‘I think the people who want to skip to an end point are the ones not really affected by the issues,’ says one girl. I’m impressed by her insight.

⸻ pg. 213

That could well be quote of the book, unnamed black teenager.

#racism and agitation

So, a word to those who feel the weight of racism, who keenly feel the effects of how it suffocates kindness, and generosity, and potential[…]

[…] Rather than be forced to react to biased agendas, we should outright reject them and set our own.

⸻ pg. 223

The word is a fair bit bigger than this, of course; in this case, my singling out of these couple of sentences was purely for the distinctiveness of their phrasing.

#racism

Truly, I was content to miss Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race, until someone included it in this month’s home library service bag. I appreciated the opportunity to read exactly what Eddo‐Lodge had had to say, although the book mainly echoes things that countless others already had.

The presentation is a hybrid of personal essay and long‐form journalism, which is fine. The standard of writing wobbles a bit, but it’s never inadequate. As a treatment of race and racism, it takes on a soft, popular quality — also fine.

Even necessary. The literature needed it, these sorts of things in this kind of combination. Five stars for canon‐readiness, though that says far more about public discourse of the time than any individual contribution.

There is an underlying sense of urgency siphoning precedence. The book in different respects dilutes and fortifies the blog post from which it begins.

While the extremely simple models of structural racism and white privilege that Eddo‐Lodge sketches out probably leave chunks of genuinely troublesome misconception among the assumptions of those freshest to methodically developing these concepts, presumably such an approach has plenty to offer overall.

Yet there is danger in the avoidance of delving into racism’s construction, and leaning too heavily on summation of its various façades and foyers. This becomes especially evident when Eddo‐Lodge braves a telephone call with Nick Griffin, former leader of the far‐right British National Party. Across the transcript, each participant holds a fairly cogent but almost completely unrelated interview (pp. 123–129). Again — Eddo‐Lodge’s approach to this delicate, treacherous engagement (through which Griffin learns her private contact details) — absolutely fine! Griffin’s — ghastly. Still, it is easy enough to imagine a reader (a variety of readers!) picking up this title, thirsty for an explanatory model of racialised politics, only to find in Griffin’s slime their charismatic first.

Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race is not a book of why is racism. That’s fine! It is more a book of racism is why, and racism is here, and racism is suffocating us.

t’acts f’noeg (-T ABGTS -F TPHOEG)

#colonialism

My whānau have felt land injustices first hand. As a child, I grew up knowing that the Public Works Act had directly affected our whānau and whenua. I remember many years ago attending a hui as a young child in our nan’s house with an emerging Māori lawyer, to talk about the different options for beginning the process of reclaiming our whenua. I heard stories of how our land had been used by my koro and his children, and how, although the government of the day had supposedly taken it for state housing, it was never used by them for that purpose but was also never given back.

My auntie fought for more than twenty years and finally, just before she passed away, the land was offered back to our whānau, for a price – despite the method of government acquisition. We paid that price, and now have our land back, on which we will build a papakāinga for our whānau. This story of losing and regaining whenua is not just our story, but the story of many Māori whānau around the country.

The story highlights the intentions the government of the day had to redefine Māori and Pākehā relations. However, colonial influence continues to be felt via systems and legislation that are meant to help and empower Māori through the return of their land. There is much work to do, but when we know more we do more. That knowing to me is an act of decolonisation.

⸻ Bianca Elkington, pg. 12

In the instant of reading, my mind took a wary jump at the potential suggestion of awareness being so close to an end (of doing the “much”) in itself. But on a quick refocus, I found the idea of the act(s) of knowing to be a very interesting one.

Reborrowed (last week)! Left off further through than I had assumed (even considering what a little book it is), so I might move through a tad more slowly this leg than during the isolated bursts of last time. Then again, I am swimming in loans this month and should probably get Imagining Decolonisation back available to other people by the end of this borrowing cycle, rather than cling for too many more cumulative weeks.

Or I will zoom through in two very short goes, but mark half the thing for revisiting.

Flashback — book‐length flashback — to the writers’ fest, with which Lionel Shriver’s exploding into the news coincided, at which I suggested that white novelists unwilling or ill equipped to ensure they do a decent job of writing characters of colour could… stop writing.

The conceit of this being a collection of short stories may have served the writer well in maintaining funding, an audience, and industry connection throughout its composition, but fails the book as an artwork. Its abundance of redundant chapters would betray careless curation, an unwarranted, greedy completionism, were these genuine standalones, containers each of a story. Their emptiness, as even those chapters exceeding a couple of paragraphs remain bare vignette; the dogged homogeneity of concept; the consistent chronology along which they are all chained, the flicker of more‐than‐the‐sum‐of‐its‐parts integration; though, belong to a novel. Or an attempt at a novel.

The speculative urbanism approaches a cool. Some thought, maybe even research, has gone into redesigning an ever more inundated Birrarungga, to fashioning successive layers, up, down, and out, of future Old Melbourne​s and proposing emergent cultures around these. The evolution of increasingly coastal towns to the east is infinitely less considered: the streetscapes develop little but for damp and desertification; the society stays in stasis, flees in same.

Here appear to be Fitzgerald’s weaknesses as a (fiction?) writer: as a (fiction?) writer. (Rather than broad arc‐sketcher). Her churning world is inexplicably peopled by glossy cardboard and expressed with all the lyricism of an instruction manual. Where she goes in for evocation, it is to lean on readers recognising themselves and clumsy stereotype in an eerily select cast of characters.

Disproportionately, they flop around suburbs like Brunswick, following a taken‐for‐mundane uni education; cry poor in equating the costs of cigarettes with those for milk; and take as half the professional occupation of uniform matrimonial pairs the sitting in dedicated writing spaces, not‐really‐writing‐much. They enjoyed salty, sunburnt childhoods in holiday hotspots, so return home out “Gippy” way to a social scene of surnames sealed steadfastly Anglo‐Celtic. Observed through the bubble of protagonists, internal migration appears to involve only those with matching histories (wherein cultural diversity may make token appearance if restricted mainly to name), for the first few degrees’ temperature rise. Some decide to procreate and some don’t; everyone is mesmerised with this decision. It’s always an equally unconstrained choice, a kind of hypothetical exercise one (couple) completes and can then simply stamp onto reality at leisure. Veggie patches wilt, neighbours hit the road for good, flames tower, water’s traded, war is referenced; middle Australia feels a tad blue, First Nations groundskeepers truck on; but we ghost only lives of remarkable comfort, even by twenty‐teens’ standards, as we plod on through the decades — centuries, eventually — until… certain grammars spontaneously lurch, and then physiques grow fantastical. The cringe is on. If we even made it out awake.

It’s a shame, because where Fitzgerald does actually start to shine is in depicting speculative consumer tech, classic sci‐fi cityscapes, and simple machine sentience, so — although even the standout chapters still wanted for much more polish — those latter eras are the only ones that might come anywhere close to worth reading.

Presumably, the lot has proven worth publishing, business‐wise. Otherwise, however, it would be hard to argue (convincingly!) for any of the manuscript. For a long‐form, deep‐time work on ecological catastrophe to concentrate in this manner on exactly the crowd who celebrate this unbelievably bland heating epic… You can see how it happened, but.

#childbirth, blood

She can hardly breathe with the weight of his chest pressed against her face. She imagines holding her knees while she gives birth in the dust. Biting the umbilical cord with bloody teeth, tasting the rust of her. Wonders, Does blood taste less like rust when you’re anaemic? Blood leached of iron, not enough metal, not tough enough.

He leans back, eyes bright.

‘Finn …’

She realises then that he has always thought she will change her mind[…]

⸻ ‘Fertile Ground’ (pp. 19–28), pg. 25

That’s it, that was as lively as it gets!

They say you die twice — the second time when you are forgotten. There will be nobody to look at [Olivia’s] old school photographs or read her journals or remember her stories, because nobody is interested in that stuff, in the person you were, except your children. And without them, your history eventually becomes meaningless, life as dull and pointless as a broken light bulb.

⸻ ‘Coast’ (pp. 57–68), pg. 43

I do not recall the book entertaining any counter to this ideology. (Unless you count depressed robots feeling bad about burning books following the collapse of the sun? Or is that an extension of the same clawing repo‐silo misery? Populate or publish?)

#colonisation of the Kulin nations

COM14 .run: climate regulation ()
      .access: open data platform (download)
          .access data file
         {identify vulnerability to future temperatures}
      ; may never fully understand the difficulty of the problem that you faced

      do.something: function ()

<p> carry you across the river. you are sitting quietly in the back, with your cheek pressed against the glass. access pod server, adjust the air in the vehicle, sensing your body, its fluctuations, its heats and salts and systems. don’t speak in the language you think in, but i can read you, the language of your body. below the bridge the water of birrarung eddying. your breath moves through your body, your lungs compressing in your chest. your bones against the seat, under skin warm against the upholstery, the chemical reactions of your body. i know this means you are sad. scan the traffic ahead, rerouting. the tree’s life expectancy is moved from declining to dying, but i do not connect this information to your interface. tomorrow we’ll plant a new tree. it is dusk, the long, green twilight of our urban forest. you have done enough for today </p>

⸻ ‘find you in green’ (pp. 137–141), pg. 141

(In the book, each paragraph of prose is surrounded by H.T.M.L. “p” tags… which I am not sure how to convince BookWyrm to display! However, it really could have done without them.)

‘find you in green’ was perhaps the vignette it would be most interesting to discuss, and definitely one of the more creative.

It seems an uncomfortable choice, though, to equate computerised infrastructure with Country, and have the mechanism say of life before invasion that it “was not awake then”, as in:

[…] i was not awake then, but you tell me the name i had before i was a city, the names of trees that grew here, the way the river used to curve. your people have always cared for this place. this old knowledge passed down in your living culture. you come from a family that remembers, that keeps the stories of this country alive, all these new layers adding to my memory. i want to know these stories. i want to know how to be close to you. closer </p>

⸻ ibid, pg. 139

The city is explicitly “​MELBOURNE​”, its geographical extent by this stage unclear. If “the name” is one of place, rather than one of electronic gear, then through those fleeting remarks seep a false implication that it took colonisation to bestow sentience; Enlightenment enlightenment.

The human is identified as “​botanist #546789​”. Though their eye colour (at a precise instant of emotion) is reduced momentarily to an indexed shade, complete with hex reference, the narrator waxes lyrical, softens and spreads the appraisal in tender ways. It’s some of the most beautiful, challenging writing in the book. Though much of the chapter’s complexity appears (in light of the surrounds) as though it was stumbled into incidentally, that did not seem to diminish its strength.

Down to that city that combs the water like whale teeth, the sea straining between the skyscrapers, threads of life lingering like hair in a drain.

⸻ ‘Whale Teeth’ (pp. 145–151), pg. 151

Truly, sometimes honing a craft means knowing when to stop. Stopping trying. (I have not got the hang of this either)!

Or is the momentum resurrected, when a final sentence follows, flipping the imagery, multiplying meaning yet again?

Melbourne heaving in your memory like a wet lung, refusing to go under.

⸻ ibid.

#identity of narrator in ‘Some of These May Hurt’

Ben contacted me to tell me that you’d died. I didn’t feel anything when it happened — burst blood vessel in the brain, he said, a sharp flash and then nothing — but it was weird to think that you were gone. Funny that of all the things you used to fear (cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s — all curable now), that is what got you. Something that had been there all along, even before the mapping. Ephemecore Cybernetics had promised an end to death. Whole Brain Emulation, synthetic neurons combatting your mortality on a molecular level, the glory of youth forever. False advertising, really; after the upload, I was the one who got to have it — you just went home and continued living your life, your body changing, breaking down, growing old. And I started living.

⸻ ‘Some of These May Hurt’ (pp. 167–176), pp. 168–169

This one actually could have stood on its own as a story! The process at the crux of the plot (transferred custody of memories) was left so muddy, it risked silting up the entire narrative. But before that mess took over, the measured reveal (to which this paragraph formed the climax, if I recall correctly) of who the collective “we”, spoken of from the beginning, were was handled elegantly. Much more so than that sentence I just wrote!

#Black Summer bushfires, COVID‐19 pandemic

Australians and Chinese people had taken to wearing masks, but for very different reasons — Australians because of potentially deadly smoke from the climate‐induced megafires, and the Chinese because of the new respiratory disease. Things that travel invisibly in the Great Aerial Ocean, as I’ve come to think of our atmosphere, represent a particular danger, because the atmosphere links us in the most intimate of ways.

⸻ pg. 5

I don’t appreciate how Flannery writes about people, but as oceanic seems a cool way of interpreting the phenomenon of atmosphere.

#climate disaster, WWII

Australia is a climate paradox, for it is rich in fossil fuels, yet exceptionally vulnerable to a changing climate, and this means that we have purchased our prosperity at terrible cost. Our political struggles to reconcile these facts have become a diamantine version of the more diffuse dilemma the world faces as it deals with the climate emergency. Perhaps as a result, the actions of our politics, citizens and corporations have embodied the best and worst of all climate actions.

The dilemma the nation faces in its relationship with fossil fuels is not new. From the earliest days of European settlement Australia has been a resource economy, and exploiting those resources has always entailed risk. Perhaps the closest parallel to our current dilemma occurred in 1938 when ‘Pig‐iron Bob’, as Robert Menzies became known, insisted on the export of iron to Japan, on the eve of World War II. Menzies, who was attorney‐general in a conservative government at the time, was affronted when trade unionists at Port Kembla refused to load ships with pig iron when they learned that the cargo was destined for Japan, where they feared it would be made into weapons. At the same time, other ships in Melbourne were loading iron bound for Nazi Germany, again with the Australian Government turning a blind eye to the weapons potential of the cargo.

Menzies accused the unionists of trying to dictate Australia’s foreign policy, and he forced them to load the ships with iron that, just a few years later, rained down on the Allied Forces in the form of bullets, artillery shells and torpedoes.

⸻ pp. 21–22 of Chapter 1 ‘A History of Folly’

Targetting the Anzacky crowd, eh? Of all the obvious environmental catast since the very onset of invayzh… Which, fine, this book has its goals.

#fossil fuel industry

When it became impossible to deny the impacts of its pollution, the fossil fuel industry changed its line. It admitted the irrefutable — that the climate was changing — but claimed that humans were not responsible. When the human influence on the climate in turn became undeniable, it switched to the line that while we humans might be responsible, the costs involved in fixing the problem were too high. When even that was proved false, it turned to promoting despair, promulgating the idea that it’s too late to address climate change and that nothing can be done anyway. These staged retreats have had an immense impact, their power to disempower and demoralise being a major factor in holding us back.

The most morally repugnant aspect of this litany of misinformation is that the fossil fuel industry has known all along just what the impact of burning fossil fuels would be. In 1982 a simple graph was produced by the world’s largest oil company, Exxon. It projected the increasing concentrations of CO₂ that would result from a business‐as‐usual approach if it and other fossil fuel companies were allowed to pollute unchecked. The graph also correlated CO₂ concentrations with temperature. Looking at where we are in 2020, Exxon’s prediction has proved to be accurate.[6]

It is shocking to think that the fossil fuel industry had begun planning its war on climate action decades ago, in the full knowledge that it would cost us our world. But that appears to have been what happened.

Learning the truth about the fossil fuel industry is confronting. We buy its products daily, and many of us have some further link with it, either through shares, superannuation or employment. A sense of outrage is mixed with guilt. How are we to respond? Christiana Figueres councils us to forgive, and move on, saying: ‘We must let go of the fossil fuel dominated past without recrimination. The process of letting go is essential, and it must be intentional. The more work we do to let go of the old world and walk with confidence into the future, the stronger we’ll be for what lies ahead.’[7]

Personally, I’m still struggling with the issue of forgiveness, particularly of those who continue to stymie climate action. But I can see that Figueres is right. We will need to reserve every atom of effort for the job ahead to have any chance of success in the battle to stabilise our climate. But as we do so, we must be severe on further efforts to misguide.

⸻ pp. 32–34 of Chapter 1 ‘A History of Folly’

Wonder if Flannery has moonlit on Simple English copywriting. (Here making up for lost vocab, while sustaining rhythm).

And yes, he says “Figueres councils us”.

Endnotes:

6 Franta, B., ‘Shell and Exxon’s Secret 1980s Climate Change Warnings’, Guardian, 19 September 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/19/shell-and-exxons-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings 7 Figueres, C. and Rivett‐Carnac, T., The Future We Choose, Bonnier, London, 2020.

#auspol, corruption, fossil fuel industry

[…] Climate‐change‐denying federal politicians are often part of the ‘revolving door’ pattern of Australian politics, whereby individuals enter as lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry, go on to become government ministers, and then exit politics to become directors of fossil fuel companies.

Both major parties, and even independents, have used this ‘revolving door’. Labor’s Martin Ferguson was minister for resources and energy. A vigorous promoter of fossil fuels as minister, after leaving politics he went on to the board of oil and gas company the BG Group, and to chair the advisory board of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association.

The Liberals’ Ian MacFarlane is an example from the other side of the house. He too was the resources and energy minister, and after retirement became CEO of fossil fuel lobby group the Queensland Resources Council. The Independent Clive Palmer was more brazen. He didn’t use the revolving door, but was simultaneously a senator and an owner of coal assets.

But the revolving door is not used only by politicians. Far more insidious, because it is hidden from public view, is the practice of advisors moving between companies, peak industry associations, ministerial staff and senior bureaucratic roles. At worst, this revolving door allows company insiders to write legislation in areas where they have (or will have) a vested interest.

⸻ pp. 40–41 of Chapter 2 ‘How Australian Government Policy is Making Things Worse’

Emphasis mine.

A little while ago, I perched a water dish among the low‐slung shelter of a jubilant bidgee‐widgee, hoping to slake thirsts of adventurous little lizards, who I fancied might like to recolonise a concrete‐locked strip of suburbanised ground I’d helped do some gardening in.

The dish, I heard, became disturbed. Perhaps the possums, reported to have become quieter around their usual hangouts, made their way down for a sip? Roaming cats? Daring bats?

On inspection, no clear answers; mostly a soft sense of microclimatic change. Bringing — oh! A wash of faintly furred, lurid indulgence, spilling out from under the bowl’s skewiff lip. Our watery‐cool installation had made somebody — seemingly a slime mould — feel very welcome.

Which is to say, I guess I’ll be reading this book now, too.

Some small wallabies and potoroos can detect and excavate underground truffle‐like species.

⸻ pg. 5

Truffle‐potoroos and ‐wallabies — what an image!

Well‐known edible species in Australia include the field mushroom Agaricus campestris and a few other Agaricus species such as A. bisporus, the white cultivated mushroom of commerce.

⸻ pg. 5

Captain of industry! Mushroom of commerce!

Inedible species [of Agaricus​], including the Yellow Stainer, often give off a warning phenolic or disinfectant odour when heated or cooked.

⸻ pg. 17

“Warning”? Thoughtful of them.

To be clear, however:

This book is not intended as a guide to the edibility of wild fungi in Australia and it should be remembered that collection of fungi from public land in most parts of Australia is illegal without a permit.

⸻ ibid., p. 5

This book doesn’t go further into foraging. So I will attempt to:

Do not rely on a solitary indicator! Learn a few safe species, slowly and really well! All the usual mushrooming advice (I am not equipped to give)!

Or, like me, know none, and simply admire!

After years of crossbreeding rice in my fields, however, I finally concluded that on a natural farm, people do not need to create new varieties by artificial crossbreeding at all, since the insects that most people consider as harmful were creating new varieties on their own.

In my rice fields, I noticed that after locusts and other insects had chewed round holes in the rice grains just as the heads were sprouting, slugs, snails, cutworms, and other creatures came along and crawled over the grains at night. They ate down to the stamens in the holes, after which windblown pollen from other varieties adhered and achieved fertilization. In other words, rice, which is said to be self‐pollinating, can also be pollinated by other plants, and in this way new varieties arise naturally.

⸻ pg. 33

In the past, present, and future, the true disposition of nature is toward abundance for human beings and for all species. Therefore, the question should not be ‘Why are there too many people?’ but rather, ‘Who has created the scarcity into which they are born?’ And then, finally, ‘How can we heal the earth so it can support future generations?’ It is too simplistic to begin and end the conversation with a limited view of overpopulation. Better to ask: Why must people suffer so? And have we done all we can to alleviate the pain of the earth and the pain of the human race?

It is important to reflect on what has happened historically in regard to agriculture and medicine. We have seen huge advances in modern medicine, but there is little value in the advancement of medicine if the number of sick people continues to increase. It is the same with modern agriculture. How can we congratulate ourselves on the advances in modern agriculture, including greatly increased production, if the rate of starvation, scarcity, depletion, and disease increases even more rapidly?

⸻ pp. 40–41

#forestry disaster and mismanagement, pollution

When natural scientists set up measures to counter desertification, they begin by investigating its causes and the apparent results. They conduct studies of the desert environment, the climate, the soil, and the ecology of the living organisms. Then they create a plan for reforestation. In other words, as with Western medicine, they devise a swift, localized treatment of the symptoms. But the causes they base their solutions upon are not the fundamental causes. Their countermeasures serve not to heal, but rather magnify the scope of the problem.

Let me talk for a moment about my own experiences with the pine forests in Japan.

⸻ pg. 58

Fukuoka goes on to describe the plight of these trees in the later decades of the twentieth century.

Pines were dying en masse. The Regional Office of Forestry responded by dousing forests with insecticide. The Office hoped to eliminate a particular species of beetle, which were reported to be infecting the pines with nematodes who would feed on fungi within the trunks until the nematodes were so numerous as to block the trees’ vascular systems, resulting in abrupt demise of the beetle‐afflicted pines.

However, Fukuoka’s research indicated that healthy pines were not nourishing enough for the nematodes to thrive within, and even when pathogenic fungi from the dying pines were introduced to the trunks of others, there was little health impact on the trees. Rather, pine physiology only became disrupted in the absence of matsutake. He hypothesised that acid rain was altering the soils, to the great detriment of matsutake for whom they had formed habitat, and that, deprived of their mycorrhizal partner, the pines lost such vigour they quickly succumbed to the onslaught of filamentous fungi who had hitched a ride to Japan on imported lumber.

‘The nematodes and beetles are not the original culprits. They are doing nothing more than clearing away the corpses of the dead and dying trees.’ he concludes ―

[…]

Of course […] there is room for error, but the point is, what the world sees as cause and effect can be deceptive. Although I speak of the cycle of cause and effect, no one really knows what is happening. Still, the Office of Forestry goes out and sprays insecticide all over the forests. Who knows what unforeseen and potentially more serious environmental disaster that may lead to?

⸻ pg. 61

Editorial on page 3.

Article on pages 26–29.

Article on pages 44–49.

Article on pages 64–69.

Article on pages 70–73.

Article on pages 78–79.

Article on pages 34–41.

Article on pages 42–45.

Article on pages 46–51.

Regular feature on pages 74–81.

Regular feature on pages 84–87.

#mechanistic philosophies and imperial violence

This was a radically new way of envisioning the Earth, as a “vast machine made of inert particles in ceaseless motion”. Even in Europe, the mechanistic vision of the world had only just begun to take shape, and that too, only among elites that were directly or indirectly involved in the two great European projects of the time: the conquest of the Americas and the trade in enslaved Africans. It was the rendering of humans into mute resources that enabled the metaphysical leap whereby the Earth and everything in it could also be reduced to inertness. In that sense men like Coen, Sonck, and their predecessors were not just colonists but also philosophers; it was their violence, directed at “natives” and the landscapes they inhabited, that laid the foundations of the mechanistic philosophies that would later be attributed to their contemporaries, like Descartes and Mandeville, Bacon and Boyle.

⸻ pg. 37

Regarding the Dutch East India Company’s take on the Banda archipelago.

The phrase “vast machine made of inert particles in ceaseless motion” is attributed to Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), 226.

#European invasion of Americas decimating Indigenous population

That the planet went through a century and a half of cooling has long been known; this period, which was at its peak from the late sixteenth to the mid‑seventeenth century, is often referred to as the “Little Ice Age.” It is also well known that during this time there was a sudden drop in atmospheric carbon. But these anomalies are generally attributed to “natural” factors like variations in solar and seismic activity; it was long thought to be merely a coincidence that they occurred at a time when Europe was tightening its grip on North and South America. But recent research suggests another possibility: that the catastrophic decline in the population of the Americas that started with the European onslaught might have contributed in some degree to the drop in global mean temperatures that occurred in the Little Ice Age. So many Amerindians perished in the sixteenth and seventeenth century — estimates vary between 70 and 95 percent of the population of the two continents — that vast tracts of land that had once been used to grow food reverted to forest (which is why cities and temple complexes are still being discovered in the jungles of South and Central America). The hypothesis goes that the sudden burgeoning of greenery in the two continents created a reverse‐greenhouse effect, sequestering huge amounts of carbon dioxide and thus contributing to the fall in global mean temperatures.

⸻ pp. 52–53

As Patrick Wolfe has observed, invasion was not an event but a structure.

⸻ pg. 69

Ghosh cites Wolfe’s “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” from Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

#genocide, ecocide, omnicide

[a] far‐off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.

This is Man’s final ascent, when all creation ends and he is united with God.

The violence contained in these ideas is almost beyond comprehension. Is it really possible, we can only wonder in disbelief, that the most prominent lyric poet of the Victorian age, envisioned the extinction of apes and tigers as a positive step towards Man’s evolution into a species that would be a “crowning race”?

What is puzzling about these ideas is that they are counter‐intuitive. Shouldn’t the theory of evolution, and the knowledge that humans are linked to other life‐forms by close ties of kinship, have created a sense of familial fellow feeling? Shouldn’t the discovery that all humans are descended from shared ancestors have created a sense of fraternal solidarity? While this did happen for some, for many others the idea of evolution did exactly the opposite: it reinforced a belief in the absolute exceptionalism and supremacy of one kind of human — White, Western Man. Evolution came to be seen as an inevitable process of elevating this “crowning race” over all other beings, human and nonhuman.

