Maria Zakrevskaya and Andrey Ivantsov, “Dickinsonia costata — the first evidence of neoteny in Ediacaran organisms,” Invertebrate Zoology 14 (May 2017): 92–98.
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Online, a digital version of an archived lock of Dickinson’s hair can be found courtesy of the Emily Dickinson Museum and Amherst College Special Collections. Originally, the lock was enclosed in a letter to Emily Fowler. Perhaps you should skip it? An artifact that is too much a creamy, callow celebration of a rich white girlhood no matter how laced with illuminating depression and literarily generative sexual oppression.
Jessica L. Allen and James C. Lendemer, “Japewiella dollypartoniana, a New Widespread Lichen in the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern North America,” Castanea 80, no. 1 (March 2015): 59–65 →.
See →. Of note: how Carl Andre’s preparatory-school activities organize his public identity amongst peers. As listed in the Phillips-Andover Academy Yearbook, Potpourri: Philo 3, 4; Winter Prom Committee 4; Varsity Debating 4; Film Society 4; Mother Liked the Trees; Rifle Club 3; All-Club Soccer 4; All-Club Baseball 3, 4.
But is this shucking off of class really just in adapting the casual phraseology of the well-to-do? … Nahh. It claims all affect—the many dimensions of breathing as articulated by a laugh, a scream, or say, the speed of speaking. It happens, this transmogrification of our class if and when, you or me, has ceased laughing heartily at our trauma; it is if/when you and me desist in our delivery of long-form stories or shouting a good joke from the rolled-down window of a moving car or … We stop interrupting and being interrupted by our own, talking over one another. But in a way that was also a pleasure, the pleasure of layering.
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James C. Lendemer and Jessica L. Allen, “Hypotrachyna oprah (Parmeliaceae, Lichenized Ascomycota), a new foliose lichen with lichexanthone from southeastern North America,” Castanea 84, no. 1 (May 28, 2019): 24–32 →.
Scroll down to see photo of DP’s bedroom: →.
See Said’s 1999 memoir Out of Place for an explicit critique of both the landscape (white snowdrifts) and institution.
“In 1906 whilst in Columbia University, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a … law graduate student from Inanda South Africa, delivered his speech ‘The Regeneration of Africa.’ In this speech he dreamt of the revival or renaissance of Africa. Richard Rive and Tim Couzens have noted, ‘it was largely through his ideas and inspiration that the African National Congress (Africa’s oldest liberation movement and South Africa’s ruling party) was founded’ (Couzens & Rive 1993:1). … Seme’s speech was quoted in its entirety by Kwameh Nkrumah in his speeches when he called for the regeneration of Africa’ (Nkrumah 1973:212).” R. Simangaliso Kumalo, “Ex Africa semper aliquid Novi!: Pixley ka Isaka Seme, the African Renaissance and the Empire in Contemporary South Africa,” Alternation, no. 14 (2015): 190–211; 191, 194.
One’s confidence in self-annihilation can obscure capitalism’s phantasmagoria … but moreover, my prep school did not see that the inheritance of the certain sort of whiteness they were offering me, if I behaved, had been made spumy, spoiled by all that surges in its wake. I did not understand that either. The subtext of the prize is