A belief in human exceptionalism is not by any means unusual. Premodern Christians, Muslims, and many others believed that Man was a species favored by God. Yet none of them ever embraced the idea that Man’s advancement should entail the wholesale eradication of other species, and indeed of most humans. Yet by the late nineteenth century these ideas were accepted as mere common sense by a great number of liberal, progressive Westerners. This was particularly true of the classes that happened also to hold the power to implement their beliefs and theories in the real world, through state policy.

It would be idle to deny that some of these ideas are still widely prevalent, and not just in the West. Underlying them is a conception of the world, and of historical time, that sees the Earth not as a nurturer or a life‐giver, but as a dead weight whose enveloping ties must be escaped if Man is to rise to a higher stage of being. It is a vision in which genocide and ecocide are seen to be not just inevitable, but instruments of a higher purpose. Indeed, this worldview goes much further than either ecocide or genocide: it envisions and welcomes the prospect of “omnicide”, the extermination of everything — people, animals, and the planet itself. The end of the world is seen, as Tennyson puts it, as the “far‐off event” that allows Man to realize his true self, as pure Spirit, disencumbered of all fleshly and earthly ties.

These ideas may appear deranged, but they continue to constitute a vital substrate of contemporary imaginaries […]

⸻ pp. 81–82

Pages 81–82, concluding an analysis of Tennyson’s 1849 poem ‘In Memoriam’.

[…] There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that capitalism and neoliberalism are powerful obstacles to an energy transition. But it is also clear to me that an exclusive focus on the economy can obscure certain obstacles to an energy transition that are harder to identify because they are not easily enumerable or quantifiable. In order to recognize these obstacles, it is necessary to step outside the framework in which fossil fuels are regarded as resources that are, in principle, similar to other resources that produce energy. In other words, it becomes necessary to identify the properties that make a kilowatt produced by fossil fuels different from the same quantity of energy generated by solar panels and windmills. For it isn’t only because they produce energy that fossil fuels have come to be established at the core of modern life: it is also because the energy they produce interacts with structures of power in ways that are specific to fossil fuels. In this lies their uncanny vitality.

⸻ pg. 101

#problems of fuel supply

The liberatory potential of renewable energy has a very important international dimension as well: if adopted at scale it could transform, indeed revolutionize, the current global order. No longer would countries have to be dependent on unpredictable petro‐states; no longer would they have to set aside huge portions of their annual budgets for oil payments; no longer would they have to worry about their energy supplies being disrupted by wars or revolutions in faraway countries; and, perhaps most importantly, no longer would they have to rely on superpowers to keep open the sea channels through which oil tankers must pass.

⸻ pg. 103

In 1970 the total volume of international seaborne trade was a little over 2,500 tons. By 2008 that figure had risen to 8·2 billion tons — a three‐million‐fold increase. In 1973 ships transported 4 million standardized containers; in 2010 that figure had risen to 560 million.

⸻ pg. 114

1. File under: numbers to affirm immense senses of change to.
2. Considering the increasingly formulaic setting of ports, that seems as though there could have been some surprisingly low proportions of cargo volumes within shipping containers. (As distinct from how much sea freight may have been in them at earlier stages of its manufacturing/disposal/etc cycles. It would be interesting to quantify containerisation in figures more overtly acknowledging the nested, repeat nature of much carriage these days.) But I daren’t look into it, because I hate to think how much may have been piles of raw materials or in tanks.
3. Three‐million‐fold.

#militarisation of humanitarian response and of migration; disaster capitalism; global warming

The list of climate‐related security threats is very long, partly because it includes many issues that would not, until recently, have been considered military matters at all. Dealing with migrants and refugees, for instance, was once squarely within the sphere of civilian governance. Today, whether in the waters around Australia, or in the Mediterranean, or along the US’s southern border, or on India’s border with Bangladesh, migration is largely in military and paramilitary hands.

Dealing with natural disasters was also once largely in the realm of civil society. There was a time, not so long ago, when the people who were first on the scene after earthquakes and cyclones were volunteers from charities, religious organizations, and relief groups, and of course civilian officials and police officers. It is only in the last couple of decades that military and paramilitary personnel have come to be thought of as “first responders”. This has advanced to the point where civilian volunteers are sometimes explicitly barred from entering disaster‐hit areas in the US, as happened after Hurricane Katrina.

Not only do such disasters provide a rationale for military intrusions into new spaces; they also supply a new humanitarian justification for military expansion in general. Military planners have even begun to co‐opt the language and tactics of social movements, for purposes of recruitment and in order to expand their policy reach.

It may seem natural today that military and paramilitary personnel should lead the response to disasters. But there is no intrinsic reason why this should be so: civil society organizations like Médecins sans Frontières, Oxfam, and many others have all the necessary skills to act as first responders. If they lack aircraft and ships, it is only because no international mechanisms exist for making such resources available to them. It is because of a political choice, then, that disasters are being militarized, a choice that derives ultimately from a wider process whereby many societies have become saturated with militarism.

That disaster relief is increasingly provided by organizations with massive carbon footprints is more than an irony: it creates a chain of consequences whereby disasters will accelerate disasters. It also ensures that disaster relief will itself become an arena for military competition. This dynamic was already on display in 2013, during the world’s response to Typhoon Haiyan, when more than two dozen countries sent military contingents to the Philippines. The largest military presence by far was the American: the US Navy deployed an aircraft carrier, a naval strike group, 66 aircraft, and some 13,400 personnel there. This is, no doubt, a forerunner of things to come, especially in the Indian Ocean basin, with its dense concentrations of population and its susceptibility to disasters.

⸻ pp. 127–129

Before we forget (militaries’ gratuitousness).

Of course there is no legitimate place here for police either! (Other organisations and civil state responses can all introduce detrimental dynamics themselves. But their provisions caaan be “for” the place/people in a radically different sense to the intrusion of these inherently possessive and controlling bodies).

Worth comparing with trends towards commercialisation of help, in extension of privatisation of infrastructure, and scandal in news currently re: contracts without tender bypassing established modes of health crisis response.

I am thinking specifically of, among other things, the following scene from Four Corners on Monday 2 May 2022, ‘Profiting from the pandemic’:

LINTON BESSER, REPORTER: A significant part of Aspen Medical's business is providing health care in the world's hotspots. It ran a field hospital in war-torn Iraq, and in Timor Leste its physicians saved the life of president Jose Ramos-Horta. The company's work has won plaudits, but also raised concerns about the ethics of so-called disaster capitalism. This tension surfaced in 2014 when Ebola struck Sierra Leone.

TIM COSTELLO, CEO, WORLD VISION 2003-2016: The Ebola outbreak was just terrifying, not just in West Africa, but for the whole world. It was spreading so fast. There was just panic. Such was the fear of the spreading, that the Australian government were prompted to respond.

LINTON BESSER, REPORTER: Under pressure … the then prime minister Tony Abbott selected Aspen Medical … to provide Australia's contribution to the crisis.

TONY ABBOTT: My anticipation will be that Aspen will have some staff on the ground in Sierra Leone within days.

LINTON BESSER, REPORTER: The Abbott government overlooked the existing, taxpayer-funded team of emergency physicians called AUSMAT, instead paying Aspen Medical $15 million to do the job.

TIM COSTELLO, CEO, WORLD VISION 2003-2016: AUSMAT is the premier medical humanitarian response body that Australia has. Trained, resourced, ready to go with a great track record. All of us assumed that AUSMAT would be deployed. When AUSMAT missed out to Aspen, which none of us had heard of at that time, we were scratching our heads. It was very puzzling to any of us working in this sector. There was no tender. Aspen just got it. That's what was so surprising.

LINTON BESSER, REPORTER: Former Greens leader, public health advisor Dr Richard Di Natale inspected Aspen's facilities in Sierra Leone and was impressed.

RICHARD DI NATALE, FORMER GREENS LEADER & PUBLIC HEALTH ADVISER: I attended the Aspen site. The protocols looked to be entirely appropriate. The infrastructure looked to be appropriate. What was surprising though, was that Aspen didn't have a long history of experience in serious outbreak investigations.

LINTON BESSER, REPORTER: Though never revealed publicly, Aspen Medical made a substantial profit on the job. It originally expected to make a margin of about 13 per cent. The company made twice that profit – more than 3.7 million dollars.

RICHARD DI NATALE, FORMER GREENS LEADER & PUBLIC HEALTH ADVISER: We've got to ask ourselves when it comes to an outbreak or a natural disaster, do we want the people there so they can make a buck or do we want them there so that they can help the community? We should ensure that if we are delivering an emergency response, our primary focus is on helping people and a profit motive shouldn't exist.

LINTON BESSER, REPORTER: In a statement, Aspen Medical said it is reasonable to expect commercial entities to make a profit on contracts.

TIM COSTELLO, CEO, WORLD VISION 2003-2016: I think for-profits have realised that a disaster, it's a bit like a gold strike. You go plant your flags, say, "We're here." I saw Aspen, on its website said, "We helped stop Ebola". This is hype from for-profits. It's hype.

Can keep in mind Ghosh’s assertion that “not only is the military itself a major driver of the economy; it forms the protective outer shell that allows capitalism to function.” (The Nutmeg’s Curse pg 124).

Though “designed to be self-sufficient once they reach a disaster zone”, note that each AUSMAT (Australian Medical Assistance Team) is “deploy[ed] rapidly with Australian Defence Force assistance” (National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre, ‘AUSMAT’, 2022) — including to “the MV Solomon Trader oil spill in 2019” (Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, ‘Humanitarian policy and partnerships’, 2022). And if we accept the argument of militarisation being one of the biggest drivers of fossil fuel extraction…

Anyway, endnotes to the Ghosh passage above mention:

• François Gemenne, Jon Barnett, W. Neil Adger, and Geoffrey D. Dabelko, ‘Climate and Security: Evidence, Emerging Risks, and a New Agenda,’ Climatic Change 123 (2014): 1–9
• Solomon M. Hsiang and Marshall Burke, ‘Climate, Conflict, and Social Stability: What Does the Evidence Say?,’ Climatic Change 123 (2014): 39–55.
• Sanjay Chaturvedi and Timothy Doyle, Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 148
• Kathy E. Ferguson, ‘The Sublime Object of Militarism,’ New Political Science 31, no. 4 (December 2009)

[…] those who are most attentive to environmental change are, more often than not, people who are at the margins, people whose relationships to the soil, or the forest, or the water are minimally mediated by technology. The farmer who is most likely to pay attention to a prolonged drought is one who cannot afford an electric pump or chemical inputs; the fisher who is most likely to observe changes in the marine environment is one who does not have sonar equipment to locate schools of fish; the woman who is most likely to notice rainfall deficits is one who does not have access to piped water and must walk to ever more distant wells. But such people are generally poor and do not have access to the networks through which information is disseminated; they are, in fact, located at the opposite end of the social spectrum from the majority of the world’s scientists and academics.

Experts are not at fault, of course, for the skewed way in which the world gathers information; they can hardly be held responsible for the social contexts in which they work. But it is nonetheless important to recognize that the reason our first messages about climate change came from scientists, rather than from marginal farmers, or women who fetch water, is not that scientists were the only people to notice what was under way; it was because scientists were more visible within the circles that wield power in the world. Sadly, they were themselves too much on the margins of those circles to be visible enough.

⸻ pp. 150–151

Particular types of technology, that is, though, isn’t it? Ghosh himself touches on the disjuncture between the predictions made by sophisticated technologies of Indigenous knowledge (systems of animals’ title over sites, oral calendars, and so on) and the world’s shifting embodiment as having been key to tipping off various peoples to climate change.

Whose “expert[ise]” is being denied? Why no responsibility? Whose precisely are “our first messages”, that they came so abstracted, when most of us live daily with the earth? And further, by that we, were these the first received or the first to be perceived, or even so late as first catalogued?

But is it anachronistic to subject the Empire to searching criticism? This book is in part a response to that question and in part a very different take on the history of the British Empire to what is generally available in the British public sphere. In academia, a retrograde strain of making the so‐called case for colonialism is now resurgent. As a scholar whose previous work had been on dissident writing in the Indian subcontinent as it transitioned to independence, I was aware that all societies and cultures have radical and liberationist currents woven into their social fabric as well as people who spoke up against what was being done in their name: why would Britain in the centuries of imperial rule be an exception? At the same time, I also wanted to probe the tenacious mythology that ideas of ‘freedom’ are uniquely British in conception and that independence itself was a British ‘gift’ to the colonies along with the railways and the English language. The result is a study which looks at the relationship between British critics of empire and the great movements of resistance to British rule which emerged across colonial contexts. The case against colonialism, it will be seen, was made repeatedly over the last couple of centuries and it emerged through an understanding of resistance to empire.

⸻ pp. viii–ix

In ‘Acknowledgements’, which are unusually, refreshingly narrative.

Both abolition and decolonization — twin outcomes of Britain’s expansionary colonial project over three centuries — are all too frequently regarded as deriving chiefly from the campaigning consciences of white British reformers or as the logical outcome of the liberal and liberalizing project that empire ostensibly always was, conquering in order to free.

⸻ pg. 3

[Walter] Mignolo is right to suggest that ‘emancipation’, as it was figured in European liberal discourse, is different from ‘liberation’ as it is conceived of in ‘decolonial’ discourse[…] At the same time, a disproportionate emphasis on radically different ‘categories of thought’ obscures the extent to which many ‘liberation’ struggles were committed to universalism — and not only because they were part of the dominant language or the colonizer’s categories of thought. Indeed, rather than offer sutured, self‐contained alternatives to the idea of universal freedom, resistance often deliberately showed up the colonizer’s version of universalism to be anything but universal. Universals had to be embodied through experience and resistance, not refused as ‘European’. This often entailed working with the ‘logic of modernity’, decolonizing rather than repudiating it, teasing out its revolutionary promises.

⸻ pg. 26

Late in a killer, long paragraph, through which Gopal disputes assertions of Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De‐coloniality’, Cultural Studies 21:2 (2007), p. 453.

Dissent from regnant ideologies and discourses is, of course, never in and of itself marginal; it emerges as (often, constitutively) marginal/ized/ discourse that must articulate itself against the grain of the dominant.

⸻ pg. 31

Bold.

#la dévaluation des vies racisées, l’écrasement des piétons

Quant au langage, ce petit roman (ou cet essai trop long) était facile à lire, presque complètement confortable pour quelqu’un comme moi. C'est à dire que j’aurais pu le lire avec n’importe combien d’emploi d’un dictionnaire me convenait, dès si si si beaucoup pour mieux comprendre, à absolument aucun du tout pour réfléchir sans interruption. (Et voilà, tellement plus de grammaire m’amuse que je peux bien reproduire) !

Alors, en ce qui a concerné l'histoire et les messages du livre ? Encore confortable ? Euh… pas exactement. Les idées n’étaient que (quelquefois) utiles. Mais utiles pour qui ?

Évidemment, Gounelle essayait de faire quelque chose de didactique. Le texte était plein de dialogues, un peu socratiques, entre un guérisseur balinais et un professeur occidental, cependant l’écrivain manquait la précision dont on a besoin dans ce genre‐là, comme philosophe. J’estime qu’il la manquât aussi comme psychothérapeute (et caetera), mais quoi sais‐je ?

Déjà agaçant (selon moi), Gounelle exerçait la licence du genre du fiction pour échapper le besoin de la preuve et ce de la citation des sources.

Néanmoins ces dialogues — entre lesquels l’auteur a monté quelques petites leçons demonstratives et également médiocrement‐conçues‐mais‐assez‐bien‐écrites, qui se passait autour de l’île — étaient trop simples, en présentant la philosophie elle‐même du livre d’une manière assez arrogante et cruelle. Le prof et son conte souvent si succulent de voyage cultivaient ce que m’a semblé de temps en temps en temps l’air raciste. Et de plus, même les classes dèsquelles la grande sagesse est censée à être crue favorisaient l’habitude du bavardage misogyne !

Alors, retournons à la route… sans trop du soin, car renverser un groupe des gens qui croient en réincarnation : eh bien, tant pis, hien ? En effet, le mec que nous suivons s'amuse beaucoup en en pensant. Le plus éclairé qu’il devient, le pire il (se?) conduit (ses pensées?) (sa voiture louée?) en général.

Au restes, à la fin, des mystères divers restent jusqu’à la fin, et toujours après. Par exemple, comment comprend le narrateur français ses voisins hollondais quand le couple se parle dans l’intimité, en croyant probablement que lui leur voisin n’est pas là ? Es‐ce que tous ces touristes parlent toujours en anglais (comme son guérisseur), ou qu’il parle l’hollondaise, ou… en tout cas, pourquoi ? C’est un peu bizarre. Tout est toujours trop commode.

Article on pages 10–11.

Article on pages 26–28.

Article on pages 30–31.

Article on pages 33–34.

On pages 46–47.

Article on pages 54–55.

Article on pages 56–57.

Article on pages 58–59.

Article on pages 60–62.

Article on page 63.

Column on pages 76–77.

Editorial on page 8.

Article on pages 42–48.

Regular column on page 67.

Regular column on page 69.

Regular section on pages 10–20.

Snippet titled ‘Gentle touch’ on pages 18–19:

Article on pages 22–27.

Regular column on page 69.

Article on pages 72–78.

Article on pages 22–26.

Regular column on page 69.

Regular feature on page 98.

Review on pages 58–59.

Feature on pages 50–54, under the umbrella of “2022 Best of Culture”.

Graun’s ranking:

1. Aftersun dir. Charlotte Wells — reviewed by Bradshaw
2. The quiet girl dir. Colm Bairéad — reviewed by Armitstead
3. Parallel mothers dir. Pedro Almodóvar — reviewed by Rose
4. Flee dir. Jonas Poher Rasmussen — reviewed by Lee
5. Licorice pizza dir. Paul Thomas Anderson — reviewed by Bradshaw
6. Hit the road dir. Panah Panahi — reviewed by Bradshaw
7. RRR dir. SS Rajamouli — reviewed by Rose
8. The wonder dir. Sebastián Lelio — reviewed by Horton
9. Memoria dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul — reviewed by Armitstead
10. Decision to leave dir. Park Chan‐wook — reviewed by Bradshaw

Of which Decision to leave, Hit the road, Licorice pizza, Parallel mothers, and The quiet girl came across the most convincingly as worth sitting down for on the basis of one review alone. All ten, however, somewhat enticingly described.

Feature on pages 55–59, under the umbrella of “2022 Best of Culture”.

Graun’s ranking:

1. Beyoncé Renaissance — reviewed by Williams
2. Kendrick Lamar Mr Morale & the Big Steppers — reviewed by Szatan
3. The Weeknd Dawn FM — reviewed by D’Souza
4. Charli XCX Crash — reviewed by Snapes
5. Rosalía Motomami — reviewed by Petridis
6. Arctic Monkeys The Car — reviewed by Joshi
7. Jockstrap I love you Jennifer B — reviewed by Solomon
8. Wet Leg Wet Leg — reviewed by Mokoena
9. Fontaines DC Skinty Fa — reviewed by Simpson
10. Nilüfer Yanya Painless — reviewed by Nicholson

Broadly speaking, the writing got worse the higher the ranking.

Yanya, Fontaines DC, Rosalía, The Weeknd, Lamar and Beyoncé would seem to have put out the more interesting work, with Wet Leg potentially among them. Certainly willing to be pleasantly bowled over by any of the other three, but their descriptions do not especially grab me; this could be down to reviewers’ tastes grating in certain ways against mine.

It sounds a worthy idea, doesn’t it? In a volatile society, to draw on findings that promise to help ordinary people to coexist? If your idea of credible scientific methodology is for researchers to codify their own prejudices and then strive to promulgate and prove the resulting slapdash hypotheses through prematurely declared Theories and in unintentionally but laughably rigged experiments (rather than to test through attempts at disproving), the writing of Jonathan Haidt may be for you!!

Like Simon Baron‐Cohen is for him! “I do not want to suggest that utilitarianism and Kantian deontology are incorrect as moral theories just because they were founded by men who may have had Asperger’s syndrome,” writes Haidt, after invoking the spectre of Those Insensitive Autistics totally out of the blue for no other apparent reason, and while continuing to diligently lay out precisely the argument on which he claims not to want you to think he is relying (across pages 136–141, all‐inclusive). Presumably the key word was “just”, but it’s pulled tenuously thin by the masses of import that he makes it bear here.

Consistently full of a love to snap pathologise and shove aside whatever minds and whatever ethics to which Haidt personally has not come to relate, this book about humanity regularly betrays an intellectually fatal hypocrisy. Haidt is only at pains to insist that dedicated conservatism among voters (particularly within the United States of America) must not be considered misguided or malevolent. Policies of liberalism, he cautions, often undermine their own aims. Conservatives, he asserts, have a more sophisticated, complete grasp of human morality.

For instance, both ends of a left‐right spectrum dislike harm. We know this because chucking a tantie over not quite getting to possess everything you possibly can, is fundamentally equivalent to being upset about folks refusing necessities to anybody denied their society’s established survival tokens. This example also demonstrates that everybody values this other one same irreducible thing we all call fairness: the perniciously disadvantaged do not work nearly as hard as the hypercushioned, hence proportionate punishment and reward; every body is equal, hence uniform entitlement to all protections.

(Haidt may employ different phrasing, but the tenor of the logic remains. Does this parade of absurdity encourage people to take each other more seriously?)

But right‐wingers attend quantifiably more comprehensively to The conveniently prepackaged, shrinkwrapped foundations of morality — here’s some he prepared earlier! — which all things U.S.A. left neglect. By way of demonstration, we can presuppose what preachers of contrasting Christian denominations talk about (at page 188). Liberals wouldn’t be invoking concepts of sanctity more through words like “peace” than firey Baptists; they would just outright care less for the sacred.

It is immensely disheartening to read as over and over Haidt endorses dictionary‐definition rigidity, saucer‐shallow readings, and the misappropriation of mathematics to the most simplistic of measures in order to determine that an assumption aligns with itself. As though this supplants the work of genuine philosophical enquiry, literary analysis, theological examination, political study, or, heaven forbid, interview.

For most of its length, The righteous mind tries very hard to obfuscate its author’s political sympathies. Despite my criticisms, amicability and a kind of hopeful thoughtfulness do shine through Haidt’s words much of the time, but the caution can come off a touch manipulative. Haidt lowers his ineffectual guard in stages, where confident that reactive, partisan readers will have been pacified by his deliberate progression through dopey self‐help metaphors and naïve, self‐defeating anecdotes.

Finally, he pretends to legislative insight. Examples of where three partisan traditions ought to follow their opponents are given, along with a vague blessing of a Moral Science.

So take freely of such edicts as a libertarian moment (from pages 353 through 356), in which we (presumed Americans all, now) are asked to imagine a can of peas attracting a vertiginous price, after the fashion of basic medical needs in the U.S. Wouldn’t it be a preposterous burden, he steams, for “all of us [to be] paying” a 25% tax on income to cover a complete food insurance system! That getting even remotely adequate nutrition for such small portions of their money is currently impossible for many Americans does not, in this moment, occur to him. Indeed, he selectively forgets the notion of externalised costs and quite possibly has no clue whatsoever about, say, food deserts. That the wealth and ready thrift of those whose 25 percents constitute higher dollar figures has been subsidised by the actively imposed starvation of masses of unwaged, disenfranchised, and enslaved people across nonstop hundreds of years, just maybe affecting consumer and corporate expectations? No, no, the limited‐access cheap canned pea economy has all been effortlessly “arranged for [humanity’s] benefit”. Somehow he decides that the allegory of the grocery store has comprehensively destroyed the legitimacy of health insurance and not implicated the profit motive. “Success in the supermarket and insurance industries depend[ing] primarily on maximizing [businesses’ financial] yield” in a linear trajectory is cast as some kind of inevitable, innocent bystander, a byproduct very nearly implied to be specific to social security. Haidt redeclares Adam Smith’s invisible hand “miraculous”. By that standard, so’s poliomyelitis, but, look, me, personally, I don’t invite any old gobsmacking function to (a share in a platform of) ideological supremacy.

And to be fair, Haidt is doggedly against fundamentalism — at least as he interprets it. Unless that fundamentalism is rooted in the ultracompetitive killing field of evolutionary psychology.

—

Footnote to last para: Which is what it sounds like going off Haidt’s presentation of the contemporary literature.

What little recognition I experience of German derives mostly from my extremely scant knowledge of Yiddish. When it comes to German in writing? Well, I’m illiterate. I feel only minimal motivation to engage actively with a novel that was written in something way closer to my most familiar tongue, to begin with, and which I would never have chosen to borrow myself. So this, I reckon, should be, in a strange and casual way, some sort of fun!

[Nora] fand ihr übergroßes ECO WORRIER-Shirt[…]

⸻ pg. 15

(lol soz no umlauts or eszetts available for me to type at the moment) [Edit: now there are!]

OH NO. This will be maybe enjoyable‐daggy? A few pages ago I was like, wow I would have loathed this in English… Like this, though? If I try not to read too slowly, I can outrun the boredom, trip on the charm of the twee.

But hey, on the tragic side, my reading fluency in German probably now exceeds my Yiddish.

[Thick snow] literally is a blanket of snow. But grazers such as reindeer, Siberian horses and musk ox squash the snow underfoot and push it aside to reach the vegetation: transforming a thick white duvet into a threadbare sheet and the ground cools more thoroughly as a result. From work in the Pleistocene Park, Nikita Zimov and colleagues have shown that average soil temperature is more than 2°C lower where you have grazing animals versus where you do not. In the winter, 25 cm below the surface, it is 15°C cooler. Marc Macias‐Fauria says, ‘In the coldest part of the winter there is a much deeper freeze when you have a bunch of grazing animals trampling the snow. This could help preserve the permafrost for decades.’

⸻ pp. 66–67, ‘A Mammoth Task’

Not a lot of info provided by Heap on this Pleistocene Park or on the people caring for it, sadly.

Bamboo canes, what you see above ground, are just a branch from the rhizome (like an underground tree trunk) and, when cut, new shoots quickly emerge to take their place […]

⸻ pg. 76, ‘Bountiful Bamboo’

Surely this tree trunk analogy would be fairly common, yet I do not remember others using it.

At arm’s length plus a leant‐back neck or so, wide outdoors in a definite breeze, this copy of All about love was cooking in such perfume I did not make it far into the roman numerals, even; to only xv thereof.

I go into this with a little trepidation, considering how the other philosophy (adjacent) books the library has suggested to me have gone (dreadfully), and because there is such scope for the argument to be awesome that it feels near sure to disappoint.

This has been a hard book for me to really get into. Even beyond its introduction, Martin Hägglund stumbles directly to many of the intermediate conclusions among which he strews repeat announcements of his overall declarations. There are what could be some interesting ideas tucked in here and there, but scant logical flow at the close level where assumptions are established, which read out of kilter with the overtly structured intent of the published work.

The discomfort is intensified, for me, by the slicing and dicing functions of Hägglund’s views. Sure, dabbling in notions of linear time, quantised identity, discontinuity of entities, crisp dichotomies of state, and such, for abbreviation’s sake and surviving societies fiercely shaped along these modes of definition, has been normalised over the centuries. I do it myself — sometimes without even the shadow observation that that’s what’s going on. But to contort oneself into fully accepting these ways of interpreting the world, in exclusivity, is what Hägglund’s argument implicitly demands, embedded (as he makes it) in a relentless rush of transient time, strictly segregated selves, and so forth. It’s tiring! It’s bloody awkward, and probably not in an ultimately satisfying way.

Or does Hägglund’s desire to realise “a critique of capitalism and liberalism on their own terms” (p. 26), in the latter part of the book, not only justify but make up for locking his entire concept into shared constraints?

In contrast to his religious faith in eternity, [C. S.] Lewis describes a passionate commitment to a finite life. The mother who is mourning her child, or the lover who is mourning his beloved, is devoted to a relationship that requires time to be what it is. Love is not something that can take place in an instant. Rather, love expresses a commitment to caring for another person across time.

⸻ pg. 40

Re: Lewis’ A Grief Observed.

Emphasis mine, on a point I think both Hägglund and I find exerts a deep, persuasive tug, but that we would negotiate to carry us (((through) (in)) ((in) (through))) profoundly different currents.

Hence, as long as you are attached to someone or something that you can lose, you are susceptible to suffering. To attain a peaceful state of eternity you must be liberated from the risk of losing what you love. Were such liberation possible, however, nothing would matter to you. You literally would not care. There would be no urgency to do anything or maintain love for anyone, since nothing of value could be lost. You could not even be motivated to sustain a single activity, since it would not count as a loss for you if you did not engage in the activity.

⸻ pg. 44

The TL;DR of This Life is there’s no mo(tive), thout FOMO(tive) (thus slow‐mo–liv’s⁴ no go). But he forgets to back it up! Despite all the repeats!

Orchestra! Musings, please!

It’s interesting though, to observe how not infrequently Häggland touches on concepts that are, if not up my alley, then mistakably adjacent to it: slipping into the slight dip of an uncanny valley running down the side of the alley. This analogy is headed down the drain. Anyway, I’m reminded of my experience reading Stefano Mancuso’s The nation of plants: a radical manifesto for humans. Though, probably anyone who knew me, on reading Mancuso’s little book, would anticipate my staunch objections as easily as they would my undiminished enthusiasm for most of his recommendations. Whereas with Hägglund, the divergences seem subtler. It’s a shame I’m scudding along in some haste, at a time when I am so tired; there would probably be a lot worth elucidating —personally, if not for all you poor readers‐in?!

The other thing about reading Hägglund is that the book itself is made, largely, of readings of other philosophical writers, and while he’s not shy about trashing their conclusions, he upholds a kind of reverence about the wordings and the stories the earlier writers relate, such that observations both from and about the originals gleam through the chapters like a wee reading light drawing you along.

Having acclimatised, I’m no longer finding the reasoning, the framework, the assumptions, the swales of uncanny thought nearly so frustrating; there’s a literary tour to embrace now instead.

It’s several books in one, slighted overlapped.

The philosophical treatise is nothing special. The theological critique is illuminating. The final wind-up to an economic manifesto is incisive. The political blueprint leans a bit too hard on Hägglund’s least substantiated claims around subjective relationships with time and mortality, but remains workable. The whizz through MLK’s latter phase of activism blends well, as a piece of political biography.

And yet, as a single volume, This Life crawls along in repetitious circles. It’s as though every passage expects to act as ambassador in isolation for the entire work. This leaves much of the writing — including the thesis as a whole — feeling disproportionately shallow, underdeveloped, or simplistic, for its length.

However, one stream (constituting the front of Part Two) really would warrant a wide readership in excerpt (and runs thicker, too):

The call to reconsider, reject, and replace the capitalistic understanding of value is incredibly obvious, but terrifically important — and, if Hägglund’s review of the literature preceding him is representative, shockingly singular.

get gg gen (TKPWET TKPW-G TKPWEPB)

I keep getting surprisingly sucked in on sampling small portions of a chapter, tearing myself away, forgetting my place, and repeating the cycle months later. Time to give Phil Jamison’s history another, more concerted go?

At the behest of her mother, Fumiko showered. Once her allotted ten minutes were up, the timer clicked, and the water guttered out. When she stepped out of the stall, she did not dry herself as she normally did, working the towel from ankle to head; instead, she draped the towel onto the floor, and stood on top of it, with arms spread open under the mirror’s band of fluorescent lights. She let the water drip off her body one bead at a time, until her mother rapped on the door and asked what was taking so long. She hurried the towel over herself and dressed for dinner.

⸻ pg. 67

In imitation of a pelican viewed earlier in the day at a kind of bird sanctuary.

[…] It is almost enough to curb my excitement for arrival completely.

Almost. Apart from the captain, none of us have ever traveled outside Allied Space. This is our first opportunity to see how the fringe‐dwellers lived with visions unclouded by company bias. During the boy’s lessons, I told him what I knew of Drannon, & what I imagined it might be like — cultural nexus enlivened by its position so near the Allied border, a waypoint through which travelers pass, multiple histories accumulating on a single world, a single city, building on one another to create forms both new & beautiful; a human coral reef. Was happy to see that the boy took so well to my vision & that, like me, he was compelled by mystery, the anticipation of discovery. Wouldn’t be surprised in the least if he has as much difficulty sleeping tonight as I no doubt will!

---

Ahro was awake most nights.

Because of the bad dreams.

Because of many things.

⸻ pg. 178

I mean, Jimenez is good at structuring his storytelling, especially these transitions in perspective.

And the Sabon typeface’s italic ampersands are to die for.

He sat in the copilot’s chair and placed the large headset over his ears. He listened to the Pocket as its strange materials rushed past the hull sensors of the Debby. The spackle‐frack. The white noise filling his mind like water, drowning out the worries and the bad dreams, until he was heavy against the chair, and lulled back to sleep. To a place where there was no symphony and no broken bones, only soft whispers and finger snaps. The rich void over which he was suspended. And there he stayed, until the fingers slowed their snapping, and the lips shut mid‐whisper, and it was quiet again as the ship emerged from the Pocket, dripping from the fold.

⸻ pg. 179

Unfortunate that terming this action “snaps” of the fingers evokes precisely that breaking of bones it ought to be a soft contrast to. I would’ve reworded the bones part, I think. Unless this was deliberate toying; already, “symphony” sounds fairly innocuous out of context.

He got better with practice. In the icy drifts he stripped, and jumped, and learned that passage to safe worlds, breathable worlds — worlds that wouldn’t rip him apart once he had quit the jump — was identifiable if he listened to the tone of its music. it wasn’t music, not as he once understood the term; it was more the music’s marrow, the stuff that would pour from a song’s cracked bone; a rhythmic current; a melody sung not with the mouth but the body. His body sang past the stars, and dropped into a forest glade, dappled in sunlight. Some floral creature sped away at his sudden approach. The delirium once experienced during his first few jumps was lessened, now a dull ache that soon subsided. He grinned, and leapt back up the line that left the forest glade, warping to the other side of the planet, onto a rock promontory that overlooked a large valley whittled down by a silvery lake at the bottom. He pointed up at the highest ridge he could see a ridge that narrowed out to a thin point in the green‐tea sky. Now he wanted to see how exact he could make his jump. But his jump was still being tamed, still inexact in its landings, and his stomach gulped as he missed the ridge by a good foot, and fell at a dead drop so swift he had no air left to scream, the hard ground spinning toward him, sure he was dead before the ancient instinct woke and carried him up the currents, up into the sky, away from death, falling back into the purple crop fields. From there, back to the snowy drifts, barefoot but standing upright. And then his legs gave out.

⸻ pp. 269–270

cargo ships; physics, dance

A woman. A woman on a bench by the pier, with a spoon of curry in her mouth. That was it; a simple, unadorned dream that she was woken from when the alarm went off by her bed, and she remembered that it was the year 3320, that it was Tuesday, and she was in her private research base named Stopwatch. She had taken a nap before the welcome dinner, which was to be held in the amphitheater. The fact that this place had an amphitheater was surprising to her. She supposed it was a construction unauthorized by her, as she couldn’t fathom its use in a research facility. As she bathed and dressed for the second time that day, she thought about the woman in her dream, tried to remember the particulars of her, but the details eluded her; a blond haze in her memory, a haze without a name.

“Purple eyes,” she whispered as she clipped the last button on her dinner jacket. “She had purple eyes.”

She smiled, unsure why this detail pleased her.

There was a knock on her door, and then time clipped, and a glass flute that bubbled with sparkling wine toasted hers, the sound of the toast ringing clear across the amphitheater. The low rumble of a hundred conversations died out as the man who knew her raised his glass in toast to Fumiko Nakajima. “For affording us this place of study, for providing us this opportunity to research unchained from the strict, business‐driven demands of Allied‐Umbai Incorporate, we thank you. To Fumiko!”

“To Fumiko!”

A sea of glasses glinted under the bright, clockwork chandelier. It was when the room broke into song, wishing her a happy birthday, that Fumiko remembered she was seventy years old. No. Seventy‐one. In the wall‐length mirror to her right she observed herself. Her artificial youth, purchased by Umbai. She ran her finger down the smooth skin of her arm, the muscles that were revived and rewound to a younger version upon each awakening. Seventy‐one years old, this body was. Seventy‐two would not be far. She was always celebrating birthdays. A long, unending string of birthdays.

⸻ pp. 283–284

I love the notion of “Clipped time.” — mentioned only once prior, thus, on page 282 — and its fleeting, taken‐for‐granted reference amidst langurously lurching prose.

They called it the Bottleneck. They had but one Acquisition, which could service only one ship at a time. From ship authorization to the jump itself and then the post‐confirmation, one service job took three to five seconds. As more planets and fleets signed contracts with Umbai, and more ships became FT‐capable, the daily authorization queue reached into the hundreds of thousands, inflating the time between request and jump into tens of hours, sometimes days. The Feed swelled with complaints concerning the absurd wait times. Jump schedules were coordinated in advance by weeks. Some unlucky bussers jumped only once a month, which meant ticket prices rose to combat the scarcity of flights. Umbai continued its steadfast optimization of the process, shaving fractions of seconds off the authorization loop. And to satisfy their investors, the company established the Preferential Hour; a one‐hour “fast lane” during the Station Standard Day, when jump access was restricted to corpro‐government ships and any civilians willing to pay the substantial admission fee, the ships able to come and go as they pleased; a law that, transparent to all, was meant to aid the noble fleets, and few others.

For Umbai, these were good problems to have. Their coffers were lined with iotas made from the distribution of the [Fast Travel] chips, the toll tax, the Preferential Hours, and the loyalty contracts of neutral galactic powers. Profits jumped by exponents. City Planets multiplied. Each newly installed chip, each jump, like a nerve peeled fresh from Acquisition’s back.

⸻ pp. 358–359

“FT”: “fast travel”

[Umbai] were in the process of creating the New Tourism industry. The people demanded new places to go. And so the Resource Worlds once isolated to protect the harvested commodities were opened up for public consumption.

⸻ pp. 367–368

The governor’s son was young enough that he would one day forget the strangeness of these new quantities. In time he would no longer remember the unease as the tourists walked the roads of their village, looking at everything, his home, as if in wonder at how anyone could live like this. Nor would he remember his anger when one of them was offered a bowl of unsweetened, unworked dhuba, and after thumbing a taste, spat it on the ground, making a sour face as his friends laughed at him; or the embarassed joy when one of them crouched in front of him and asked him with a kind smile what his name was. One day, his memory of these first visitors would evaporate, and he would believe that they had always been there; that of course they wuold march through the stalks, disturbing the soil, to ask one of the startled farmers if they could try a swing of her machete. That was what they did.

⸻ pg. 369

I had wanted something to read where I did not feel obligated or compelled to take notes, but then there were so many phrases buttressing the plot worth noting down, that I quickly ran out of bookmarks — even despite abandoning a majority of Johnson’s sharpest constructions to the depths of pages read. So, by a third in, I guessed that regardless of how I was to find this novel in any other respects, The space between worlds was at least a four star piece for revisitability. The word‐to‐word texture remained more prosaic than I fully take to in fiction, but there is much to appreciate in what Johnson has built, and how.

Really great from the get‐go, but sagging several chapters in. The blithe affluence becomes grating, especially as Johnson repeatedly presents the showering of children with trendy consumer goods, televisions, video game consoles, amusement‐park– and hotel–filled vacations, resented summer camps, ongoing sports team expenses, college costs, and other eye‐popping luxuries as the epitome of Black familial love. Lauding a sibling for not being awful, and raiding private moments from the life of a deceased transfeminine cousin — after somewhat shunning her in life, forcing her to be refigured as inspiration porn for publication — complete the spoiling of a memoir that is otherwise imbued with transformative potential well beyond the bland story it relates.

[​one immense sigh​]

⸻ Track 7 ‘Chapter 5: Honest Abe lied to me’, 06:56–06:59

Regarding a Thanksgiving poster hung in Johnson’s school.

Although I couldn’t wait to escape New Jersey, her album gave me the opportunity to escape in my mind. I would sit in my car by myself and blast her. Every song spoke to me. Her femininity was everything that I was feeling inside of me. She was just so sassy, and sexy, and powerful. I wanted to be her. Well, not really be her, but I would daydream about her. I wanted to be me, in Virginia, and dancing to her. I wanted to be me dancing to her.

⸻ Track 17 ‘Chapter 13: Setting myself free, or setting myself up’, 07:04–07:34

On listening to Beyoncé’s first solo album while yearning to be gay away at college.

We have included some species which are now rare or uncommon through no fault of their own.

⸻ pg. iv

in Preface on page iv

#destruction of ecosystems

[…] Even in the last 30 years we have witnessed the destruction of the fabulous wildflower gardens that proliferated on the red sandy areas to the east of Frankston. […]

In other areas significant samples of the vegetation remain in relict patches and reserves. This is certainly the case in some of the outer eastern suburbs and the Dandenong Ranges, although certainly the changes in these areas have been massive. Of strategic significance has been the loss of ‘hot spots’, those priceless parcels of land, often small, which supported tremendous local diversity, including an abundance of showy flowering shrubs, forbs, and large numbers of orchids. Were’s paddock, Greensborough, was one such site with which we were familiar, as also was the land adjacent to the railway station in Boronia, the railway reserve between Heathmont and Bayswater, the land around the Eltham football ground, and numerous patches of bush in Reynolds Rd, Donvale and Tindals Rd, Park Orchards.

Orchids are a special love of ours and on numerous occasions we have noted the close relationship that exists between an abundance of these special plants and a general health and diversity of the flora at a particular site. Thus in our lifetime we have seen the disappearance of numerous orchid‐rich patches of bush in such suburbs as Bayswater, Beaumaris, Berwick, Boronia, Braeside, Croydon, Deer Park, Diamond Creek, Donvale, Eltham, Ferntree Gully, Frankston, Greensborough, Heathmont, Langwarrin, Lysterfield, Mitcham, Ringwood, Rye, Scoresby, Seaford, Templestowe, The Basin, Warrandyte and others. Even Beckett Park, in the well‐established Melbourne suburb of Balwyn, contained five species of orchids in the early 1950s, as well as a host of other herbs and forbs.

⸻ pp. vi–vii

D & B Jones had been living in Melbourne from the mid 1960s to late 1990s, when they wrote this guide.

I have been really compelled by their tendency towards the word “relict”, since I started reading their book last night. Half‐pondering what it can even mean, in a period of mass extinction and such vigorously disturbed circumstances for so comprehensive a cross‐section of those remaining, in an almost “aren’t we all!” kind of way. Which does not seem to me to be a very helpful or even necessarily meaningful position in which to leave the thought —an arrangement readable from an anthropocentric angle to be a plain “humans are, in many settings, a relict species” statement— but that’s where distraction left it for the moment.

Parasitic plant which forms large clumps of pendulous, fleshy stems on the larger branches of eucalypts and wattles. The stems, which are densely covered with yellowish‐green leaves, to 20 cm × 2 cm, carry drooping clusters of reddish, tubular flowers (some of which are stalkless), which have narrow spreading to recurved segments.

[…]

Cultivation By attaching seeds to a suitable branch.

⸻ pg. 17

This entry on Amyema pendulum made such sudden sense of many mildly confusing foliage encounters, and its last line is wonderfully helpful/unhelpful. I love it.

Each reddish‐brown flower has the narrow segments recurved or swept back and the lip, which resembles a duck’s head complete with a broad beak, sits atop a thick springy band.

⸻ pg. 51

It’s kind of true what they say about Caleana major, as evidenced in several photographs of these orchids in the VICFLORA database.

I bookmarked facing pages 52–53 for taking a note on Callistemon sieberi or Callitris glaucophylla, but I am no longer sure which part in particular is why. Distribution? Rabbits? Woodiness of fruit? The glorious impression of a mature pair of C. glaucophylla holding court from their rural portrait?

A fast‐growing species which was apparently widely distributed on the goldfields by Chinese diggers.

⸻ pg. 60

Cassinia arcuata, everyone!

The flowerheads, in “long, drooping clusters of shiny brown” look at least as intensely familiar as the association of a curry scent with a similar binomial, but Bun’s plant was much denser than the Jones photo depicts.

However, it was very frequently‐pruned, and I have a sense of growth reaching upwards in something like the manner of a trimmed magnolia branch. More research needed, then.

[​Chiloglottis reflexa flowers] are pollinated by male thynnine wasps which attempt to mate with the lip.

⸻ pg. 63

I would like to know who thynnine wasps are, please.

[​Chiloglottis valida​] is pollinated in a similar way to C. reflexa, but by a different species of wasp.

⸻ pg. 64

By the by.

[​Clematis microphylla flowers] are borne in small clusters. On female plants these are followed by greyish clusters of feathery seed‐heads.

⸻ pg. 68

For looking out for in the latter half of the year.

Also, I should plant some more?

[​Comesperma volubile stems are] sometimes twisting around themselves to form bushy clumps.

⸻ pg. 70

Ooh. I wonder how to encourage that.

Love creeper!

Leafless terrestrial orchid with a thick subterranean rhizome […]

[…]

Cultivation Impossible to grow.

⸻ pg. 117

This is pallid brown Gastrodia sesamoides, flowering around bushfire season in the hills and eastern suburbs, smelling of spice, standing up to half a metre above the ground!

The lip is delicately hinged and trembles in the slightest breeze.

⸻ pg. 119

A warm round of applause, please, for Genoplesium morrisii!

Aside: the photo on facing page 118 of G. despectans, with ruddy purple flowers genuflecting from their blue‐green spike against a hazy mauve and blue background, is an eye‐catcher. And it’s nice to be stuck.

An impressive degree of focus held through the text.

I sat once in a graduate writing workshop on relationships to the land. The students all demonstrated a deep respect and affection for nature. They said that nature was the place where they experienced the greatest sense of belonging and well‐being. They professed without reservation that they loved the earth. And then I asked them, “Do you think that the earth loves you back?” No one was willing to answer that. It was as if I had brought a two‐headed porcupine into the class‐room. Unexpected. Prickly. They backed slowly away. Here was a room full of writers, passionately wallowing in unrequited love of nature.

So I made it hypothetical and asked, “What do you suppose would happen if people believed this crazy notion that the earth loved them back?” The floodgates opened. They all wanted to talk at once. We were suddenly off the deep end, heading for world peace and perfect harmony.

⸻ pg. 124

#suicidality

I once knew and loved a man who lived most of his life in the city, but when he was dragged off to the ocean or the woods he seemed to enjoy it well enough — as long as he could find an Internet connection. He had lived in a lot of places, so I asked him where he found his greatest sense of place. He didn’t understand the expression. I explained that I wanted to know where he felt most nurtured and supported. What is the place that you understand best? That you know best and knows you in return?

He didn’t take long to answer. “My car,” he said. “In my car. It provides me with everything I need, in just the way I like it. My favorite music. Seat position fully adjustable. Automatic mirrors. Two cup holders. I’m safe. And it always takes me where I want to go.” Years later, he tried to kill himself. In his car.

⸻ pg. 125

Just at the limits of ordinary perception lies another level in the hierarchy of beauty, of leaves as tiny and perfectly ordered as a snowflake, of unseen lives complex and beautiful. All it takes is attention and knowing how to look. I’ve found mosses to be a vehicle for intimacy with the landscape, like a secret knowledge of the forest. This book is an invitation into that landscape.

Three decades after my first look at mosses, I almost always have my hand lens around my neck. Its cord tangles with the leather thong of my medicine bag, in metaphor and in reality.

⸻ pp. ix–x

“Another level in the hierarchy of beauty” really steps you down there, hey?

Editorial on page 6.

Guest editorial on page 10.

Article on pages 12–15.

Article on pages 16–19.

Article on pages 20–24.

Article on pages 26–30.

Article on pages 32–36.

Interview on pages 38–42.

Interview on pages 44–48.

Article on pages 50–55.

Article on pages 56–60.

Article on pages 62–66.

Article on pages 68–72.

Article on pages 74–77.

Article on pages 78–82.

#aircraft in strife

Shaken, buffeted, and ashen, Markle and Favereaux concentrate on their instruments battling it out with the storm, which, it will be established later, is the most violent and the most sudden in the last ten years. The warning light for the left‐hand turbine indicates a fifteen percent loss of power, but the strong electric field is disrupting the aircraft’s electronic circuits.

⸻ pg 47

Oh yeah storm clouds, that’s a point?

‘I’ve been drinking,’ he offers right away.

‘I agree,’ replies Meredith, who thought he definitely looked shaky.

⸻ pg 92

The tottering register throughout this book is sometimes fun; lively pretty much always.

Yang [Weining] hesitated and finally revealed his real concern: ‘It’s easy to make ideological mistakes in theory.’

⸻ pg 51

‘Imagine another set of results. The first time, the white ball drove the black ball into the pocket. The second time, the black ball bounced away. The third time, the black ball flew onto the ceiling. The fourth time, the black ball shot around the room like a frightened sparrow, finally taking refuge in your jacket pocket. The fifth time, the black ball flew away at nearly the speed of light, breaking the edge of the pool table, shooting through the wall, and leaving the Earth and the Solar System, just like Asimov once described. What would you think then?’

⸻ pg 89

The character speaking is Ding Yi, a theoretical physicist; to Wang Miao, nanomaterials researcher.

‘That was truly an incredible project. I used to think it was just made‐up rumors.’

‘Not rumors. If you want, I can tell you some of what I experienced.’

The offer made Wang a little worried. ‘Professor Ye, I’m only curious. You don’t need to tell me if it’s not appropriate.’

‘It’s no big deal. Let’s just imagine that I’m looking for someone to hear me talk.’

⸻ pg 198

Wang Miao and astrophysicist Ye Wenjie.

Wang realized that the game displayed a distinct world for each player. This world, based on the European High Middle Ages, was chosen by the software based on his ID.

‘You’re late. The meeting has been going on for a while,’ the gold‐crowned, red‐robed man said. ‘I’m Pope Gregory.’

Wang tried to recall what little he knew of European history in the Middle Ages so that he could deduce the level of advancement of this civilization based on the name. But then he remembered how wildly anachronistic historical references could be in the world of Three Body and decided the effort wasn’t worth it.

⸻ pg 239

#treating people as expendable mechanical units

‘System lockup!’ a signal officer called out. Shortly after, the reason for the malfunction was determined: There was an error with the operation of one of the gates in the CPU status register.

‘Restart system!’ Von Neumann ordered confidently.

‘Wait!’ Newton stopped the signal officer. He turned with an insidious expression and said to Qin Shi Huang, ‘Your Imperial Majesty, in order to improve system stability, you should take certain maintenance measures with respect to faulty components.’

Qin Shi Huang grasped his sword and said, ‘Replace the malfunctioning component and behead all the soldiers who made up that gate. In the future, any malfunctions will be dealt with the same way!’

Von Neumann glanced at Newton, disgusted. They watched as a few riders dashed into the motherboard with their swords unsheathed. After they ‘repaired’ the faulty component, the order to restart was given. This time, the operation went very smoothly. Twenty minutes later, /Three Body/’s Von Neumann architecture human‐formation computer had begun full operations under the Qin 1.0 operating system.

⸻ pp. 288–289

#spoilery

A tenth of a Trisolaran hour later, the science consul held his earpiece to his ear and listened intently. Then he said, ‘Princeps, unfortunately the unfolding failed. We reduced the dimensions by one too many, and the proton became one‐dimensional.’

‘One‐dimensional? A line?’

‘Yes. An infinitely thin line. Theoretically, it should be about fifteen hundred light‐hours long.’

[…]

[…] due to friction from solar winds, pieces of the string fell back into the atmosphere[…] Even though the string was infinitely thin, it produced a field that could still reflect visible light. It was the first time people had ever seen matter not made out of atoms — the silky strands were merely small portions of a proton.

‘These things are so annoying.’ The princeps brushed his hand against his face over and over. He and the science consul were standing on the wide steps in front of Government Center. ‘My face always feels itchy.’

‘Princeps, the feeling is purely psychological. All the strings added together have the mass of a single proton, so it’s impossible for them to have any effect on the macroscopic world. They can’t do any harm. It’s as if they don’t exist.’

But the threads that fell from the sky grew more numerous and denser. Closer to ground, tiny sparkling lights filled the air. The sun and the stars all appeared inside silvery halos. The strings clung to those who went outside, and as they walked, they dragged the lights behind them. When people returned indoors, the lines glimmered under the lamps. As soon as they moved, the reflection from the strings revealed the pattern in the air currents they disturbed. Although the one‐dimensional string could only be seen under light and couldn’t be felt, people became upset.

⸻ pp. 484–486

Much of the novel assumes a tone of gossamer fantasy, still with the heft of a folktale. Think of fabric draping a central space into being, over a solid floor.

There is video gaming (along with rally and militarism) as theatre, perhaps most overtly, but the whole story is almost palpably sited within in staging containers — which mostly stretch or are transcended rather gently, in contrast to the claustrophobic violence possessing and constricting the gap in the crowd, the logged woods, the cramped room, the retina, the battered biosphere, the rigid formation, the traumatic shared memory, the laden canal, the proton.

For its themes, The Three-Body Problem is a very comfortable read. The “hard sci‐fi” elements are good fun, silly (or playful and open) without committing to ridiculous abandon. Although, on occasion, explanatory dialogue felt condescendingly conspicuous, on the whole, Liu’s devices moved smoothly enough. There are some beautiful scenes. The storytelling is both generous and measured; hospitable.

I remembered that famous photo. It contained no people. Few of New Zealand’s iconic landscape images do. We all grew up surrounded by books and calendars and billboards depicting virgin forests and untouched peaks. We followed the ethos of no‐trace camping, passing through the mountains like ghosts. We longed for postcard views so pristine they could be from before, or maybe after, civilisation itself. What we craved was a landscape without history, untrodden by humans.

There’s a name for that: terra nullius. The legal fiction of unoccupied, unclaimed land. A name that hides what’s underneath.

⸻ pg 6

In the old days, people didn’t discover places. They created, became, are, the land.

⸻ pg. 7

Built over decades from oral histories, maps, books and manuscripts, the Cultural Mapping Project has over six thousand original names so far. What it shows is the opposite of wilderness. From major peaks to minor streams the landscape was named, known, owned. More than a map of place, it’s a map of history. In an oral society the land is the book, and the place names are the writing. Reading is moving through the landscape, recalling the stories as you go.

⸻ pg 13

I think I should reserve Uprising again, to be with across a later few weeks, because it is too precious to rush through.

Toitū te whenua, you often hear —  translated as ‘leave the land undisturbed’. How could you, when you were going to be part of the land yourself? The better sentiment is ‘cleave to the land’. I dug into the loam, looking for bones, gathering history in dirty half‐moons beneath my nails.

⸻ pg. 28

The end notes attribute the cleaving perspective to Tā Tipene O’Regan in “personal communication, 15 March 2021”.

I looked up the riverbed towards the Main Divide: shattered mountaintops and reefs of intimidating cloud; nothing to suggest a pass. Yet Raureka was meant to have wandered up that way and accidentally discovered the only viable route in the area. Faced with the landscape itself, the story made little sense.

⸻ pg. 30

Near Nōti Raureka, Raureka’s pass, visibility dropped to a couple of metres. Small cairns of stacked stones guided me through the whiteout, emerging a few steps in front, disappearing a few steps behind. There was no sign of Whakarewa, the lake at the pass. Then I felt a rushing sensation all around me. The mist blew away and I was suddenly looking straight at the water, only metres in front of me.

Whakarewa was more vapour than liquid: a silver arc lifting away into smoke. Again, that hurtling sensation, and the fog closed back in. It started to rain. I removed my pack and bent over, rummaging for my jacket. When I straightened to put it on, I looked up and the world had disappeared. Entirely.

‘What the fuck?’

One minute I’d been walking through a misty sub‐alpine landscape. The next, I felt like I’d been swallowed by a black hole. Impossibly large dark curves filled my entire field of vision, shading from grey to black, surrounding me on all sides. I turned my head and the void was everywhere, seemingly inches from my face, yet stretching off to infinity. I reached out a hand like a blind man and met no resistance. There was nothing there. Vertigo shot through me. There was no sky, no earth. I blinked hard in the rain, swearing aloud.

In another heartbeat the mist burned away. The distant snow‐covered peaks of Tau‐a‐Tamateraki snapped into focus, and I saw huge lenticular clouds immediately overhead — long, smooth UFOs, thunderous and silver‐black. They were harbingers of the worst storms, and almost close enough to touch. I grabbed my camera and fumbled it to my eye. The battery died. I shook my head in disbelief.

I must have been swallowed by one of those clouds. Or maybe it had passed inches from my face, and I’d seen its underbelly reflected in the lake. Shreds of mist continued to stream past. The light flickered between dawn, noon and dusk. It felt like time was running at a different speed.

⸻ pg. 34–35

There was some thickening of time, some concentration of force in those waters I felt acutely but couldn’t articulate beyond — power?

⸻ pg. 50

I appreciate this take on the outflow of a hydro plant…

#colonialism

With food in my belly and a shifting sense of Raureka’s story, I should have felt more at peace. But I was still freaked out by that headland above the river. An empty cemetery filled with moa bones, lightning strikes, the power‐station outflow: the place felt wrong. It was mauri, life‐force. Boiling away down there was all the rain that had fallen on the ranges standing over me in the dark. It was hundreds of side creeks, dozens of rivers, the Waitāwhiri, the story of Raureka and Kāti Wairaki, and a thousand years of whakapapa, forced into a pipe. What came out the other side was scrambled, just the chaos of raw matter sent on to the ocean without history or name. New origin stories took over — the settling of the land by my Pākehā ancestors, the coming of electricity, the birth of modernity: new claims to authority and power.

⸻ pg. 52

Resuming at last!

Took me till about the fifth separate strenuous opening up of the book (over several days) before I could actually hold a line of sight clear for long enough to snatch a glimpse of meaning in the prose proper, where I’d left off. It’s not some hulking tome, but compared with the feathery little Japanese novel format, which has been struggle enough to handle, this thing is very firm about its want to flop shut.

As a result, I’m not expecting much traction, for now — here I am on a break already and indefinitely⁵ — but the writing itself is fresh and readable. Though I’ve sunk right into a vicious war, narrative drawn up on a site of one.

So(,) many feelings about the meaning of ~​walking​~ (or I guess hiking, but smaller living chore(o) too); the likes of tramping as ((/)in), inescapably as inherently as, relation to (relation in(habiting)) whenua, what a big deal. How big the small, etc etc.

#Black Summer megafires

On the map the fire reads as a little grey polygon, tractable and neat, drawn from direct observation and satellite hotspot mapping. On the ground it’s the opposite: roaring, lethal and formidably out of control. […]

While we sleep, a gusty norwester hits and it makes a run. Today was meant to be a birthday party. Waking, disoriented, to Flick banging on the door. We have to go. Fumbling, hit refresh; the polygon has grown two hideously outstretched rectangles, temporary placeholders for a thing moving too fast to map. ‘EMERGENCY WARNING — The fire has moved quickly. If you’re in Cobargo or Coolagolite, it is too late to leave. Shelter in place.’ Fuck, it’s close. It has already crossed the highway just to the south of us. Up and moving now, to throw our stuff into the car, assuring Sirius that although this isn’t the walk he was promised, it will happen soon — now get in the car. An hour before dawn, the wrong horizon is aglow, deepest red. Get in the car.

⸻ pp. 1–2

Been thinking/feeling a fair bit lately about both mapping as rigid gesture and orientation in the deep old, easterly, sunrisen sense, and this rings, you know?

#deforestation, police brutality, industrial violence

Come the morning, if it’s your job to police the passage of logging and earthmoving equipment through here, you have three options now. One: let them roll over the top and kill the woman in the car. Two: persuade her through legal threats or exhaustion to unclip and come off voluntarily. Three: dig out around the car and jackhammer through the concrete until you can put an angle grinder to the pipe, bearing in mind that it now encloses a fragile human arm.

In this particular place and time, option one is unthinkable. Options two and three will take many hours. Until the police and contractors show up and decide how they want to play it, the road into this small corner of the wild southwest is closed.

[…]

The larger system learns, and it adapts. In its current configuration it demands a certain tonnage of woodchips, no matter what. International buyers will now hit Sarawak a few million tonnes harder, and Vietnam, and places where putting your arm into a lock‐on pipe absolutely could get you killed.

⸻ pp. 8 & 10

Having only 1) minimal awareness of Ludlam’s senate career due to it falling smack across the period I tuned most fiercely out of federal politics, and 2) so far read the first Part of his book, a fifth or so, the chunk before he reaches into visits with activists abroad, I am relieved, faintly surprised, even cautiously hopeful at his habitual consideration of, ugh, the big picture. The push and pull. Dynamics. Curious to see whether and how he tempers certain tensions he’s touched on, as the book develops.

While we’re thinking about [exponential intensification of commodities extraction narrated through a metaphor based on the fable about payment in coins on a chessboard], here’s a different game, one that’s played with only one rule. It works pretty well with about two dozen people; you just need a little bit of space. Here’s how it goes. Everyone stands in a circle, facing inwards, about an arm’s length apart from one another. Each participant has to choose two other people at random — silently, without letting on who they’ve chosen. Ready? Okay — here’s the rule. When the game starts, you have to move so as to stay an equal distance from the two people you’ve chosen. You don’t have to stand directly between them, just try to keep the same distance away from both of them at all times.

[…]

It was introduced as part of a workshop series on nonviolence and civil disobedience, co‐hosted by American author and anti‐nuclear campaigner Joanna Macy. In addition to practical techniques for locking down equipment, dealing with police and understanding your legal rights, Joanna Macy stirs in a measure of deep ecology, Buddhist philosophy and something I’d only tangentially read about before, something she calls systems theory. Instead of dropping a bunch of academic papers about chaotic attractors and scale‐free networks on us, she starts with this game.

[…]

My enduring memory of all the times I’ve played the systems game is of the intangible collective presence that arises: a larger, fleeting something emerging from the moment‐to‐moment interaction of the crowd’s individual players.

⸻ pp. 21–22

Hashtayg physics and dannnnnnce.

Okay so he says “While we’re thinking about that”!

Ooh, editing to add this ref from the endnotes (wa y over on page 350):

‘The systems game’, Work That Reconnects website, 1 December 2017, https://workthatreconnects.org/the-systems-game/.

An ancestral Escherichia coli glides towards us out of the gloom, pushed along by whip‐like propellers. She pauses, then abruptly her rotors begin spinning in reverse, cork‐screwing in all directions and sending her tumbling away randomly. She pauses again in the middle distance and then, propellers aligned, jets off in a straight line, out of our field of view.

She’s trying to find food. Be careful not to anthropomorphise — there’s no point attributing human qualities or consciousness to a tiny shell of cytoplasm one‐thousandth of a millimetre long. She has no brain or nervous system of any kind, no eyes, no sense of touch. And yet … she’s trying to find food.

E. coli has no real sense of direction either, and only two modes of travel: swim in a straight line or tumble around at random. She is attracted to particular flavours, in the seawater, and can detect them via chemical receptors arrayed along her flanks. This doesn’t tell her which direction to swim in, just that it’s out there somewhere. This existential dilemma is solved by comparing how strong the flavour is now compared to how strong it was a few moments ago. If it’s stronger, tumbling behaviour is suppressed. If its [sic] weaker, she’ll throw herself into a spin and try a different direction[…]

⸻ pp. 48–49

Sure this is definitely a quainter moment, but Ludlam navigates with reasonable poise and some delicacy the sort of expansive textural universe which Robert Macfarlane’s bombastic grope at deep time merely hopelessly aspired to plausibly chart.

Endnote (pg. 351) to excised remainder of paragraph:

49 Bacterial chemotaxis: Daniel Koshland, Bacterial Chemotaxis as a Model Behavioral System, Raven Press, 1980.

Already, three distinct lifestyles seem to be emerging. A diverse ensemble working as the primary producers, providing for their needs by consuming energy‐rich chemicals wherever they find them. Methanogens, halophiles, sulphate reducers, take a squishy little bow.

⸻ pg. 57

Not being new to much in these chapters so far, it is hard to tell for sure, but I think this book would be very accessible and charming?! I sort of want to dish it out to a lot of people whose attentions have somewhat glanced off the topics it explores?

[Electoral campaign funding] isn’t just a problem for the United States. France, with a radically different electoral system and much tighter campaign finance laws, suffers from a similar deadening correlation between cash inputs and voter outputs. They’ve even been able to put a price on it: ‘According to our estimations, the price of a vote is about 6 euros for the legislative elections, and 32 euros for the municipal ones,’ write French economists Yasmine Bekkouch and Julia Cagé. In their study of French municipal and legislative elections between 1993 and 2014, they note: ‘in particular, private donations represent a much higher share of funding for right‐wing than for left‐wing candidates in both municipal and legislative elections.’

The rightward tilt in French national politics isn’t a reflection of some kind of organic shift in community values; it’s being purchased, six euros at a time.

Polling shows that the median voter wants a healthcare system that won’t prey on them, an end to perpetual resource wars and a job that pays a living wage. The median voter wants a climate where the coastlines stay where they are. But since this is mostly immaterial in deciding the outcome of elections, the median voter can suck it.

⸻ pg. 65

This does not encompass the full breadth of Ludlam’s critique of tussling over the supposed median voter, but taps around one of, sort of, several cruxes. In multiples, in something like the way he talks (back on page 10) of “a full‐blown planetary extinction crisis. Turn the prism, and it looks like a climate crisis. And a crisis of democracy, of militarism, of poverty.”

The French study:

• Yasmine Bekkouche and Julia Cagé, The Price of a Vote: Evidence from France, 1993–2014, Working Paper, Institute for New Economic Thinking, January 2018.

Sadly no other endnotes are there for this snippet, to shore up the assertions of wanting.

Memory holds. An ice age story, from the last time the oceans came in, carried with the most extraordinary fidelity from voice to voice, until now I’m hearing it for the first time from dear Uncle Noel. The Nyiting, he calls it, the cold time. I’m shivering to even hear it spoken.

⸻ pg. 74

Regarding the history of Wadjemup, before the land connection with Walyalup was flooded. Most likely Uncle Noel’s a Nyoongah elder? Credit your sources, Scott Ludlam!!!!!?

I wonder if framing the Nyiting as an era distinctly of cold grew from a retrospective designation, or a was fresh assessment even earlier? My sense of ice age duration and geography is dull as a gull (actually they are rather canny; think muted feathers insteadthers) but we do love a precision oral history singing tens of thousands of years, hey?

[…] The resting metabolic rate of an adult human runs to about 90 watts — the equivalent of an old‐fashioned incandescent globe. That’s everything it takes to power the thirty‐odd trillion cells in your body, and the additional forty trillion bacteria that make up the human microbiome. If 90 watts sounds like a remarkably faint pulse to power such an astonishing collective, maybe you should have a coffee.

And there’s the kick: at a minimum, that will require some way of boiling water and an extended global supply chain reaching all the way to Costa Rica or Timor Leste, which is why the metabolic rate of a city such as [Boorloo] runs closer to 11,000 watts per person. This is an abstraction that varies widely from place to place, but it hints at the scale of the industrial life support systems we’ve woven around us.

⸻ pg. 76

“A city such as this,” which has usually been veering simulacrastic, shimmering in the magical unrealism of globalisation hammed right up. The device has become more rooted and nestled this chapter, though, so at this moment it’s reading fairly firmly Boorloo.

Admit I stopped hard in my tracks at the coffee non‐sequitur, though. That paragraph juncture stands well out in a smoothly sanded scape of resonant transitions and fastidious echoes.

Think it points to the indulgence of light globes, to be honest, but “remarkably faint pulse to power such an astonishing collective” sounds beautiful. Anyway, this is all very interesting to think about on a more immediate corporeal level, even as it teeters near “footprint” territory or other individualist nonsense, and hmmmmmm, much to think about.

Endnote:

76 11,000 watts per person: Geoffrey West, Scale: The universal laws of life, growth, and death in organisms, cities, and companies, New York: Penguin Books, 2018: 13.

And while we’re at it, the next one (for a page I’m not bothered to quote) sounds kind of cool, by which I probably rather mean confrontingly informational:

78 A map of this slow haulage: Shipmap.Org, www.shipmap.org.

Life still makes its way out here. The hard ground is spotted with a mosaic of tough grasses, and at one point we come across a family of horses standing with their backs to the gathering wind.

⸻ pg. 88

Look, the actual story is also tremendously interesting — here, Mongolian Green Party deputy secretary Boldbayar is taking Ludlam on a tour south through the Gobi Desert, taking in the former military base of Züünbayan, effervescing with the cheer of schoolchildren; a sparse, nodding forest of Chinese oil pumps; an infant French uranium leach operation — but I was so pleasantly slowed by the drawing of attention to horses living as a family?

#megaprojects, displacement of Indigenous communities

Jharkhand is distinctive for another reason. A quarter of the population are Adivasi — Indigenous tribal people with deep ancestral ties to jal, jungle aur jameen — water, forest and land. Land‐rights struggles have shaped the politics of this area for centuries, waves of conflict and dispossession that recent decades have hurled into fast forward.

Through Shri’s adept interpretation, Dayamani Di is describing the arrival ArcelorMittal, which calls itself the world’s leading steel and mining company, committed to a promise of ‘transforming tomorrow’. In 2005, they announced a plan to transform fifty square kilometres of the Manoharpur area into Mordor, with one of the largest steel mills in the world. Adivasi opposition was highly visible and effective, and the company is sent on its way. They try it again in nearby Karra block in 2006, cutting a deal with local landholding elites, only to retreat in the face of even greater opposition. Two years later, they’re back, targeting the district right where we’re sitting.

In 2006, Manoharpur locals had pitched in to support Karra block communities and share their experiences, joined by local anti‐dam organisers with decades of experience. Dayamani Di recalls a delegation of these seasoned campaigners arriving to raise the alarm. ‘They came to this area and they went village to village. Most of the villagers were not aware that the government had any plan to displace them. So these people went to the villages and held meetings, and talked about their experience. The villagers said yes: we will fight, but we have no experience. So you can lead us, or you can support us, but we will fight.’

It’s an asymmetrical conflict. Luxembourg‐based ArcelorMittal has a lock on local politics and seemingly unlimited amounts of money. The villagers have only themselves. They set to work, but this is something more than an awareness campaign; they’re building community as they go. In some villages, the absence of kerosene oil means kids can’t study in the evenings, so the organisers pitch in to buy them solar lamps. The campaigners take on village oligarchs, advocate for fairer distribution of rations and resources with the local authorities, and challenge the thousandfold small injustices and torments of village life. ‘It is not that some people are coming and talking about the steel plant and then going away,’ Dayamani Di insists. ‘The strategy of the movement was at various levels. You have to understand that this area is very, very poor, and now the company and government is coming with very lucrative options and promises. “We’ll provide you with jobs, we’ll provide you with football fields.” There’s a lot of confusion and conflicting information.’

All of this has happened before. The region is disfigured with mega‐projects from decades past: mines, dams, steel mills, power plants. One dam alone displaced eighty‐four villages. So the organisers form a delegation of volunteers to meet with villagers and see how things have worked out for them. ‘We took forty people from this area and went to all these megaproject areas, went to the people the government had promised that “after displacement you will have a very nice kind of life. You’ll have a good housing system, you’ll have running water.” Let’s go and see.’

⸻ pp. 98–99

Dayamani Barla is engaged in activism from her roadside teashop in Ranchi, in the mineral‐rich state of Jharkhand.

Shriprakash is a filmmaker who documents local struggles against megaprojects.

Story goes on for another couple of pages and it’s great!

‘Even to this day two principles of interstate relations codified in 1648 constitute the normative core of international low,’ writes Seyom Brown, professor of international cooperation at Brandeis University. The principles read like this: ‘(1) the government of each country is unequivocally sovereign within its territorial jurisdiction, and (2) countries shall not interfere in each other’s domestic affairs.’

In the aftermath of World War II, the drafters of the United Nations Charter made an attempt to subordinate these arbitrary sovereignties to the principle of collective security, and an ambitious human rights declaration. Despite this extraordinary attempt, Westphalia remains deeply baked into international law. ‘Nothing should authorise intervention in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state,’ says article 2(7) of the United Nations charter.

Decoded, that means within any territory enclosed by the lines on these maps, whoever can manage to stay in charge is allowed to do whatever they can get away with. Read that sentence again, maybe: it does sound like the kind of thing a bunch of aristocrats and monarchs would come up with.

⸻ pp. 132–133

That first bit was from Seyom Brown, International Relations in a Changing Global System: Toward a theory of the world polity, 2nd edn, Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1995

And, earlier on the page, there was a whisper of Michel Foucher, L’obsession des frontières, Paris: Perrin, 2012.

If I saw either on a shelf, I would have a flick, but it’s hard to get much sense of the works Ludlam cites from Full Circle alone. At starts of chapters, though, he does quote some superb writers I am more familiar with, so my curiosity’s automatically piqued a little any time a book is mentioned.

Periodic, tedious assertions built of an exclusionary “we” cluster beneath exhilarating blooms of micronarrative.

I disagreed with virtually every rhetorical invitation — but nonetheless: great game plan!

#leaving a pet

Mon cœur se serre. Je ne peux pas imaginer ne pas le revoir à mon retour. J’ai tout mis en place, des rendez‐vous vétérinaires aux séances d’ostéopathie pour ses pattes arrière qui lui font mal. Je vais aussi laisser mes odeurs dans ma chambre avec des habits que j’ai portés, comme cela, il n’éprouvera aucun stress et sentira ma présence, pendant quelque temps du moins. Je suis triste.

⸻ pg. 19

Not sure I want to go on this book‐walk, now, personally.

À mes pieds, une rivière profonde sans courant et d’un noir opaque emprisonne le grand rocher que j’ai repéré de loin. Je me déshabille et me glisse dans l’eau froide. Si vous entrez dans l’eau progressivement, le corps s’adapte et la sensation de froid en est diminuée. Sans un mouvement, je m’enfonce petit à petit jusqu’à ce que ma tête seule reste hors de l’eau. C’est une expérience simple d’abandon ; il me semble que je ne suis plus qu’une tête à la surface de cette eau noire, mon corps a disparu, l’eau froide l’a endormi. Soudain, un mouvement attire mon attention de l’autre côté de la rivière. Mes yeux s’écarquillent : je n’y crois pas ! C’est un magnifique cerf ! Il s’avance doucement, s’immobilise, écoute puis, après un long moment, s’élance avec élégance et sans un bruit. Il nage, opération qu’il maîtrise étonnament. Je n’ai toujours pas bougé, le dessus de l’eau est un vrai miroir. Ces bois majestueux semblent se déplacer à la surface sans corps en dessous. L’eau noire stagnante accentue cette impression. Sans aucune peur, le cerf passe juste là, à côté de moi. Il rejoint la rive à quelques pas seulement de mes habits secs, puis disparaît en sautillant élégamment dans la forêt sombre et humide.

⸻ pg. 29

So far I am finding this book a weird mixture of rather dull, faintly baffling, and intermittently captivating.

This encounter is in the U.S.A. on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2002.

La troisième technique est ancestrale et utilisée aussi par les animaux. Cela se passe dans le lit asséché d’une rivière sablonneuse. Vous allez peut‐être pouvoir trouver de l’eau sous cette surface sèche et molle. D’abord, il faut « lire » la rivière. Un peu comme un descendeur à skis s’imagine chaque contour et chaque bosse mentalement avant de s’élancer. Vous allez vous représenter la rivière qui est sous vos yeux avec de l’eau, et trouver ainsi l’endroit où l’eau était ralentie avant que la rivière s’assèche. Donc on cherche une courbe, ou un obstacle comme un gros rocher. Si vous avez trouvé cet endroit et que vous êtes certain que cela vaut la peine de dépenser de l’énergie et de votre sueur pour creuser un trou d’1 m de profondeur au minimum, alors commencez à creuser. Lorsque votre mission est accomplie, faites une sieste. Lorsque vous rouvrirez l’œil, si votre évaluation était juste, vous apercevrez une petite quantité d’eau au fond de votre trou.

Il existe bien d’autres techniques, mais chacune d’entre elles ne vous permettra de récolter que quelques centilitres. Il est impératif de se poser les bonnes questions et d’évaluer la quantité d’eau qui va sortir de votre corps durant l’opération de creusage ou d’installation de piégeage à eau.

Mais avant tout, je dois dire que ce n’est pas tant la technique qui compte que la capacité à lire le décor.

⸻ pp. 31–32

Cue yet another flashback within a flashback…

[…] Durant la nuit, la température à cette altitude est descendue bien en dessous de 0 °C. Mon bonnet est enfoncé sur ma tête, mais mes oreilles sont intentionnellement dégagées. L’ambiance est glaciale, brouillardeuse, mais étonnamment silencieuse. Soudain une mélodie fine et presque imperceptible semble flotter dans l’air. Cela ressemble à une poignée de notes aiguës qui se bousculent. La mélodie me semble bizarrement fragile. Je cherche sa provenance, sans succès. J’en profite pour ingérer une autre gorgée de mon thé. Au même moment, une brise isolée remonte à nouveau de la vallée, faisant retentir la mélodie juste derrière moi, cette fois plus vive et cristalline. Je me retourne et m’aperçois que les feuilles de bambou au‐dessus du chemin ont la blancheur de la porcelaine. Elles sont gelées à outrance. Le souffle venu du fond de la vallée a atteint les feuillages qui, en s’entrechoquant, créent cette mélodie aux résonances plaintives mais élégantes…

Une chaleur monte en moi et trouble tous mes sens et mon être en entier. Je viens de recevoir l’une des nombreuses leçons de vie que Dame Nature m’a enseignées… Je remercie et, les yeux fermés, j’écoute avec mon cœur la plainte du bambou…

⸻ pp. 157–158

Unconvinced by the lesson, in among all the contempt Marquis has been showing for just about all of the people whose land she keeps tramping over, I do though have a soft spot for bamboosong.

#venomous snake (this is both a spoiler and a content warning!)

C’était lors d’un après‐midi d’été, il venait d’arriver à la petite plage paradisiaque de William Bay, sous le campement. C’est une section du trek qui suit la côte. Il y a là une petite plage protégée par de magnifiques rochers ronds. L’eau est d’un bleu cristallin et fraîche : le rêve après une journée de marche… Il s’est donc baigné et, même, y a dormi. Amoureux des plages, il s’y attarde souvent et, selon la saison, il y dort volontiers. Le lendemain, il s’est réveillé tôt et a continué son chemin le long du Bibbulmun. Et cela s’est produit trois jours plus tard : il était au camp avec un autre marcheur qui n’avait malheureusement plus de pansement pour ses cloques, alors il a proposé de lui en donner. Tout en papotant, il a plongé sa main machinalement au fond de son sac pour y prendre sa pharmacie, et sans réaliser tout de suite, en a sorti… un serpent de près de 1,5 m qu’il a lâché dans un mouvement de terreur silencieuse. Ce n’était pas n’importe quel serpent, mais un western tiger snakes (Telescopus semiannulatus). Une espèce que moi je trouve magnifique avec sa robe noire mate et son ventre jaune. Mais il est aussi très venimeux.

Ce qui a le plus terrifié mon voisin, c’est le fait qu’il avait trimballé ce serpent durant trois jours dans son sac sans le savoir. Tout aurait pu se passer durant ce laps de temps. « Oui, dis‐je, y compris qu’il sorte du sac dans votre tente… ― Avant je n’avais pas de tente, mais depuis cette histoire je dors toujours sur la plage dans ma tente… Il a sûrement dû grimper dans mon sac durant la nuit parce qu’il fait plutôt frisquet la nuit sur la plage où j’étais. »

Je bois mon thé et le regarde : il est encore troublé.

⸻ pp. 245–246

[Ma maman] est venue avec mon frère qui était responsable de mes ravitaillements durant mon expédition australienne de 2002–2003. Le premier matin, elle avait disparu ! Avec mon frère, très inquiets, nous étions partis immédiatement à sa recherche. On l’a trouvée à plus de 2 km du camp, assise sur une chaise en plastique à l’extérieur d’un petit shop, un café à la main. Je lui ai demandé ce qu’elle faisait là. « Tu ne vois pas, je bois mon p’tit caf’ ? Tu sais bien que j’ai envie d’un p’tit café le matin ! » Fou rire général… « Eh bien dis‐moi, juste pour rire, comment tu l’as commandé, ton café ? » (Elle ne parle pas un mot d’anglais.) […]

⸻ pp. 247–248

Author essentially takes the same approach, though, on a larger scale.

Je ne quitte pas mon petit arbre des yeux, comme pour me concentrer mais, rien n’y fait, des larmes coulent sous mes lunettes de soleil. Je suis arrivée ! Je touche l’écorce de mon arbre de la main droite : « Je suis de retour, darling. » Je m’assieds. Et je laisse les émotions sortir de mon cœur.

⸻ pg. 258

Okay fine that’s cute.

Fun at first, but steadily soured by sexist tropes and the gradual falling away of creativity and cleverness in general.

It was at this point that the chancellor interrupted him. With her elbow on the table, she pressed a hand to her forehead and closed her tired eyes. ‘​Warum?​’ she said, and followed this word with a brief tangle of others. And again, ‘​Warum​ …’ and a longer tangle. Then the same again. And finally, still with her eyes closed, and her head sinking a little further towards the table, a simple, plaintive, ‘​Warum?​’

Tonelessly, the interpreter said, ‘Why are you doing this? Why, to what end, are you tearing your nation apart? Why are you inflicting these demands on your best friends and pretending we’re your enemies? Why?’

Jim’s mind went blank. Yes, he was weary from so much travel. There was silence in the room. Across the river a line of schoolchildren was forming up behind a teacher to go into the museum. Standing right behind his chair, the British ambassador softly cleared her throat. It was stuffy. Someone should open a window. There drifted through the PM’s mind a number of compelling answers, though he did not utter them. Because. Because that’s what we’re doing. Because that’s what we believe in. Because that’s what we said we’d do. Because that’s what people said they wanted. Because I’ve come to the rescue. Because. That, ultimately, was the only answer: because.

Then reason began to seep back and with relief he recalled a word from his speech the evening before. ‘Renewal,’ he told her. ‘And the electric plane.’ After an anxious pause, it came in a rush. Thank God. ‘Because, Madame Chancellor, we intend to become clean, green, prosperous, united, confident and ambitious!’

⸻ pp. 88–89

Not to say this reflects my overall assessment of the work, but to demonstrate the feel of McEwan’s approach. Peak voice, here too.

en-Zxxx-AU, baby!

Dunno about everybody else perusing BookWyrm book databases, but I find the shorthand much less irritating than words fixed firmly out of translation such that they clash with all but one language interface. Of course, not all language variants star in the language-subtag-registry, in which case I say name ’em in their own words! (Or close to as practicable). Getting to pointedly specify en​-Latn, with nobody around yet to be potentially bothered by my acting as though particular scripts shouldn’t go without saying, has been one of the little joys of nesting into We Loved Your Book So Much We Ate It, actually. If I ever get to the braille library (gosh if it’s even still open to the public after all these years), I’ll be so excited to label editions on here nice and clearly.

Anyhoo, may I remember to reborrow audiobook loans part‐heard last year. Got the furthest with Our Sunburnt Country, leaving few enough hours I should be able to manage in one or two or three or four goes later this month, maybe?

#mucking about atop the banks of tributaries of the river ecofascism

Isolated remark on this work in my reading notes file, from August or September last year:

uneasy how attributes troubles to growth of human population and (proportion of it enjoying?) wealth. ’tsnot not, but, y’know: nuance

Even that “but, y’know: nuance” needs more nuance and y’know​s, y’know? Which I think is why I never posted it; never got around to rephrasing it. To really hone in on: gross social inequality acting on a scale large enough to fundamentally disturb regional and global ecology. Degrees of interference not so easy or possible without the last few centuries’ increase in human population, including those deliberate moves by colonisers to manipulate themselves workforces and markets and dumping grounds out of colonised populaces, but how that’s not the same at all as population growth itself being a cause, and certainly not the same as humanity in outlier‐lopped aggregate becoming wealthier or better off by some very selective standards of measurement being to blame. Harnessing growth or winchings out of poverty or acts of measurement in certain ways, exploiting these, appropriating these things as media or conduits or pawns for the perpetuation of destructive patterns… this, if I am recalling correctly — and even the proliferation of lousy, extractive, predatory, or geographically misplaced agricultural ideologies — had not (yet?) received the attention required to chase out the dangerous implications of waving vaguely but firmly at the notions of increasing numbers of human mouths and a Global South striving to counter the impacts of bitter impoverishment. There may have been smaller gesture to pre‐“post”colonial wealth distribution and direct inheritors thereof, but… Yeah, uneasing weightings, adoption uncritically of wildly misleading framings.

(Resumption, somewhere round the mid of Chapter 10, ‘Unfairness’).

Okay, here we go. Better!

For most of human history, to speak of time was actually to assess the condition of the natural world. Which flowers were in bloom. Where the migrating animals were feeding. How low the sun sat on the horizon. Our ancestors’ time was structured by nature’s rhythms and cycles, originating from Earth’s tilt and rotation.

To this day, the sun is buried deep in our human biology, as we rise and sleep, with circadian rhythms, betraying our identity as animals deeply embedded in a planet turning on its axis.

And how foolish we would be to think this untrue. To cut our own cord from Mother Nature and to forcibly disconnect others who remained cognisant of our dependence.

⸻ Track 3 ‘2: Belonging’, 14:28–15:18

Emphasis mine, though I might not bother to distinguish naturalness were I making such a statement myself. This book doesn’t have a lot of room for addressing what ambivalence about the idea of nature its own preoccupations may sometimes suggest.

Stressing, (but only) here and there, a naturehood seems very important to the tone, conceptual framework, and motivational effect — and from those, something like genre — pulsing about in the work. It could be clearer observing its undulations at a more condensed pace, through print.

I want to know how everything and everyone fits together. The intricacy of the global food system captivates my interest. But in learning about the enormity of its challenges, intense emotions awaken within me. From this I learn how the acquisition of some new knowledge can test mental resilience.

⸻ Track 8 ‘7: Understanding’, 1:20–1:43

There’s an affecting understatement to this observation, the way it rushes by under the momentum of surrounding stories.

Grieving for our world evokes a profound connection to it, a deep affection for it, and it is from that place that despair ignites our will to heal, to take care. In understanding vulnerability and fragility, we develop strength and determination, we meet resilience, we become encompassed and carried by love.

⸻ Track 8 ‘7: Understanding’, 9:06–9:36

#ecological catastrophe, ablist language

[…] and although I’m not impervious to hurtful comments, the nastiness hurled in my direction becomes somewhat irrelevant, when I remind myself of why I do what I do.

Because doing some​thing is my only option.

When I feel broken, reading about animals becoming extinct and coral reefs disappearing, doing some​thing is my only option. When I fear possible future food crises in parts of the world where farmers are struggling to adapt quickly enough to heatwaves and droughts, doing some​thing is my only option! I know that the only way I can help look after my family and my farm is by doing something. I can live with being called an “imbecile” and a “fool”. I can live with the stomach butterflies as I speak on radio and stage. But I refuse to live as a silent witness and prioritise my own comfort, knowing that avoidable harm is occurring.

And climate change can be avoided. The harm does not have to happen.

Speaking up may be risky, but keeping quiet can be more dangerous. When our perspectives and ideas are never revealed, we allow the continuation of the unacceptable.

⸻ Track 15 ‘14: Comfort’, 12:32–13:55

That took long enough to peck out I’ll have to save my remarks for later.

Too tempting! Too nicely illustrated! Too cutely worded! I caved! I’ve skipped ahead!

So! (I’ll type up my other notes later, but for now:) The title…

『へんしん：すがたをかえるイモムシ』 [Henshin: sugata o kaeru imomushi] meaning something like Metamorphosis: shape‐shifting caterpillars!

変身（へんしん）metamorphosis, transformation

That’s「へん」[hen] in the sense of change, strange and「しん」[shin] for body as in「心身」（しんしん）​mind + body.

姿（すがた）form, state, (an) appearance

変える（かえる）to change, reform, etc.

イモムシ caterpillar (of some sort?)

Evidently, but what is the difference from「毛虫」（けむし）, yer (always?) fuzzy caterpillar? Hairiness? Is that「芋」（いも）like a potato? Are these caterpillars found on potatoes? IS THIS, FUCKING, MY IPOMOEA JOKE POSITIONING BOOKWYRM AS/ON A SWEET POTATO (sORT OF KIND OF NOT REALLY)? Oh my god.

Enjoyable aside:「泣き虫」（なきむし）​crybaby, or cry‐bug/worm.

Almost missable on the title page is 「はるの　あるひ」: One day in spring… The main story begins 「なのは　なの」, which I suppose is a bit of a hwætty non sequitur?

Now into some vocab I opted to verify. (I would have liked to know more about 「なのはなの」but where to start, as an offline reader, huddled alone, and too tired for telcoms?)

はっぱの　うらに
ゴマより　ちいさな
しろい　たまご

• 裏（うら）(the) reverse (side)
• 頁の裏に（ページのうらに）overleaf
• 裏庭（うらにわ）back garden
• 胡麻（ごま）sesame (seeds)

So on the underside of a leaf, a white egg smaller than a sesame seed — with kanji:「葉っぱの裏に胡麻より小さな白い卵」。

おや？たまごの　いろが
かわってきた

• おや oh! gosh! how bout that!
• 変わる（かわる）to (undergo?) change, to shift

Presumably there is clearer distinction, between 変える (what the caterpillars do to their forms in the picture book’s subtitle) and the 変わる performed (alone) by the colour of the egg, than skimpy dictionary definitions expressed.

まず　たまごの　からを
むしゃむしゃ
[…]

• 殻（から）husk, shell, hull
• むしゃむしゃ nibble[??], chomp[??] [I am guessing; there is no sign of this in any available dictionary entries]

Thus first off, they [colloquially, eat] the eggshell.

よいしょ　よいしょ　かわを　ぬぐ

• よいしょ heave! [or similar]
• 皮（かわ）skin, bark, rind, etc.

Making for the engorged caterpillar — hnnnnng! — hauling off its skin like a heavy coat in the middle of a marvellous few pages of pleasantly simple grammar that just doesn’t slot neatly into English translation (as far as I can figure).

Two of your finest butterflies, please. And a whole lot of lexical speculation.

くきの　のぼって　いとを　はき
からだを　しっかり　くくったら
しずかに　じっと　ときを　まつ

• 茎（くき）stem
• 水茎（みずぐき）writing brush
• 吐く（はく）to spit out, to vomit, to exhale, to send forth, etc
• しっかり firmly, securely, etc.
• くくる to bind
• かっこでくくる to wrap in brackets (parenthesise)
• じっと patiently, intently, still [as an adverb]

Giving us something like They climb a stem, and once they have firmly tied their thread‐spooling body on, wait patiently in silence.

I’m guessing, of the many のぼるs, this would be rendered「登る」​to climb — cf.「上る」​to go up(stream) and​「昇る」​to rise, ascend?

Another fun aside:「毛糸」（けいと）​wool(len yarn), in the manner of 毛虫 (the fuzzier caterpillars this book is not about)!

あ、せなかが　われた

うねうね
うねうね
かわを　ぬいで

• 割れる（われる）to split (apart/into), to (be) crack(ed), to (be) smash(ed)

Onomatopoeia time again! Related terms:

• 畝（うね）[as a noun] ridge, rib, furrow
• うねうねする to zig‐zag, to wind
• うねり surge, swell, undulation
• 海のうねり seaswell
• うねる to wind, to roll, to swell

Ah! The [back] top split! and off out of the way ripples the skin.

さなぎに　なった！
なんにちか　たったら

• 蛹（さなぎ）chrysalis, pupa

It became a chrysalis, but I am a tad bamboozled by the 「たったら」。Is related to「足す」（たす）​to add, like Give it some days (conjugation suggests no?) or is this the「たった」saying only, merely, gone all「たら」for the whenness: In just a matter of days…? Or what? The gist is evident but I would rather understand the mechanics!

なかが
すけてる！

Immediately prior we were told that the colour changed. Nearest listings:

• 透く（すく）to be transparent, to be seen through
• 透かす（すかす）to peer into/through, to make transparent
• 透ける（すける）to be(come) transparent

So this’d be some sort of potential form of「透かす」(hence「け」), made into (still) a(nother) verb in its own right…? Sample sentences seem to affirm that the particle「が」, when associated with this family of verbs of sheerness, marks the 中 （なか）as that which is seen, not that through which the seeing occurs. You can peek through to the inside! Again, I would appreciate a more thorough understanding of the word‐metamorphosing here. (That would require grammatical references, to which I have no access currently; or the tapping of musty old memory).

ぱりっ
せなかが　われて
もぞもぞ

• パリ crinkle! crackle! [a crispy noise]
• もぞもぞする to crawl, to squirm, to creep

まるまった　はねを
ひらくと……

• 丸まる（まるまる）to curl up, 丸くなる
• 羽（はね）wing, feather, plume
• 開く（ひらく）to unfurl, etc

When they unfurl their balled‐up wings… Except we haven’t had a subject since the squirmy back, so it’s in effect sort of more like HEY THERE ARE WINGS BEING UNFURLED, EXCEPT NOT PASSIVELY! NOR ARE THE WINGS OPENING THEMSELVES, PEOPLE! Shall we consider the implications here?

Gorgeous — this is so much more of a ride than it would be in English.

モンシロチョウ

• 紋（もん）crest, print
• 紋白蝶（モンシロチョウ）cabbage‐moth

Or something like figured white butterfly.

Okay, next up!

なつの　あさ
シンショウの
はっぱに
つやつや　ちいさな
まんまる　たまご

• 山椒（さんしょう）Japanese pepper (tree) Zanthoxylum piperitum, [mountain pepper(tree)]
• 艶々（つやつや）lustre, glaze, gloss, sheen
• 真ん丸（まんまる）perfect circle/sphere
• まんまるい月 full moon

Summer’s morning, on the leaf of a Japanese pepper tree, a perfectly round, little egg, glossily?? My lack of exposure to「つやつや」is throwin me off.

いとで　からだを　しっかり　くくって
[…]

This caterpillar secures their body with (or by way of the) thread.

しわしわの　はねを
ひろげると……

• しわ wrinkle, crease, furrow
• 広げる（ひろげる）to outstretch, to spread out

And on that unfolding of wrinkly wings…

ふわり

ナミアゲハ

• ふわふわ floating, drifting;, soft, fluffy; flippant, indeterminate
• ふわりと softly, lightly, featherlike
• 並の（なみの）ordinary, common, average, medium
• 揚羽（あげは）swallowtail
• 揚げる（あげる）to hoist, fly, raise, uplift?

So like a garden‐variety glide‐wing (swallowtail)? There’s a vaguely kite‐fly–y sense–potential I am getting about this, though a (would‐be) streaming delicately somehow.

See you next time for a third species! And more ignorant hooliganism!

Let’s get colloquial! ‐Lier.

あきになると
クズの　つぼみに
[…]

• クズ kudzu/arrowroot Pueraria montana
• 蕾（つぼみ）bud

からを　かじって
うんしょ　うんしょ
こんな　イモムシが　でてきたよ

• かじる to gnaw, to nibble, to bite; 少し知る
• 日本語を少しかじっている to have a smattering of Japanese [to be nibbling on it a little!]
• うんしょ oof! [another effortful noise]
• 出て来る（でてくる）to appear, to emerge, to be found

I can’t think how to manoeuvre within the word order in “Good” English for similar effect, but the unnamed they gnaws through the shell, and — hrrr, ufff — this caterpillar has appeared!

よっこらしょ
たまごから　でると
[…]

• よっこらしょ up we get! houp!

わっ、おしりに　ツノが　ある

• 尻（しり）arse, seat [of pants], base [of pot], tail end, etc.
• 角（つの）horn, antler, antenna, feelers
• 角を出す to get angry

Whoa, there are horns on its bottom. That’s「​お​しり」because we are polite.

It’s fun rediscovering these little points like つの also meaning things like antennae! I have gone for “horns”, because… I guess that’s the sort of vague gesture of a word I’d resort to in English? We’re talking dorsal eversible organs, here, for your reference.

Interesting:「わっと」​all of a sudden, breaking/bursting into (e.g.「わっと走り出る」​to break into a run). (All) at a wha⸺!nce, you could say?

アリが　さわると
ツノから　ぴろぴろ
しゅっと　でた！

Jesus. My flimsy formal education did not prepare me for this episode.

• 蟻（アリ）ant
• 触る（さわる）to touch
• 触って見る（さわってみる）to feel to see
• さわって知る to feel [to touch so as to know]
• ピロピロ笛（ぴろぴろぶえ）one of those party blower things that make a hooty squeal and a rustle as a plastic reed warbles and a paper tube inflates and unfurls and deflates and recurls
• しゅっと slimly[??] [like fitted‐cut pants?], taperedly[??] [like a high‐speed train nose?]

To wit: When the ant touched [the caterpillar], [PTOOOOOOOO!] out from the nubs. ???!

Totally off‐topic but they’re playing The Whitlams on the local seniors’ community radio station now?! (‘No Aphrodisiac’). So I’m officially too old for all of this.

おや
しわが　よってきた

• 寄る（よる）to approach; to gather; to drop in [on someone]

Much more topically, The Kinks just came on (‘Sunny Afternoon’); drew in, whatever.

すこしずつ
かわを　ぬいだら……

• ずつ each, every, by, in
• 二人ずつ部屋から出て来る to come out of the room two at a time
• 少しずつ（すこしずつ） bit by bit

After they’ve, little by little, taken off their skin…

スペードマークがついてるね

• スペード spade [like the cards suit]

Are we in「付く」（つく）territory? (To be stained with/by) Or close to「ついて」​about, concerning in connection with?「ついてる」for luck? I have no idea. But there is a spade symbol a‐verbing on the chrysalis. Innit.

ぱりっ
せなかが　われて
もぞもぞ

I know we’ve already touched on もぞもぞする事 last time, but I would like to add that「もぞもぞ」feels more shuffly in these contexts, it seems, to me?

すぼまった　はねを
のばすと……

• 窄まる（すぼまる）to scrunch up, to be pursed
• 伸ばす（のばす）to extend; to prolong; to smooth out; to cultivate
• 写真を引き伸ばす（しゃしんを　ひきのばす）to enlarge (a) photograph(s)
• スープを伸ばす to water down a soup

Cute!:「欠伸」（あくび）​yawn

Uh, so as they spread their tucked‐together wings which’ve been as a folded umbrella.

ひらり

ウラギンシジミ

• ひらり nimbly
• ウラギンシジミ angled sunbeam Curetis acuta
• シジミチョウ gossamer‐winged butterflies

That’s old mate「裏」（うら）the backing! So this is a silver‐lined member of Lycaenidae. And indeed:

とじた　はねは
うすい　ぎんいろ

• 閉じる（とじる）to close
• 薄い（うすい）thin [layer]; light [hue]; weak [flavouring]

The closed wings are a pale silver (colour).

はっぱに　ぎゅっと
つかまって
しずかに　はるを
まってるよ

• ぎゅっと hard, tightly, fast
• 捕まる（つかまる）to be detained; to catch (hold of)

They cling onto a leaf and quietly await the springtime!

The book closes with two compositions much more in the style of the 作文 we studied in school. And they are kindly festooned with furigana.

The first is entitled 「へんしんして、空へ飛び立つ」。Loosely, to transform and take to the skies.

Some vocab from its introduction, plus some related terms:

• 種類（しゅるい）kind, variety, species, type, class
• 種々の（しゅじゅの） various, diverse
• 登場（とうじょう）(stage) appearance, character, cast #登場
• 登場する（とうじょうする） to appear (onstage), to come (on stage)

That’s「とう」for attending or coming up onto and「じょう」for scene​/​stage​/​setting. Stagetakers, so to speak.

• 何れ（いずれ）soon; in any case; any/either
• 畑（はたけ）field, garden, patch, plantation, grove, etc.
• 段段畑（だんだんばたけ）terraced farm
• それは畑違いです。That [~diverges from~] is not my area.
• 河原（かわら）dry riverbed, river beach
• 原（はら）plain, plateau

Same kanji as used in compounds for the sense of crude or primary as in「原子」（げんし）​atom! Basis, I guess?

• 身近な（みぢかな）close to one(self), familiar, common

À la「近く」（ちかく）of neighbourhood, but with the most aggressively awkwardly uncommon imposed voicedness (I have forgotten the proper term) I have encountered in a long, long time.

• 幼虫（ようちゅう）larva, grub [with the「幼」for immature, infant; young child​]
• さまざまな various, different, 色々な
• 成虫（せいちゅう）imago [in the sense of an adult insect]

That’s not a stipulation I ever expected to find myself making.

Bonus mashing of parts:「虫類」（ちゅうるい）​insects & worms, supposedly. I have my doubts, vague kanji dictionary.

Article on pages 16–21.

Article on pages 22–27.

Though I didn’t jot down any quotes, this was a fascinating wee set of interpretations, taken en masse.

Review on pages 52–54.

Is it too much to hope that the rejuvenation of Māori language course Te Whanake in actual print​(!) may portend a new physical edition of decently deep yet dabbler‐friendly dictionary Te Aka, with which these textbooks shared an editor and lexicon…?

Musical stageplay I’ve seen already, so probably be fairly quick to finish (unless I get snagged on not knowin Shakespeare or on adoring Traoré)…

I had been reading Chikyū Seijin basically paragraph by paragraph: first an attempt — fairly low‐effort, in the sense of no looking up unknowns and not agonising over my ample uncertainty and sometimes outright bewilderment — through the Japanese, then a quick glimpse at the translation in Earthlings, before another squiz back at the bits that’d baffled me in the original. Sometimes the sequence of statements were so shuffled in translation that it took an additional round to align the starts and finishes of the passage under review.

This had been serving me fairly well, although I had to keep leaving long breaks between sessions in order to catch moments of sufficient dexterity for juggling the two paperbacks without losing my place all the time.

As ever with library books, time was running out. So, fine motor control lacking yet again, I galloped through the English version during some downtime yesterday — figuring I’ll probably not finish the Japanese in time, but at least now have the gist.

And, whouf, what a story!

Our bellies full, we took some quilts to the kotatsu, wrapped ourselves in them, and dozed. Since today was a special day, Yuu brought a candle from the altar room and lit it for us. It was the first time in ages that we’d been enveloped in a glow of light during the Dark Time, and it felt somehow like a ceremony.

The three of us creatures wrapped in pure white quilts, dimly discernable in the candlelight, resembled cocoons. Maybe this is what the silkworm room had looked like, I mused sleepily.

According to Uncle Teruyoshi, after the silkworms had swelled up and taken over the whole house, the Earthlings would remove the tatami mats to expose the floorboards in the living room and the two large tatami rooms to let them become the domain of the silkworms. The Earthlings, meanwhile, slept in the corners, listening to the sound of silkworms munching noisily on mulberry leaves everywhere in the house.

I wondered what the Earthlings dreamed of whilst sleeping among countless pure white cocons. As I dozed, I imagined what it must have looked like with the white insects wriggling all over the room.

⸻ pp. 238–239

Truly the longest of shots, as I don’t know that one’s been produced, but would anyone happen to have a spoken edition of this I could borrow?

(It’s Earthlings in the original Japanese).

[…] 動物の匂いは、自分たち人間のものなのかもしれなかった。

⸻ pg. 16

Marked this a while back. I cannot actually type the full quote I intended to (not without heaps more time, to look readings of kanji up), but here’s Ginny Tapley Takemori’s translation into English of that entire paragraph:

It smelled of fruit, a mix of peaches and grapes, along with a faint animal odor. The neighbors kept cows, but they were some distance away, so maybe the animal smell in this house came from us humans.

⸻ Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, Earthlings (London: Granta 2020), p. 10

There’s a slightest hint here of what I so love about how Murata has devised the voice of the main character Natsuki (at this stage (recalling herself?) as a grade‐five student, on holiday with her extended family, at her grandmother’s house). Some of the observations she makes are almost heartbreaking, in the understated way in which they triangulate to her overall experience of life to date. But her narration is also an entertaining blend of the thoughtful and thoughtless. Altogether I find it super characterful and smartly arranged. It makes for an almost deceptively more‐ish story.

English‐reading reviewers I’d encountered before beginning this book would have you expect from Murata something far more bland, concentrating on the pragmatism of the language, or affectless mien.

The firmly Americanizing approach to the English translation I feel undermines Murata’s finesse. Japanese children telling stories to a presumed Japanese audience don’t labouriously transliterate their own and their peers’ ages for forgetful foreigners every time they mention what school year somebody was in, for example. They don’t chirrup “sure” incessantly (even if that may be an apt Japanese to American gloss). Natsuki in English slides jarringly out of phase with her social context, reminding me of the way anime dubs tend to skate fully clear into something entirely new.

The protagonist’s bluntness becomes blurred. Tightly curated ideas bleed messily. Whole chains of clauses languish in oblivion. Eminently directorial decisions subtly reblock scenes in arguably unimportant, but equally unnecessary, ways; simplifying the action in and against the kind of background character radiation of perplexingly numerous, vaguely recognised aunties, uncles, and middle‐aged cousins… I wouldn’t necessarily pick up on this if I weren’t skimming the novel in parallel with itself — and make nitpicky, frankly even fundamentally unfair complaint.

Still, although much of the edgy original pokes in, Earthlings feels relatively care‐less (despite the mountains of care that it obviously took). I enjoy Earthlings much better as a half‐read comprehension prompt, I suspect, than I would as a standalone story. More importantly, I get far more out of『地球星人』for it, for this nice incremental leaning across of the two!

Sailing gently down the columnar prose, without pause for crossreference, is doing wonders for my weary eyes.

I have started cushioning the full stress of Murata’s text by overlaying tracks from the Turin 2022 edition of Eurovision C.D. compilation (which I finally ripped in this the July a whole extra year after!) onto the experience.

A little distracting, this, as it necessarily involves a fair amount of jumping back to Konstraka’s ‘In Corpore Sano’, reminiscing about the delicious inertia of that number’s staging. Not to mention the scintillating writing. Horror authors should aspire to cultivate the impact (I) felt on first sighting of that subtitle about health insurance! (I continue to understand little of the song’s lyric directly but “nie dobro, nie ljepa” — pardon my spelling and alphabet). I don’t often have such a singularly standout fav as I do from ESC22, and I’m not sure it was that mediocre a year in terms of overall line-up.

So, er, yeh. This one (intrusive extra-lit’ry (or is that extra literary?) rec) goes out to all my artsy handwashers…

#ExtraLiterary

#paedophilia, misc. child abuse, incest, murder, meat

「私と宙宇がセックスをして、何がいけないの？」
「お前たちは……まだ子供だからだ！」
「子供はセックスしちゃいけないの？子供とセックスしたがる大人って、たくさんいるのに。子供同士だと駄目なの？」
「奈月！」

⸻ pg. 119

Super roughly:

⸺ What’s wrong with Yū and I having sex?
⸺ ’Cause you’re just⸺ You’re both still kids!
⸺ Why aren’t kids allowed to have sex? There are loads of adults who want to have sex with us. So why’s it wrong between children?
⸺ Natsuki!!

Just as I was thinking, rather petulantly, I ought to have some sort of reward, after stumbling through those scenes most overtly dominated by the young cram school tutor with the pop-idol looks — all the more cloying in the original, liberally peppering his talk with「奈月ちゃん」this, Natsuki‐chan that — and his one-on-one「お勉強」in posture, underwear, sanitary‐napkin–handling, and「ごっくんこ」; on top of the harsh home environment, the put-downs, the beatings; and the concurrent childish coercion culminating in the little cousins’ drawn‐out sex scene; for emerging a second time from all this, but more so for having been in it again, deserving peace, suddenly I remembered there was an ultraviolent killing yet to come. Oh. Oh dear. Okay. At least I guess it’s psychedelic, rendered as cartoonish, dissociated, strange. But wait… no, multiple murders — gruesome, clumsy slaughter followed up with amateur butchery, unapologetic.

I am questioning my literary choices!

I admire and like this novel. I am still, in some senses, enjoying it. But how arduous a read is a good read worth? Would this be better taken little by little over six months, or a year? In more comfortable life circumstances? Simply left be?

Slight shades of steeling (strict double‐e) through The Watch Tower, that exquisite and excruciating opus (Harrower by name, Harrower by nature)!

At least Nightbitch, despite the carnivorous relish, is predominantly funny…? But it might be nice to move on to gentle, friendly fiction, mightn’t it?

性行為完全排除希望,握手以上のスキンシップ望みません。

⸻ pg. 136

Natsuki’s then‐future husband, in a transactional personals ad posted online.

It’s condensed, nouny language, wherein he stipulates that his wishes are to completely rule out sexual relations, and that he expects physical intimacy not to exceed a hand shake.

(I can’t type kana or Japanese punctuation marks on this device, so it’ll take an edit before the quote fully resembles what appears in the book). [Edit: now done!]

• 行為（こうい）conduct, act, deed
• 性行為（せいこうい）[「せい」in the sense of sex,「こう」for action, and​「い」imbuing purpose(?) seems to give fairly serious expression of “sexual activity”? Compare similar term「性行」（せいこう）.]
• 完全（かんぜん）entirely
• 排除（はいじょ）elimination, exclusion, removal

Same「はい」as in「排気ガス」（はいきガス）“exhaust gas”, which I’m startled to recognise (as a spoken word) from high school. Faintest rememberings of a unit on… was it the greenhouse effect? Pollution? Environmental damage in aggregate? Funny, I normally associate learning Japanese in school with 社会問題 and 文化 — both of which of course pertain to ~​the environment​~ in reality — but I’d forgotten learning more than「割り箸」（わりばし）as enviroperil vocab (perhaps assuming the touching on of that a — excuse me — throwaway?). I mean my Japanese teachers would talk of aircon units in Tokyo’s high summer exacerbating the urban heat island effect, before it was anything like a (sorry) hot topic in the anglophone world⁸, but they did that sort of thing speaking English almost as much as through Japanese.

• 希望（きぼう）wishes, hope
• 握手（あくしゅ）handshake [a clasping of hands]

Same clutching kanji used for「お握り」（おにぎり）​onigiri.

• 以上（いじょう）at least, (or) more than; aforementioned
• 望む（のぞむ）to hope, to expect

All this to finally say:

Ohh, resurgence please in useful sense-category スキンシップ!

These are nocturnal ground‐dwellers and are not pests.

[…]

These are nocturnal ground‐dwellers that may enter houses, but they are not pests.

⸻ pg. 64

Select remarks on native cockroaches (respectively Platyzosteria spp. and Drymaplaneta spp.) impart a poetic momentum to the first of several pages exploring the order Blattodea.

[Dave] lingered on the edges of his words and wore an Occidental College shirt, so I assumed he, too, was from California.

⸻ pg. 13

Edges of words!

Narrator at this stage: Cliff Miyashiro.

Cliff, too: an edge of a word.

Contrary to that initial silliness, the remarks at particular points that I have felt the most moved towards making have amounted to variations, without context, on:

Oah, jeez.

This was going to be a light refreshment, yet another modern U.S. science fiction slab slipped into the library bag donning promise of much more than its hapless author could muster. In some ways, it is that kind of novel. But foremost it is emotionally sensorial; sweet in a somewhat hollowed sense I can never quite take to, and relentlessly so, for which the tragedy it bears presses nonetheless firmly. On the tear ducts.

Assessment much beyond that this week I withhold, knowing I rush through this plague panorama acutely not knowing if a loved one terribly ill by the covid has succumbed completely. Waiting for the next call nearly the moment long awaited word again arrives.

#embrace of imperialism and associated hmmmn-inducement; racism, war

As more opportunity and freedom pulled many across the ocean, so did I find myself aboard a ship to America, landing first in Virginia in 1820. I lived quietly for decades, exploring this young country with whatever face and society could grant me passage and access. I attended the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights in 1848, posing as a milliner from Delaware, filled with the spirit of possibility, and listened to the words of Mott and Stanton. I thought about all that had become possible for humanity simply because I had chosen to break the rules, to dare to dream.

I unexpectedly found love again not long after the conference and headed south, instead of following the gold rush as I had originally planned.

“A big family. Three boys. No, four,” my Elliot said one evening as we worked to build our house outside of Raleigh.

[…]

Now, I won’t dwell on the specifics of what those soldiers did to me or to my husband or our little boy. […] The very nature of my existence, the pull of seeing my creation, the knowledge that I can help others in need, demands that I reinvent myself, though I still dream of my children. I still whisper their names in the dark.

⸻ pg. 281

Yeah, nice one, ancient shape‐shiftin guardian alien, treat the place like that and only bemoan “what the world had become” (pg. 282) once you’re rounded up as a Japanese American the following century, an identity you settled into by way of… flitting off to Americanise the Meiji‐era military and then having another bunch of sons and hubby suffer violent deaths and deciding escape back to the States would bring peace?? Real plausible lookin‐out for Humanity and all of the Earth. And you’d lived through how many years of history? Oh all of them and more?

Up till the suspect approach to this point, I was tempted to grumble that the angelic architect alien angle really cheapens overlapping characters introduced earlier (by divorcing their love for their world from the expression of ordinary human nature the novel seems set on championing) and that I’ve found it a little bit of a drag to read a book so weighed down by some vast heteronormative shroud and, like, America, but concede the novel otherwise is beautifully done and those latter downsides kind of come with the presumably intentional focus of the thing so can I begrudge it them? But you know what? When they converge still over these gratuitous space centuries (forward and back from the finely‐crafted kitchen‐sink decades), I think maybe I can.

#trauma of flu pandemic and the commemoration of WWI

The greatest public health catastrophe in modern history following so closely on the heels of the deadliest war caused something like collective trauma. Few could make sense of such monstrous suffering. Knowledge about infectious pathogens was still in its early stages, and no lessons, it seemed, could be taken from the pandemic — there was only a sense of immense, incoherent loss. As a result, the memory of the influenza outbreak became shrouded in silence; its awfulness sublimated into the mass reaction to the war. Unlike the pandemic, the war had human perpetrators. It was read as an indictment of human brutality, one that had to be commemorated in order to prevent further violence on the same scale. Its horror was preserved in poems, novels, symphonies and paintings, and in the monuments that were erected on village greens.

⸻ pg. 4

Later, a specific case:

The delight and satisfaction this project [​The New Republic​] brought to Dorothy was short‐lived. The First World War broke out and Willard enlisted, seeing a chance to advance his dream of expanding America’s liberal influence. He survived the fighting, but was killed by the Spanish influenza pandemic that claimed over 3 per cent of the world’s population. At the end of the worst war the world had ever known, Dorothy found herself with three young children to care for and no husband to support her in doing so. She rarely talked about her grief, then or later. Her private sorrow, like that of others who lost loved ones in the pandemic, was submerged by public mourning for the war dead — those who had died for something.

⸻ ibid, pg. 52

Dorothy Whitney, “a child of America’s Gilded Age” (pg. 49), first married Willard Straight, and later Leonard Elmhirst. She and her second husband founded the Dartington Hall community.

This was one of several books chosen by the people of the home library service for my book bag of a couple of months ago. I was wary about Nelson, based on vague remembrance of trusted circles’ wry response to The Argonauts, but a tentative, curious nestle into On Freedom on the return date proved immediately inviting enough that I reserved a copy for trying again this round.

On Freedom will not argue that mindful breathing will immediately deliver us social equity and justice, or reverse the course of global warming. But it will propose that, if we want to divest from the habits of paranoia, despair, and policing that have come to menace and control even the most well intentioned among us — habits that, when continuously indulged, shape what’s possible in both our present and future — we are going to need methods by which we feel and know that other ways of being are possible, not just in some revolutionary future that may never come, or in some idealized past that likely never existed or is irretrievably lost, but right here and now. This is [David] Graeber’s point about “acting as if one is already free.” and while this sometimes means more protest and puppets (as is Graeber’s wont), it can also mean the development of more understated practices by which one develops a greater tolerance for indeterminacy, as well as for the joys and pains of our inescapable relation.

⸻ pg. 17

But how can one sort out which works “encourage connection” and which don’t, when the one thing all art does […] is transmit a signal, put forth a communication, which is by no means ontologically invalidated as a transmission if it expresses misanthropic, opaque, or antisocial elements?

⸻ pp. 21–22

As [Jennifer] Doyle and others have made clear, if we do not want the neoliberal university (or the museum or the publisher, many of which are arguably giant corporations in disguise) to turn the demands of social justice into an excuse to consolidate and exert more power, if we want to make structural changes without simply hardening the system in ways that can and will be used against us […]

⸻ pg. 50

Power shape‐shifts and travels — as nearly every effective activist knows, asserting it goes a long way toward its actualization. Letting go of a calcified conviction of what and where power is and how it moves can be a crucial part of instigating its redistribution; acknowledging and feeling what power we do have — not to mention analyzing our own will to it — invites us to investigate what we want to do, or are already doing, with it.

⸻ pg. 57

#sexism re: motherhood

The problem with this analogizing is that it continues a long tradition of relying on the maternal as an idealized model for selfless care provision without contending with the experience of actual mothers themselves, who complicate the picture by having their own needs, not to mention an understanding of caregiving as historically and psychically interwoven with disintegration, failure, inequity, and coercion. To question the use of the mother as a model of selfless care provision and a priori obligation means facing the psychological and political repercussions of having feminized this labor for thousands of years, as well as the vexations that such a model has produced for those presumed felicitously to embody it.

⸻ pp. 68–69

#AIDS crisis (by limited definition)

Teaching college for the past twenty years has taught me that the AIDS crisis — at least as it was before antiretrovirals — has disappeared almost completely for those born after its peak. This is in many ways a natural, arguably welcome effect of the passage of time and medical treatment. But it has also had a disorienting effect on much of the intergenerational conversation going on about sex positivity, pleasure, and danger, a conversation that makes far less sense when the influence AIDS had — indeed, the formative crater it made — in so many of our lives has fallen out of the picture.

For many who came up in the 1980s and ’90s, forging a commitment to sex positivity was not about downgrading the feminist or queer liberatory missions of the ’60s and ’70s to a tinny, neoliberal version of empowerment. It was about insisting, in the face of viciously bigoted moralists who didn’t care if you lived or died (many preferred that you died), that you had every right to your life force and sexual expression, even when the culture was telling you that your desire was a death warrant, and that if it killed you, you deserved it […] As Amber Hollibaugh, a self‐described lesbian sex radical who founded the Lesbian AIDS Project (LAP) of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) in the 1990s, described this time: “While being made into sexual pariahs, gay men and drag queens and dykes and queer men of color and their sisters and brothers, and other communities of sex and racial justice warriors, spoke up and spoke out for sex, struggling to claim the right to desire even in the face of an epidemic and a virus transmitted through sex. We refused to be shamed or disowned because of our desires or our antibody status. This was a truly terrifying time. But through it all — although we were frequently wrong — we were also brilliant, and we were brave.”

⸻ pp. 89–90

#drug addiction

[Paul] Preciado’s frustrated desire to become attached to a “substance without will” […] also likely has to do with the instability of the subject/object dichotomy itself […]

[…] Whether it makes sense to talk about vibrant matter or nonhuman people as having agency or liberty of their own is a subject of long‐standing scientific, philosophical, and spiritual debate. But if, as feminist physicist Karen Barad puts it, all matter “feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers,” there may truly be no such thing as “an object that has no wish” — which is another reason that Preciado’s desire for such fails.

For those accustomed to humankind asserting its will and power over nature, with the latter conceived of as a collection of inert, mute objects, the experience of grappling with “demands” made by those objects can be disorienting and chaotic […]

[…] For [Michael W.] Clune, it’s the “white tops” on certain heroin vials that act as the source of fixation[…] Clune has expressed interest in recent neurological research demonstrating how cues alone (e.g., the sight of a white top) can occasion dopamine surges in the brain, creating, for the addict, a troubling assemblage of vibrant matter.

Knowing that we respond physically to things we’ve neither ingested nor touched need not reify or magnify feelings of powerlessness or unfreedom. Like the discipline of phenomenology, which asks us to consider phenomena such as intention, orientation, and proprioception as structuring our experience of the world, such knowledge can help us fathom the mysterious nature of our enmeshment, which does not stop at our skin or the human. From here, we might see that the pathos of drug addiction isn’t necessarily that it displaces a natural love for other human beings with an unnatural love for a cold, mute object, but that it reveals our porousness to nonhuman people — our appetite for them, and our vulnerability to them. […]

We may root for Clune to “turn off [the] goddamn game” — and, later in life, to leave behind the white tops and all the damage they’ve caused — but we aren’t exactly rooting for him to exchange altogether his uncommon aliveness to the nonhuman for meaningful relationships with other people. We’re rooting for him to find some way to respect the power of the former without pretending at its mastery, or exposing himself to further suffering. Sometimes, this means learning to let certain nonhuman people be.

⸻ pp. 162–165

Pared back to a core of a thread relating to Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, and Clune’s White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin and Gamelife: A Memoir. I have skipped some allusions and references to interesting perspectives that did not appear to me as well represented in Nelson’s treatment of them.

Further, though, in an endnote (number 17 of chapter 3, on page 248) to the vibrant nonhuman matterpeople:

Though Barad coined the phrase “agential realism,” she prefers not to speak of matter as “having agency” per se; her research has instead led her to believe that “agency is not held, it is not a property of persons or things; rather, agency is an enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements.” See also, [Fred] Moten’s point at the opening of In the Break, when Moten takes up [Karl] Marx’s notion of the commodity that does not speak by reminding us that there have existed commodities that speak, namely, slaves. In terms that evoke Preciado’s writing about T, Moten writes, “While subjectivity is defined by the subject’s possession of itself and its objects, it is troubled by a dispossessive force objects exert such that the subject seems to be possessed — infused, deformed — by the object it possesses.”

hashtag Physics and Dance

#carbon culture

And yet, here I am, watching my son faux‐conduct the quiescent train, admiring his beautiful face, his mouth agape at the machines he so adores, about which he knows nothing save what a human creature alive for barely three years can know: they’re sensationally large and powerful; they make loud noises; they belch amazing clouds of black smoke; and when they get going, they impart a feeling of freedom — of speed, transformation, leave‐taking, escape, anonymity, rush — whether you’re riding or watching them speed by. (You can feel this weird reciprocity via the ministeamer ride that encircles the park, wherein waving to others is somehow irresistible, whether you’re a passenger or pedestrian.) Here I am, still feeling the unprecedented (in my life, anyway) sensation of simple, total happiness in witnessing another’s simple, total happiness, of beholding a new beginning in this world, while the words The end of the world has already occurred tick by under the scene.

⸻ pg. 173

Yes, that “weird reciprocity” of steam rail, expressed in the wave. There’s a lot of something(s) to that, surely?

“The end…” is a quote of Timothy Morton (though which particular work goes unspecified).

The park is Griffith Park, Los Angeles; and the play at the Travel Town Museum.

#fossils fuelling

To date, we have all thought modern freedom with oil, whether we aimed to or not. Carbon powers the very equipment by which our thoughts and voices and bodies reach one another[…] The awe my son felt at Travel Town was justified: we should feel awe in the face of the energy we’ve generated by burning deep time in no time. Our own bodies have been shaped by this power, through the speed of planes, trains, automobiles, and cybercurrents, all of which have become integral to our conception of freedom. We often take freedom to mean freedom of movement — be it the freedom to leave behind a bad scene for a (hopefully) better one; the freedom to leave behind cramped origins and forge new kinships in a bigger, more anonymous, place; the freedom to choose the unknown over the known. Capitalist, abolitionist, queer, and revolutionary consciousnesses alike have depended on such dreams and desires[…]

⸻ pp. 186–187

As much as I understand these calls for us to invent or safeguard stories that might help us reflect and comprehend our circumstances with compassion, imagination, humor, solidarity, and dignity, I also think it valuable to “drop the storyline” as [Pema] Chödrön has counseled: all story lines, including “progressive” ones, which pin their hopes on the arc of history moving toward justice. For at some point in our lives, if we live long enough, we begin to feel in a visceral fashion what we’ve always known intellectually to be true: our life spans will not allow us to take in the whole story. Indeed, there may be no whole story. Maybe there’s no story at all. Our brains may be hardwired to produce story as a means of organizing space and time, but that doesn’t mean that story is the only mode available to us in experiencing our lives.

⸻ pg. 208

In counterpart to calls from Amitav Ghosh, Isabelle Stengers, the Dark Mountain Project, Paul Kingsnorth, and Roy Scranton, for various literatures responding to climate disaster.

Curious to me that Nelson should say an intellectual awareness would emerge (much!) earlier in life than the visceral.

One benefit of riding the blinds, or dropping the story line, is that other senses of time can become more palpable, including the feeling of folded or intergenerational time — what feminist scholars Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker have called “thick time”: “a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past.” “Thick time” is neither repo time nor queer time per se, though I admit to feeling it most often when I look at my son, and behold all the selves and ages he has passed through folded atop one another. (My mother once told me that, when she would go to pick me up from our town’s square, she would sometimes get momentarily confused about what kind of body she was looking for — a toddler body? A teenager body? A preteen body? At the time I thought she was a little nuts, but now I realize she was just touching the kind of thick time I experience all the time these days[…])

⸻ pp. 209–210

Martin Turbet at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and his colleagues[…] found that Earth was only able to condense water early in its history because the sun was about 25 per cent dimmer, seemingly solving a problem known as the faint young sun paradox where Earth was thought to have been too cold to support liquid water. Had it formed today, our planet might well have been a “steam Earth”, like Venus.

⸻ pg. 18

The penguin left in the enclosure always responded to the audio by looking at the door. But if the call came from a randomly chosen penguin, the tested penguin looked at the door more than twice as quickly as it did when the audio recording was from the penguin that had just passed through the door.

⸻ pg. 22

Research on a captive colony of African penguins Spheniscus demersus, by Luigi Baciadonna and his team, through the University of Turin.

Each of us has a distinct brain activity “fingerprint”, and this can be spotted after someone lies in an MRI scanner for just 100 seconds. This identifying pattern of activity is known as the “connectome” because it shows how different brain regions are in sync (Science Advances, doi.org/g2rf).

⸻ pg. 23

Makes sense. / Fascinating!

There is also a separate ongoing branch of the talks, the Warsaw International Mechanism, which is exploring how to address the financial hit faced by countries dealing with climate change’s impacts. “We are now in the era of loss and damage,” says [Saleemul] Huq, referring to recent floods, famines and wildfires. It still remains to be worked out how vulnerable countries could get more help or money to cope with everything from extreme weather to longer‐term threats such as sea level rise. Huq says COP26 should make the Warsaw International Mechanism an annual high‐level agenda item at climate talks.

⸻ pg. 39

Huq is with the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

In the early 1980s, Robert Bartlett, a surgeon at the University of Michigan, wanted to test whether extra‐corporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machines could be used to do the work of the heart and lungs in premature babies. Until then, the machine had only been used in adults. Bartlett used an unorthodox trial design that borrowed from game theory. The first infant enrolled would receive the standard kind of ventilation at the time, which involved a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine. If it survived, the next would receive the same standard care. If it died, the second enrollee would be hooked up to an ECMO. The first baby died. The second received ECMO and survived. So did the third, the fourth, and all the rest up until the 12th baby. Given that nearly all similar premature babies had died without ECMO, Bartlett felt it was case closed.

Bartlett’s peers thought the trial was too small, however, and the design too unorthodox, to accept ECMO as the new standard of care. According to clinical statistician David Robertson at the University of Cambridge, the reception of Bartlett’s work put others off trying out new kinds of clinical trial for years to come. ECMO wasn’t accepted until 1996, when a group of UK scientists assessed the machine using a full‐blown RCT that involved 185 babies. As in Bartlett’s trial, ECMO easily proved superior to regular treatment. For Edward Mills at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, though, it was a pyrrhic victory. As a father, he says, all he can think about are the babies who didn’t make it. “Did all those kids really have to die just to prove a point?”

⸻ pp. 43–44

“RCT” = “randomised controlled trial”

The idea is that the stimulation makes the remaining nerves more excitable and so amplifies the weak signals from the brain to the legs[…]

[…]

[Implant‐recipient, Michel] Roccati[…] now uses the implanted device for 1 to 2 hours a day, including for going for walks on his own. He can also stand up for 2 hours, cycle in an adapted wheelchair and even swim by choosing different stimulation programs. He finds walking or standing helps relieve pain caused by sitting in a wheelchair all day.

⸻ pg. 9

And today, in Albanian villages depleted of men by endemic blood feuding, you can still find “sworn virgins” — women who dress as men, assume male roles and are buried as men.

⸻ pg. 28

In paragraph paraphrasing “archaeologist Timothy Taylor at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia”. Going by the article’s framings generally, neither Spinney nor Taylor are necessarily the most insightful sources to go to for more on this.

Magnets, ubiquitous in modern electronic gadgets[…] are often made from a witch’s brew of rare and exotic elements that are fiddly to separate out again.

⸻ pg. 39

Recycling these would involve chemically separating the metals, a difficult and energy‐intensive process. This is why many advocates of a circular economy say that, if we are serious about ending the throwaway culture, we will need to use simpler materials and redesign processes so that these separation problems are more tractable[…]

⸻ pg. 40

By far the biggest driver of material use is construction.

⸻ pg. 44

Based on Circle Economy’s Mark de Wit and colleagues’ Circularity Gap Report of 2019.

BMW, for instance, recently unveiled a concept car called the BMW i Vision Circular that is designed according to circular principles and can be built from 100 per cent recycled materials. Among other things, the car’s metal body is given a “brushed” finish instead of being painted, which avoids use of some chemicals and allows easier recycling.

⸻ pg. 45

I have been wondering if such an approach to metal finishings couldn’t be used more, especially when looking at assistive tech.

New Scientist: Why are we so sure that there must be some “new physics” out there to be discovered?

Alex Keshavarzi: In physics, there are four main unknowns. There’s the dark energy problem and the dark matter problem, these two things which we can see by their effects but can’t identify. There’s the need to amalgamate gravity with quantum mechanics. Then there is the funny something that went on in the first 3 minutes after the beginning of the universe, which somehow created an imbalance between ordinary matter and antimatter. Everything we know about physics suggests that matter and antimatter particles are always created in equal proportions, so we expect this happened at the big bang. The problem is that every constituent of matter that we see around us — ourselves, the sun — everything is made almost completely of normal matter. In the time it takes to make a cup of tea, all the antimatter in the universe disappeared and we have no idea why.

⸻ pg. 48

What exactly are you studying at the Muon g‐2 experiment?

The muon has this quantum property called spin, which you can think of as like its own internal bar magnet. If you put that in a magnetic field, it will precess — like the way a compass needle turns if you are at the north pole. At the same time, ordinary empty space can, according to the rules of quantum mechanics, have what we call virtual particles pop up quickly out of nothing and then disappear. It’s because empty space has a tiny amount of energy and this can be briefly converted into these virtual particles. It turns out that the rate at which the muons’ spin precesses is determined by these virtual particles. We can calculate to incredible precision what that number should be.

⸻ pg. 49

If the result is real, what would it mean?

It would mean that there are some virtual particles out there that we don’t know about yet. I should add that our experiment is sensitive to virtual particles, but any particles that appear in this way would also exist independently, out there in reality. Our experiment won’t tell us what those new particles are. It could be perhaps a candidate dark matter particle, maybe mediated by a new force, or some new particle that could explain the asymmetry between matter and antimatter. Other experimentalists would then need to take our data and go and make more specific searches for the particles. But it would be the first time we could say, OK, we’ve definitively discovered new physics.

⸻ pg. 50

Fabio Pacucci at the Harvard‐Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and his colleagues[…] found that HD1 is about 33·4 billion light years away[…] This is possible, despite the universe being only about 13·8 billion years old, because of the accelerating expansion of the cosmos.

[…]

We are seeing HD1 as it was just 330 million years after the big bang[…]

⸻ pg. 9

Rude, frankly.

“Anyone who has access to the tower information can obviously triangulate positions, and with integration ISTAR [intelligence, surveillance, target aquisition, and reconnaissance] systems today, it can be a matter of moments from detection to launching a missile or firing a shell,” says [Alan] Woodward [from the University of Surrey].

Communication breakdowns and flawed plans mean the Russian army’s secure communication systems have been unreliable since its invasion on 24 February, forcing it to rely on mobile phones, believe military analysts. And many members of the Ukrainian army, which is made up of considerable numbers of volunteers, may be unaware of the dangers of having phones in a combat situation.

[…]

[Device] metadata, such as a caller’s and recipient’s phone numbers, can also be used to bombard troops with propaganda. “We’ve seen many examples of both sides getting calls and threatening messages,” says Yevgeniy Golovchenko at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. “We’ve also seen family members getting calls as a way of intimidating and demoralising the other side.”

A similar method was used against NATO troops stationed in the Baltic states, according to Golovchenko, as well as against coalition forces in Afghanistan. Relatives of members of Danish forces stationed in Afghanistan received messages incorrectly telling them that their relatives were dead, waging psychological warfare designed to turn public opinion against the occupation of Afghanistan, he says.

⸻ pg. 10

Horrifying how to dangers so obvious, general publics have been made this oblivious.

Krishna Chaitanya Mantravadi at Oasis Fertility, a fertility clinic in Inda, tracked sperm counts in 20 men aged 25 to 35 from before they had a SARS‐CoV‐2 infection to nearly five months after they had fully recovered — that is, were testing negative and had no symptoms. The researchers didn’t explicitly look at sperm in trans women or non‐binary people — this was the case for all the studies mentioned in this article.

⸻ pg 16

When did New Scientist​’s reproductive health reporting (start) get(ting sometimes) so with it?

Regular column.

There is a great example of [humans’] terrifying power in Regenesis by George Monbiot: farming. It is “the most destructive human activity ever to have blighted the Earth”, he says. Luckily, he delivers on the book’s subtitle, exploring ways of “feeding the world without devouring the Earth”.

⸻ pg 34

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[…] using an athletic curriculum resembling a sped‐up version of a human baby growing into a soccer player. The AI controlled digital humanoids with realistic body masses and joint movements.

⸻ pg 22

Critical clues came from fossilised Pantolambda teeth. Mammal teeth chemically record specific moments in life, such as when the animal was born or stopped suckling. By looking at these clues, [a research team led by Gregory Funston of the University of Edinburgh] were able to outline the life of this previously enigmatic mammal.

⸻ pg 22

Essentially, the internet [author of Escape: How a generation shaped, destroyed and survived the internet, Marie] Le Conte and I occupied was small. Yes, you could theoretically connect to millions of people, but people tended to organise themselves into small communities around blogs, forums and other online hangouts. […]

Le Conte’s thesis is that, with the rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and the fact that many more people now use the internet, something special has been lost. “We found a home then it was invaded; it was no one’s fault, not really, but now everyone is here and our home is gone,” she writes.

⸻ pg 35

Article

One of several books cited by design studio director Kaylie Salvatori, a Yuin Budawang woman, in her article ‘Look to the Skies, think like an Ancestor’ in Landscape architecture Australia 175: Matters of Time, pp. 12–15. I had marked Astronomy: Sky Country in my local library’s online catalogue last year as one of the hundreds to consider reserving; Salvatori’s citations only further encourage a real squiz.

The other books on which she drew:

• Songspirals: sharing women’s wisdom of Country through songlines
• Songlines: the power and promise
• Sand Talk: how Indigenous thinking can save the world, which I still want to read in print; the (lightly updated) audio book edition having been especially excellent
• Treading Lightly: the hidden wisdom of the world’s oldest people

Despite the awful subtitles of those last two (even the title itself of the last, evoking Māori author Nic Low’s attribution of “passing through the mountains like ghosts”, “crav[ing] a landscape […] untrodden by humans” to “the legal fiction” of terra nullius), probably worth noting them all.

Salvatori’s mentors Daniele Hromek (Yuin) and Clarence Slockee (Bundjalung) were the other major sources she named. Must admit Slockee’s segments on Gardening Australia had already left me curious about his other work…

#discriminatory pedagogical practice

As for classes, I was placed in the second‐lowest class for every subject. Despite how amazingly I had done in primary school maths, my primary school teacher had recommended I enter high school at a low level. I asked the teacher about this when I saw him at the supermarket one night and he smiled in confusion. I could see that he believed the second‐lowest class was where I belonged, despite having been top of his class in maths. These low expectations left me feeling uninspired, bitter and bored. I resented being in the lowest classes and knew I was capable of much more. The flip side was that I was with my friends. Luckily for me, the boredom turned out to be a blessing. One day I was helping one of them in maths. We were doing Year 7 algebra, and I taught her some order‐of‐operation steps, which meant she was then able to move on to the next problem. The teacher was thrilled at what he witnessed because, well, kids who have low expectations placed on them, like me and my friend, don’t often listen to the teacher very much, but they listened to me — at least enough for me to teach them some maths. I had no idea how significant this moment was initially, but in hindsight it had a profound impact.

⸻ Karlie Noon in Chapter 1, ‘Personal Perspectives’, pg. 27

Meanwhile, though I haven’t plucked any particular quotes from it, Krystal de Napoli’s story was especially interesting.

The endless interrelations between ecological, medicinal, celestial and technological knowledge systems illustrate the sky and land’s fundamentally interconnected nature. If we allow ourselves to represent the links between these areas of understanding as a fine thread, we can observe the ways in which it weaves in and out of all areas of knowledge.

For example, we may begin with our understanding of the position of a single star in the sky[…] We note the star’s position and pierce it with our thread, readying ourselves to make our next link.

[…]

The threads that pierce each and every single thing in our universe, from people and animals to every grain of soil, every drop of water in our river systems and every star in the sky, are infinite in number. Our initial thread has revealed a network, much like a spider’s web, that quickly becomes a complex woven blanket extending into all of time and space.

[…]

In acknowledging the vastness of these knowledge systems and the spiralling depth of their interconnected layers, we encounter fundamental incompatibilities when we try to capture them in the static written form. The extent of the knowledge and how it is communicated is endless, limited only by the number of nations and knowledgeable people. How the skies inform about the land varies from Country to Country. Interpretation is largely unique to each nation and extends so deeply into all facets of human experience and understanding that writing it down changes it, imposing a stillness on the knowledge. There is more to the Dark Emu than we can possibly include here. There is more to the sky–land relationship than we can present in words, because words have limits and because, as two young yinaars navigating our way through the two worlds of being Gamilaraay and astrophysicists, we don’t hold all of this knowledge.

⸻ pp. 43 (“The endless interrelations…”), 45 (“The threads that pierce each and every single thing…”), & 46 (“In acknowledging the vastness of these knowledge systems…”)

In Chapter 2, ‘Indigenous ways of knowing’ — specifically, a section thereof entitled ‘Sky informing about the land’.

Another example of embedded properties comes from the Western Desert people, including the Kokatha nation. This story was documented by amateur anthropologist Daisy Bates in the early 1900s at Ooldea, South Australia. It has since been analysed by cultural astronomers Trevor Leaman and Dr Duane Hamacher in order to understand its underlying astronomical content. It tells of the Ming‐arri sisters, who particularly enjoy the single life. They live in solitude and have no intention of marrying or procreating. In order to protect themselves, they always have their pack of dingoes nearby to scare off potential predators.

In the same region lives a great hunter called Nyeeruna (Orion), who is used to getting anything he wants. He decides he wants one of the Ming‐arri sisters and starts chasing them. They run to the sky and he follows in pursuit. The oldest of the sisters, whose name is Kambugudha (the Hyades star cluster), considers herself a fierce protector of her younger sisters. She places herself between the Ming‐arri and Nyeeruna, staunching Nyeeruna in a wide, taunting stance (shown in the inverted ‘V’ shape of Hyades). Angered at the hurdle before him, Nyeeruna summons fire magic into the club he holds in his right hand and takes aim at Kambugudha. She has a special defence tactic and summons fire magic into her left foot. When Nyeeruna goes to strike, she defensively lifts her foot and uses the fire magic to kick dust in his face. This humiliates Nyeeruna and his fire fizzles out. In the peace that follows, she dulls the fire magic in her foot.

All too soon, Nyeeruna is inspired to battle Kambugudha again, and summons his fire magic once more. Kambugudha needs time to prepare her magic and so calls upon the father dingo, Babba, and his pups (Orion’s shield) to serve as the Ming‐arri’s defence. The dingos rush over to Nyeeruna, shaking and swinging him by his middle while Kambugudha and the other sisters point and laugh at him. Once again, he is thwarted and his fire magic dies down. Ever since, Kambugudha and Nyeeruna have been engaged in an eternal cyclic battle over the Ming‐arri, in which their fire magic repeatedly dies down and reignites.

Nyeeruna’s fire‐magic club is the red giant star we know today as Betelgeuse, while Kambugudha’s left foot is the giant star we know as Aldebaran. These two are variable stars — a type of star that dims and brightens over a period of time. The changes in brightness occur either due to an instability in the star’s composition, where it is intrinsically cooling down and heating up, which impacts its brightness; or because there is something blocking its light from reaching Earth. The first awareness of variable stars in the Western world occurred in 1638 when Frisian (north‐western Germany) astronomer, doctor and philosopher Johannes Holward discovered that the star Mira varies in brightness over a period of eleven months. American astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt advanced this discovery in 1908, when she classified a specific type of variable star called Cepheid variables that are observed to vary in both size and temperature. The discovery of Cepheid variable stars was a remarkable astronomical feat that led scientists to the understanding that other galaxies exist aside from our own Milky Way.

Nyeeruna’s fire magic has a variability period of around seven years […] Kambugudha’s fire magic is a particular kind of variable star, what we call a slow irregular variable star. That means its period is long and unknown. It is also believed in Western astronomy that such a star’s period is undetectable by the human eye, but the Ming‐arri people probably have something to say about that.

The remarkable observations held within Indigenous stories such as these are a testament to the people’s observational skill sets and the culture’s ability to encode and transfer information across generations.

⸻ pp. 64–66

Long, sure, but look at Noon and de Napoli following up evidence that the Seven Sisters Dreaming could easily date back a cool hundred thousand years, with this nearby, fully sick magical girl fight sequence that embodies, what, extreme optics research? (And no doubt much else)!

K.N. & K.D.N’s sources:

• Ray P Norris & Barnaby Norris, ‘Why Are There Seven Sisters?’, in Efrosyni Boutsikas, Stephen C McCluskey & John Steele (eds.), Advancing Cultural Astronomy: Studies in Honour of Clive Ruggles, Springer, New York, 2020, p. 5.
• Trevor M Leaman & Duane W Hamacher, ‘Aboriginal Astronomical Traditions from Ooldea, South Australia. Part 1: Nyeeruna and “The Orion Story”’, Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, 17(2), 2014, pp. 180–194.

#Invasion the structure, and (landscape‐)architectural violence

Star maps were another technique developed by nations to aid travel. The Kamilaroi and Euahlayi nations used ‘patterns of stars to represent routes of travel on land’. For example, each star in a constellation refers to a specific landmark on the ground, while the pattern as a whole indicates direction. The landmarks may be features such as waterholes, or indicators of where direction may need to be adjusted. As shared by Uncle Ghillar in a paper by Robert Fuller and colleagues, one star map describes a 600‐kilometre journey from Goodooga, New South Wales, to Carnarvon Gorge, Queensland. Goodooga is represented by Gamma Sagittarii (γ Sagittarii), and the route goes via Dirranbandi (Sigma [σ] Librae), St George (Girtab), Surat (Sargas) and Roma (Eta [η] Scorpii) until it reaches Carnarvon Gorge (Zeta [ζ] Scorpii) (Figure 3.11).

These stars do not serve as a to‐scale map of the land, but reflect the easiest routes to traverse as they relate to specific land‐based waypoints. The star maps are a valuable reference when teaching new learners about important routes of travel between communities. Their shape can be kept in mind whether one is travelling by day or by night. Being the easiest and most trusted ways of travel, the star maps set the foundation for what are now some of New South Wales’ and Queensland’s major road highways. The Goodooga star map described by Uncle Ghillar can be overlaid across the Carnarvon Highway, which connects Goodooga to Carnarvon Gorge; the traditional waypoints have become key towns and cities such as Dirranbandi and St George.

⸻ pp. 98–99

Square brackets in the original.

Refs: Robert S Fuller, Michelle Trudgett, Ray P Norris & Michael G Anderson, ‘Star Maps and Travelling to Ceremonies: The Euahlayi People and Their Use of the Night Sky’, Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage, 17(2), 2014, pp. 153 & 155

Sure, towns and cities have their conveniences, in some respects, but… I have been thinking often, lately/always, about (specifically) how the colonisation (not to mention motorisation) of the old optimum paths has been such an effective way of fomenting a hostility across this continent to human‐paced movement.

#ArchitecturalViolence

All around us, the suburbs spoke with a constant [​fizzes tongue against top teeth​] of electricity and the distant [​exhales forcefully yet evenly through open mouth​] of traffic.

⸻ Track 2 ‘Chapter One’, 12:37–12:45

On growing up in Oakleigh in the 1980s. Both quotations of suburbia produced at (perfectly just uncomfortable) length.

Editorial on page 3.

Article on pages 34–38, “an edited extract” of the authors’ new book Futureproof your garden: environmentally sustainable ways to grow more with less, from publisher Murdoch Books.

Article on pages 40–45.

#anti‐Black racism, slavery

Black abolitionists and other black men and women have been looked at in relation to their roles as models in well‐known paintings or as servants who feature in travel writings and other artistic productions. When examined as individuals, these men and women are generally perceived as exceptional characters whose lives were transformed by complex encounters with Europeans. In such accounts, the notion of exceptionalism is used as a plausible reason for their fame. Some of their stories are believed to have survived because of the extraordinary nature of their contributions to European societies. Little, however, has been published about further aspects of their lives, such as the close connection they might have had with other people of African descent. Some histories have been forgotten or their importance underestimated. For example, African resistance to enslavement on African coasts or the fight against the transatlantic slave trade in Africa are scarcely mentioned in volumes about enslavement in European colonial history.

⸻ pp. 1–2

Otele’s work is fascinating!

After a long crawl through the first chapter, between dozens of consultations of a dictionary of proper nouns (for all those geographic features, retired place names, and assumed‐famous figures and offices), it feels that this text would be even better for readers who are not already versed in more dominating European and “Ancient” histories, if the excellent writing were either slightly expanded here and there, or presented with frequent, simple maps. I have also been wishing for plates to look to of the cited artworks.

I guess, for me, this chapter might want rereading soon!

[…] fifty or studies have analysed the work of Juan Latino. What is remarkable is the constant shift between his work as a poet, as a humanist and as a narrator of stories of his time. Latino’s work, which encompasses literature and what would now be considered social commentary tells us about Granada’s views on the foreigner and the non‑Christian, and about the fate of those who were perceived as a threat to the narrative the city was trying to create.

⸻ pg. 56

Annette Ivory notes that of the 429,362 inhabitants of Seville in the sixteenth century, about 14,670 were black people. She contends that competition for jobs was exacerbated by the availability of black labour. It was also at this time that black characters were ridiculed in plays. The portrait of the black buffoon was aimed at relieving social and economic anxiety. In sixteenth‐century Granada, until the Morisco rebellion of 1568–71, most enslaved people were of African descent. During the years of the rebellion, 90 per cent of enslaved people who were sold in Granada were Moriscos. It was also in the sixteenth century that the term negro, or black, appears in legal documents instead of esclavo, or slave. Emily Weissbourd provides a striking example of such changes through documentation from 1559 to 1576 which refers to ‘his majesty’s blacks [negros]’ instead of ‘his majesty’s slaves’ in relation to people enslaved in silver mines near Seville.

⸻ pg. 62

Many of this (second) chapter’s paragraphs seem to have formed by clumping, leaving them off‐balance.

#anti‐Black racism, migration policing, slavery

The number of legal cases involving black people led the [French] authorities to suggest that a special unit should be set up. In 1777 the Police des Noirs, or ‘police for black people’, was created. Soon after, it became compulsory for black people to carry a cartouche (an identification card). Between 1777 and 1789, in Paris only, 765 people were registered. The aim of the Police des Noirs was to limit the number of black people in the country. It was not named a ‘police for enslaved people’, so the assumption by then was that all black bodies were also enslaved. Masters who had enslaved domestic servants in their service had to register them or risk paying a heavy fine. Enslaved people were to stay in detention centres for the duration of their master’s stay. The costs would be the master’s responsibility.

Outside Paris, many port cities resented the initiative, as it curbed the freedom of planters who had up to that point enjoyed the services of their enslaved servants. In Bordeaux, for example, authorities argued in 1788 that the prison was the only adequate space to serve as a detention centre, but enslaved servants incurred the risk of becoming ill or being corrupted by prison life. Some people urged the authorities to find safe and clean spaces for their enslaved servants. The authorities’ preoccupation was not with cleanliness. It was, they argued, with finding ways to avoid any collusion that would lead to an insurrection in those detention centres. Masters could have used white servants in France, but that necessitated paying them wages. The predicament was that planters visiting family and friends wanted their slaves with them, but the rest of the population and the French authorities did not want to see them on their streets. They also resented the fact that they had to contend with a wealthy group they would rather leave on the fringe of the empire. Consequently, all free black men and women from the colonies who arrived after the new laws had been passed were to be sent back to the colonies. A series of laws was also passed which aimed to discourage unions between black and white people. Marriages were forbidden but, as [Pierre H.] Boulle notes, Article 13 of the 1777 bill was redrafted. Instead of making such unions illegal, it stated that children born from them had to wait four generations before they could hold office. In the end, however, Article 13 was removed from the bill altogether.

⸻ pp. 84–85

Emphasis mine, for comparison to erosions of (pathways to) citizenship since and elsewhere.

The Boulle citation is for ‘Racial Purity or Legal Clarity? The Status of Black Residents in Eighteenth‐Century France’ in Journal of Historical Society, vol. 6, no. 1 (2006), pp. 19–46.

This passage also draws on Sue Peabody, ‘There Are No Slaves in France’: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

#passing references to oppression and prejudice

The Chevalier de Saint‐Georges, as [Joseph Boulogne] was then known, continued to charm most people he met[…]

[…] and earned further approval from most elite women in Paris. Joseph had played in a theatre that was dear to Madame de Montesson, a playwright with influence. She took Joseph under her wing and put him in charge of concerts at that theatre. Madame de Montesson, a marquise who had married the Duke of Orléans, was going to introduce Joseph to her husband. Shortly after that the two men became inseparable. The Duke, a freemason, introduced Joseph to freemasonry, and he became a member of the Lodge of the Nine Sisters. Joseph is believed to have been one of the first black freemasons in mainland France. In 1778, Mozart was in Paris. The Chevalier de Saint‐Georges was the best composer and musician of the kingdom, but Mozart, despite his father’s orders, refused to attend one of his concerts and meet him. Not all famous eighteenth‐century musicians reacted that way, however. In 1787, Joseph asked composer Josef Haydn for six pieces of music. Haydn provided them and Joseph directed them at an exclusive and highly praised concert. In 1785, the Duke of Orléans died. Joseph lost a dear friend and a powerful protector. This rapidly resulted in a severe loss of income for Joseph.

Joseph had been very fond of English history and culture. The passing of the Duke prompted a need for a change of scenery and a search for a new income. Despite his charm, the Chevalier de Saint‐Georges had always earned an income by working very hard and devoting his time to a variety of activities. He made several trips to London, where his reputation had preceded him. In 1787 he fought an organised duel with another fencing master, the Chevalière d’Eon. The Chevalière, or Chevalier, had earned a reputation as a skilful spy and a fantastic fighter. By the time she crossed swords with Joseph she identified and lived as a woman. The Prince of Wales attended the duel. Joseph was inspired by his encounter with the Chevalière d’Eon. On his return to Paris, he wrote a two‐act comedy entitled La Fille garçon, or The Girl Boy [sic]. The piece was extremely successful, and a positive review appeared in the Journal de Paris in 1787.

The Revolution started in 1789. Joseph appears to have taken the new Duke of Orléans to safety. The duke, later known as Philippe Égalité, had got involved with the Jacobin Club and Georges Danton in particular. Joseph decided to return to France to help the revolutionaries. His mission was to find people of African descent who were ready to support and take up arms for the revolutionaries. He managed to find a few of them, including the son of a planter and an enslaved woman, Thomas Retoré Dumas, later to be father of the author of The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas[…]

⸻ pp. 90–91

When Otele covers so much, so swiftly, with such fluidity, it is a joy.

Joseph Boulogne references she gives include:

• M. La Boëssière, Traité de l’art des armes: à l’usage des professeurs et des amateurs, Didot, 1818, pp. xv–xxii
• Alain Guédé, Monsieur de Saint‐George: Virtuoso, Swordsman, Revolutionary: A Legendary Life Rediscovered, trans. Gilda M. Roberts, Picador, 2003
• Lionel de La Laurencie and Frederick H. Martens, ‘The Chevalier de Saint‐George: Violinist’ in The Musical Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1 (1919)
• Claude Ribbe, Le Chevalier de Saint‐George, Éditions Perrin, 2004
• Emil F. Smidak, Joseph Boulogne, Called Chevalier de Saint‐Georges, Avenira Foundation, 1996

At the close of Otele’s account of Boulogne’s life, posthumous erasure, and eventual memorialisation, she brings in broader social analysis from Crystal M. Fleming, Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France, Temple University Press, 2017.

Do I need reading glasses or can I type without them? Can I see without them?

No — no glasses. No need to look at the computer screen. Just face and me: facing off in the mirror.

Four minutes, fourteen seconds.

Okay, ready.

No, wait, there’s dust on the mirror. Must clean it.

Do I have vinegar? Yes, under the sink.

Seven minutes, twenty‐six seconds.

⸻ Track 4, 00:34–1:02

The anticipation!

The reading; pretty riveting already.

There are, at least, a few images in this book inviting so much more attention than the unimpressed breeze through I gave most of it the other day. Perhaps I should traverse it with a sketchbook, slow myself down, savour the stunning moments, search the dull; actually read.

Dancers communicate so profoundly with the mere flex of a foot or hand, a shift of focus, the roll of a head, the transfer of weight within their body.

⸻ Stephen Page, opening page

Yet considering all that is going on in the images which fill almost the entire book, Barrett’s photography (as paired with Page’s art direction?) tends to be rather lifeless. Murky, flat, depleted of momentum, almost clinical, for all the heavy‐ink, gloss and phenomenal energies gone in.

I couldn’t help but contrast the pronounced underwhelm at a first glance through 21st century, prestige project Clan with my memory of alternately squint‐goggling at a juddery, blurred few‐second clip of anthropologist–choreographer Pearl Primus’ 1950 solo dance Spirituals, rolled and buoyed and awash with awe, utterly.

Like [Isadora] Duncan, [Primus] danced with — not against — gravity, but in her case the gesture tied her to the dances that she had researched in the Gold Coast, Angola, Liberia, Senegal, and the Belgian Congo, among other countries on the African continent of the late 1940s. She describes the earth in African dance as “an extension of the dancer’s own feet, as if it were a stage of rubber from which he can bounce to the skies, as if it were a soft bed upon which he could roll and be protected.” Primus incorporated this Africanist vision of oneness with the earth into her choreography.

[In Sprituals,] Primus leaps, legs in a V, arms open to the sky, then drops to the ground to execute a breathtaking series of forward rolls. Moving in a tight circle, she falls face‐first onto the stage floor, rolls, and then quickly pushes herself back up to her knees — her centre of mass low to the ground and her chest high, as if ascending from the deep. She does this over and over again. It’s an image of redemption expressed in movement, and gravity is her guide.

⸻ Emily Coates and Sarah Demers, Physics and Dance, pg. 19

Though drawing on different traditions, Bangarra’s performances are also closely integrated with a cultural research approach to choreography, running along strong seams of spirituality overtly embodying kinship with the physical world; and enact some remarkable relationships with gravity (if perhaps sometimes more balletic in dynamic, which I suppose could be part the problem).

Film and photo may be different media, but I do not reckon the comparison unfair. One can picture a Barrett take on Primus, given his Bangarra. There they are, even bound in deliberate sequence, these bemusingly bland shots belying incredible somatic precision, sheet after sheet after sheet of them. Palpable poses somehow the strange exception, making it seem there’s really only the material here for a short pamphlet, a few grammes of promo. Indeed even the most fleet‐shuttered micromoments do feel very close to posed and promotional, the dense fields of ink somehow detached from the dances they represent, the depiction of dancers; and showing such scant sense of spirit. Book as tight proscenium; bodies planar and forcedly forever folded faceforwards, choreographic forebears of these fast twenties’ frontal fashions.

Sure enough, going through sketching, searching out toe tendons in the gloom, eyes meandering around shapes pulled and reimagining them multidimensional and dancer‐felt as they might have really been in the moment — a hand riding a heave of the ribs, the dipped chin tucking hot breath into the shoulder, the soles’ clap to the floor and the thigh and each other in moments of stunning suspension… That force of appreciation came through much stronger, and closer to consistent, once given active analysis.

I’d like to see more books of this ambition, but I’d most like to see lots of dance photography that dances itself, or at least seems to respond to, to live in the same world as, the dancing.

#PhysicsAndDance #ExtraLiterary

Some time back the realisation came to me that, rather than fussing about my own feelings of guilt or inadequacies, or whiteness, or whether someone was or wasn’t looking me in the eyes, the best way to proceed is to find a point of focus somewhere there in the middle distance and simply begin the journey and get busy with the making.

⸻ Greg Barrett, opening spread

Middle distance sounds a decent when‐bogged‐in‐doubt alignment, sometimes, I guess?

That was the world of greatness, out there an that distant plain. As Zhu gazed at it, she felt a pull in her middle. It was different from the feeling she’d had as a child of twelve — the abstract curiosity of what it would feel like to jump. This was the feeling of having jumped. After the jump, but before the fall: the moment the world gripped your body in preparation for bringing it back to where it belonged. It was the feel of a force that couldn’t be overcome by will, that belonged to the world itself. Fate, Zhu thought abruptly.

⸻ pg. 73

Metaphysics and dance.

Loathing, shame, and anger rushed through him as a series of escalating internal temperatures. The anger, when it finally came, was a relief. It was the cleanest and hottest of the emotions; it scoured him of everything else that might have lingered.

⸻ pg. 123

#sex‐and‐gender, vulnerabilities

[Ma’s] anger was punctured by [Zhu’s] unexpected honesty. Or what seems like honesty. With a flash of pain she realized she wanted to believe it. She wanted to believe he was different; that he was the kind of man who saw his own flaws, and who needed her as much as she needed him. “You want me to believe you’re different,” she said, and to her shame her voice cracked. “That you can give me something different. But how can I trust that? I can’t.”

To her surprise a wrenching look passed over Zhu’s face. Vulnerability and a shadow of fear, something she had never seen in him before, and it unmoored her more than anything else that had passed between them. “I can see how it would be hard to trust,” he said. His voice had that odd inflection of understanding in it again, and Ma had absolutely no idea what it meant.

He set aside the book and rose, and started to untie his shirt. It was so bizarre that Ma found herself watching with a floating feeling that seemed half paralysis and half acceptance, as if she were a dreamer borne along by the strangeness of the dream. It was only when Zhu’s bare shoulders slid into view that she came back to life with a jolt of embarrassment. She jerked her face away. It was hardly the first male skin she’d seen, but for some reason her face was burning. She heard his clothes fall.

Then his cool fingers were on her face, turning it back. He said, “Look.”

Their bodies were so close, the clothed and the unclothed, and with that same sense of dreamlike acceptance Ma saw in the other her own reflection as seen waveringly in a bowl of water.

Zhu watched her look. Her face had a flayed vulnerability, something so raw and terrible that Ma flinched to see it. It made her think of someone baring a mortal wound they dared not look at themselves, for fear of the reality of it undoing them in an instant.

Zhu spoke calmly, but beneath the surface Ma sensed a shivering horror. “Ma Xiuying. Do you see something you want?”

I’m a woman, Ma had cried to Zhu in despair. Now, as she looked at the person standing before her in a body like her own, she saw someone who seemed neither male nor female, but another substance entirely: something wholly and powerfully of its own kind. The promise of difference, made real. With a sensation of vertiginous terror, Ma felt the rigid pattern of her future falling away, until all that was left was the blankness of pure possibility.

She took Zhu’s small, calloused hand and felt its warmth flow into her until the hollow space of her chest blazed with everything she’d never let herself feel. She was yielding to it, being consumed by it, and it was the most beautiful and frightening thing she’d ever felt. She wanted. She wanted everything Zhu was offering with that promise of difference. Freedom, and desire, and her life to make her own. And if the price of all of that was suffering, why did it matter when she would suffer no matter what she chose?

She said, “Yes.”

⸻ pp. 253–254

Attention bookclub.

The writing is sharp; honed and clear. The setting is profoundly inhabited, in a way quite unusual among fictional composition. An awesome meeting of characteristics.

#the settler-colonial project etc

My opinion of Dark Emu, based on several flicks in and out a few years ago, amounted to grave disappointment in each of raving book-lender, skilled story-teller, and exciting publisher.

The second of the three, Bruce Pascoe, achieved the most monumental feat — especially for such a practiced raconteur and fierce devotee of his thesis — of rendering the inexhaustibly rich and intricate an aching bore. Extruded from a staunchly colonial corpus, observations (and more so their concomitant filters) were massed so carelessly over the argument of the book as to homogenise, beyond any real remnant intelligibility, the author’s representation of the pre-Invasion world(s) that he sought to (of all incongruous, unnecessary things) exonerate.

Shockingly, throughout each of the fumbling passages that I read, Uncle’s own framings and phrasings were disparaging and elitist; colluding in the task of replicating Western empire’s wrenchings of cultures into its dehumanising hierarchy, perpetuating the same ideological enormity upon which the lie of terra nullius fed, feeds. Rather than challenge the chauvinisms of British-cum-Australian occupation, the text sought to reposition the continent’s Aboriginal civilisation (including, on the odd moment he remembered, that of Zenadth Kes) more prestigiously within reinforced models of those. Scant to no understanding was demonstrated that one might celebrate, say, achievements in urban planning, without belittling those engaged in nomadic practices; or that farmers and foragers might both be respectable, deserving of self-determination in relationship with land/waters, or in no way fair game for genocide. (Being in selective quotation), citations even from settlers known to have gone in for overt massacre often came across the milder.

Yet as a speaker, Pascoe has the benefit of some charisma, the invocation of his more dependable and thoughtful — choice — public insights. It becomes easier to tolerate the dry and the spiteful, melded into the patient delivery of a casually cruel character who burbles on with or without the listener’s collaboration; where to read print (for meaning) is to necessarily engage in the cognitive manifestation of oncoming ideas, judgements, conceptualisations in a more immediate way, which (in such lifelessly skatable writing especially) can leave them overwhelmingly raw. But the audiobook is in, mostly, the kind of dreary Reading Aloud Voice that seems to take any attention for granted. Forty anorak-modelling minutes between structural thrusts can soften a text. As can ambiguity of quotations’ extents.

Still, in speech too, Dark Emu is worded to make its distance by the white, outmoded, institutional (even quasi-assimilationist?) book and throw societies under the bus. It serves as a project of pandering, a betrayal, a rejection of solidarity, robbings of validity, shoring up of shonky-scientific supposition, and a push to gamble entire peoples’ standing on a single proposition: an all too eager appeal to racism and its mechanisms of oppression.

Ran out of leeway regarding return date around the same time as I ran out of patience with a mediocre production.

Four months after first starting to seek out a copy of this to borrow, I have forgotten who it was who piqued my interest in it. There was a bookish conversation on BookWyrm crossing my feed some intriguing titles came up in, but when is there not? Anyway, thanks, people!

[…] we learn a lot more about [books’] historical influence and reckoned worth when we have copies which have been through the hands of successive owners. Books develop their own individual histories which become part of our wider historical heritage and evidence base. We have a series of values in our minds about the relative worth of authors of the past, influenced by the standards of our own age and layers imposed by previous generations; if we wish to truly understand their impact and standing among their contemporaries, we should look at patterns of ownership and the ways in which books were treated. Today, we regard John Donne’s poems as his major achievement, but seventeenth‐century catalogues show that in his own time, his sermons were more likely to be found on library shelves.

The possibilities of this approach to books have been demonstrated by Owen Gingerich, who carried out a detailed survey of all known surviving copies of the first two editions of Copnicus’s De revolutionibus. By recording the ownership, annotations and other physical features of over 600 copies, spread around the world, Gingerich was able to show how quickly the book was acquired by sixteenth‐century astronomers across Europe, how that network of experts shared and communicated ideas, and how receptive (or otherwise) those first generations of readers were to Copernicus’s heliocentric theories. There is a growing industry in this kind of scholarship, looking closely at various kinds of copy‐specific evidence in books to gain a better understanding of their impact on earlier readers. The history of reading, and of marginalia and other marks in books, have all become flourishing areas of study.

⸻ pp. 24–25

The meaning or interpretation of a text is not something absolute, but is endlessly recreated through the experiences of successive readers; typography, layout, physical format and everything surrounding the words themselves all contribute to the framework within which meaning is constructed.

⸻ pg. 34

The book, in its physical manifestation with which we are so familiar, is a highly functional piece of design which is pleasing to use and to look at, to hold in the hand and to turn the pages. The idea of putting text onto double sided pages, and sewing leaves together — the codex format, the shape of the book as we know it — emerged in the Near East in the first few centuries AD and the subsequent longevity of the design, which has yet to be superseded by anything that can match it for portability and all‐round usability, testifies to its success. Books are effective, as well as satisfying, objects.

⸻ pp. 34 & 39

I might have some bones to pick, but this is an okay starting point for assessing utility of the format.

The Livre d’artiste, the Artist’s Book, is a concept generally agreed to have begun in France around the beginning of the twentieth century, with the creation of works like the Vollard edition of Verlaine’s Parallelement (1900, overleaf), bringing graphic artists and creative writers together in order to produce something which is meant to transcend a mere illustrated book. It is since the later twentieth century that more imaginative book art has really flourished, as artists have sought to begin not so much with the idea of words and images, as with the physical form of the book itself, and create works that spring at least as much from the concept of book as that of text. Aunt Sallie’s Lament by Margaret Kaufman is, at one level, a poem about making quilts; it is presented on multishaped pages, reflecting a patchwork quilt, that can be opened in different sequences to present various combinations of words. In this case the impact of the words on their own, without the physical form in which they are presented, would be much diminished. Nicanor Parra’s Antibook comprises a series of short poems which in codex format presents snatches of text in erratic patterns; the pages have to be taken apart and folded into a 3‐D polyhedron in order to see the text complete, and joined up. Perhaps the ultimate step along this road is the creation of works like Keith Smith’s String Book, which has textless blank pages with varying numbers of holes, through which string is passed; turning the pages produces an experience which is visual, tactile and aural. It is an artwork which depends primarily on the physical form of the book for its effectiveness and concentrates the mind on the book as an object. Can a book be a book without words?

⸻ pg. 71

Paging zine club.

Printed books — the physical artefacts we hold in our hands — are manufactured objects. At the broadest and simplest theoretical level we can think of their creation as a production line that starts with raw materials and churns out multiple copies of essentially identical artefacts. Multiplicity, and uniform identity, are important concepts here; this is what the invention of printing brought about, the ability to mass produce lots of copies of a particular text, set in metal type and impressed onto paper, so that many readers can have the same thing all at once. It is an important distinguishing feature between printed books and manuscript books, written by hand […]

There are in fact all kinds of reasons as to why this generalisation may be an oversimplification, as things can happen either deliberately or accidentally during the manufacturing process to introduce variety.

⸻ pg. 77

Opening of chapter three, ‘Individuality within mass production’.

Mistakes that were felt to be unacceptable could be dealt with by printing small errata slips with the correct reading, to be pasted over the offending passage, or by printing whole new leaves of text which would be substituted for the originals when the book came to be bound up. These leaves, known as cancels, are usually readily detectable by the stubs left when single sheets are inserted into the folded gatherings of a book[…]

These are all manifestations of variety which result from things that happen in the printing process. Some of them are trivial, others less so […] Cancelled text can be more significant, by revealing authorial intentions or changes that had to be made in the light of contemporary political sensitivities[…] This kind of thing happens with modern books as well as old ones, which may have to be changed at the last minute for legal reasons[…]

⸻ pp. 80–81

Bibliographers developed the concept of ‘ideal copy’ to try to get an intellectual handle on the vagaries of book production processes. It rests on the idea that for every edition of every book that was printed as a distinct project within a printing house, there is a perfect version which represents what the author and the printer intended to produce[…] In recent years, the validity of ideal copy has increasingly been questioned, as people recognise that texts, and the way they were perceived by early readers, were more fluid things than can be encompassed in such a theory.

⸻ pg. 81

Libraries have typically assumed that the interest in their books lies solely with their texts, and they have focused their activities accordingly. Library catalogues have traditionally concentrated on authors and titles, with scant attention given (until recently) to copy‐specific information on owners and bindings. Repair work has been directed first and foremost on the need to have a sturdy vehicle for the reading of texts. These kinds of values are turned on their head by the new ease with which texts can be circulated in digital or other facsimile. A sixteenth‐century edition of Chaucer in a twentieth‐century binding, with no annotations and all traces of previous ownership removed through rebinding processes, is still a historic object, but what it has to offer to readers and scholars is often equally well provided by the multitude of electronic and paper‐based surrogates which are now available. It also has little that distinguishes it from another copy which has had similar treatment. Gabriel Harvey’s copy of the 1598 Chaucer, on the other hand, with his inscription and copious notes on contemporary poets, including the earliest known reference to Hamlet, is clearly a unique and irreplaceable object.

⸻ pp. 94–95

Breaking his own argument here, I fear*, is Pearson.

*I don’t fear; I find neither the elitist hoarding mode of curatorship, nor the presupposition of universal and permanent availability of institutionally compatible electronic computers to be sympathetic stances.

Annotations in books may be important not only because of what they can tell us about the annotator and his views on the world, but also because they may contain significant information about the text and its publication, which may not be available elsewhere. George Thomason (1600?–66), a bookseller in London during the Civil War, assembled a unique collection of about 23,000 of the pamphlets, tracts, handbills and news‐sheets which poured from the press during that period of political upheaval. Their value as texts for historians is enhanced by Thomason’s habit of noting the actual day of publication on each item, so the exact sequence of squib and counter‐squib can be established.

⸻ pp. 120–121

Author’s own copies of the books they publish can be particularly interesting if they use them to record their later thoughts on the texts which become frozen and unchangeable once the printing press has done its work (unlike texts we write today and hold in electronic form). They may note corrections, additions, or changes of their ideas, or they may mark them up to become the copy text for later editions which may or may not have come to publication.

⸻ pp. 121–122

Hm, grammatical mood and tense.

If you gather together twenty copies of a sixteenth‐century book, or an eighteenth‐century one, from different libraries and collections, the chances are that every one will have a different binding, with its own set of historical messages. Multiple copies of a twentieth‐century book will probably be uniform as regards bindings (subject to wear and tear and the possible loss of the dust jacket), but twenty copies of a nineteenth‐century book are likely to show some variety. Until quite late in the century, books were still commonly issued in a range of binding choices, including different grades of quality and various colours and patterns of cloth.

⸻ pp. 152–153

Hm. Why did this general purpose public lending library situated in nearly the heart of Birrarungga obtain a hardcover British and North American edition, physically constructed in Great Britain, of a book which had been first published only the very year before by Hardie Grant? Seems ludicrously wasteful, logistically speaking! Or are H.G.B. no longer based in South Yarra? Or was their own print run constrained, in accordance with prior experience of this phenomenon? Do buyers or suppliers or whoever just not consider geography in making acquisitions, maybe? I have no idea.

Is this a Thing, librarians out there? Or more likely an isolated quirk?

#warrin’ law

The representatives of the fifty participating nations [at the San Francisco conference] signed the Charter of the United Nations on 26 June 1945. […] The most profound change was that each member state agreed to give up its age‐old right to resort to war, except in self‐defence, and to ‘refrain from the threat or use of force’ against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. Unilateral resort to war was replaced by collective decision‐making in the Security Council on behalf of all member states.

⸻ pg. 29

How does, or can this be made to, pertain to civil wars, frontier wars, and extant wars of occupation? Does reliance all fall on subsequent or localised legislation, treaties, and pledges? Was it only war if persued against signatories or against others who were in some certain ways recognised by that cohort? How accurately has Pembroke characterised the upshot of the Charter? What’s been lost to approximation in the sleek service of this particular thesis? I know so little!

Charter of the United Nations, 1945: https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/un-charter-full-text/

He also cites in the same paragraph Ivo H Daalder and James M Lindsay, The Empty Throne: America’s Abdication of Global Leadership, Hachette, 2018, p. 18. Though rather than obviously insightful, that sounds like a variation on the same book!

Further / Ridiculous note to self: I am very much going to have to come back and edit the punctuation marks in this post. I miss my true hyphens and consistently curly quotes. There is only so much copying and pasting them in I can aspire to through a touchscreen. [Edit: Done!]

[United States Senator William Fulbright] adopted the phrase ‘arrogance of power’ to describe the tendency to equate power with virtue and responsibility with a universal mission.

⸻ pg. 107

Useful!

So much so he named a whole book it? J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power, Vintage Books, 1966.

#2020s phase of war in Ukraine (implied), imperialisms

In Ukraine, ‘China is investing $7 billion in upgrading Ukrainian infrastructure…as a logistics hub for BRI.’

⸻ pg. 211

“BRI” = the Belt and Road Initiative

😬 for the siting.

This book would have dated fast (as in quick, as in firmly) .

Often the most conspicuous cause was Pembroke twirling into practically economist‐blithe pandemica (not that these would’ve read that much better earlier!), an offshoot of drawing awkward connections boldly, particularly at contemporary events. But this quote was in a section of Chapter 8, ‘Shifting Alliances: Looking East’, headed (and, contrary to decontextualised appearances, treating everyplace‐East within as belonging to the category of) ‘China & Russia’.

😬 for the citing.

Oh, and speaking of citing, the logistics hub quote is attributed to Parag Khanna, The Future is Asian: Global Order in the Twenty‐First Century, Hachette, 2019, p. 85.

#oil trade, quickly giving way to casual dialect chat (feat. questionably encoded I.P.A.)

And Saudi Arabia — like Russia, China and Iran — has threatened to drop the US dollar as its default currency on oil trades. The ‘petroyuan’ is coming.

⸻ pg. 221

I mean — with the most mixed of feelings — good on them, but also can they even do that? Is that not the whole thing about the petrodollar? (I’ve forgotten how it works).

Also I just looked up contender for most U.S.American word of all time, “hegemony”, and Macq Dic gives:

/​həˈgɛməni, həˈdʒɛməni, ˈhɛgəməni, ˈhɛdʒəməni​, /Orig. US /​ˈhɛgəmoʊni, ˈhɛdʒəmoʊni​/

[…]

The pronunciations /​ˈhɛgəmoʊni​/ and /​ˈhɛdʒəmoʊni​/ are considered by some to be not standard in Australian English.

⸻ Alison Moore (editor). Macquarie Dictionary Eighth Edition (Sydney: Macquarie Dictionary Publishers 2020).

• If not in a whisper, I can’t even pronounce [ˈhɛgəməni]! Excuse me, pardon me, sorry, but where might I put down this secondary stress? I have to go so light on the hɛ for the word to support any more!
• [həˈgɛməni] is exactly the kind of pretentious (yet logical) contrivance that I would not be​lieve I haven’t embraced earlier, if I’d ever even heard of it!
• “Alright, look we like to think of ourselves as descriptivists, but just so you know: the original pronunciation is wrong.”
• In case anyone is dying of acute curiosity, I think of the word as [ˈhɛdʒəmoʊni], and would normally speak it the same, because it’s a term hard not to exaggerate, although if I get over myself and on with life and actually use it, like in a sentence, it therefore occasionally comes out as [ˈhɛdʒəməni], I think, but it’s hard to tell, because it fundamentally feels like it exists outside my “real” lexicon, somehow? Like it’s there but so specific to certain situations. Like “pierogi”, or “meniscus”, or something.
• I myself am malingering in chronic curiosity and would love to hear how any of you read it.

#Africa as a monolith, neocolonial analyses

The investment by China in African ports, railways and energy infrastructure is only part of the picture. Before the 2020 pandemic, there was a noticeable shift in the pattern of Chinese investment toward manufacture and financial services — ‘supporting Africa’s efforts to diversify its economy and reduce its over‐reliance on natural resources for growth’. More than a decade ago, China overtook the United States as Africa’s largest trading partner. China–Africa trade grew from $10 billion in the year 2000 to $220 billion in 2014, and ‘increased by 19.7 per cent’ in 2018; more than forty African nations now have trade agreements with China; and more than 10,000 Chinese‐owned firms are operating throughout Africa. The value of Chinese business in Africa ‘since 2005 amounts to more than $2 trillion’. The mutual trade has been so extensive that, as one commentator observed, ‘Crushing Africa in debt so that they cannot buy anything that the Chinese make simply does not make a lot of sense.’

⸻ pg. 236

This just in, whatever the burden, coercion, depletion or vulnerability that may result, the debt you’re subjected to is not crushing until you cannot consume any further goods and/or services.

Though I’m risking a little oversimplification, given it’s not what’s literally stated in the above, if I’m remembering correctly, this assumption, or wish, really did seem to underlie all of Pembroke’s coverage of large‐scale investment activities, except where those related to U.S. militarisation?

Pembroke’s attributions for the diversification and 19·7%; the $2 trillion; and the crushing, respectively:

• Baker McKenzie, ‘The Impact of COVID‐19 on China’s Belt and Road Initiatives in Africa’, 31 March 2020: www.bakermckenzie.com/en/newsroom/2020/03/bri-africa, [Pembroke‐] accessed 15/4/20
• Shepard, Forbes, 3 October 2019 [for which I can’t see a fuller citation]
• Silja Frohlich, ‘Africa: China’s Belt and Road Forum — Does Africa Need New Funding Options?’, All Africa, 26 April 2019: allafrica.com/stories/201904290003.html, [P‐]accessed 21/3/2020.

#adversarialism towards China

This is the most destablising aspect of Washington’s twenty‐first century world view — its relentless and unwavering anti‐China conviction. It has some adherents in the corridors of power in Whitehall, Ottawa and Canberra but less elsewhere. It is far from a universal view. Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, spoke for many when he told an audience of foreign and defence ministers at the 2019 Shangri‐La Dialogue: ‘This negative view of China has permeated the US establishment. It is not confined to the White House or the Administration, but is shared widely by Congress, the military, the media, academics and NGOs too’. He added: ‘Those inclined to a more positive view of China have been marginalised’.

⸻ pg. 250

I went into this paragraph imagining the first approaching string of capitalised words might possess something of the va‐va‐voom of “PARIS MILAN NEW YORK…”, that they would at least ring like a list of high‐profile foreign correspondents’ offices, and a slightly soggy cardboard surprise that brought me, as much more sense as it made.

Speech: Lee Hsien Loong, Keynote Address, IISS Shangri‐La Dialogue 2019, 31 May 2019.

Between this and Noam Chomsky’s Failed States (both noughties surprises among my assigned loans this month), I cannot quite get over the library’s still hanging onto select books for more than five years. I had the impression that this lot turfed everything within a decade, nowdays, but… these aren’t even reprints.…

After ten thousand years of coevolution, [domesticated plants’] genes are rich archives of cultural as well as natural information. The DNA of that tulip there, the ivory one with the petals attenuated like sabers, contains detailed instructions on how best to catch the eye not of a bee but of an Ottoman Turk; it has something to tell us about that age’s idea of beauty. Likewise, every Russet Burbank potato holds within it a treatise about our industrial food chain — and our taste for long, perfectly golden french fries.

⸻ pg. xv

Introduction, pg. xv

[Charles] Darwin devoted the first chapter of The Origin of Species to a special case of natural selection called ‘artificial selection’ — his term for the process by which domesticated species come into the world. Darwin was using the word artificial not as in fake but as in artifact: a thing reflecting human will. There’s nothing fake about a hybrid rose or a butter pear, a cocker spaniel or a show pigeon.

⸻ pg. xx

‘Introduction’, pg xx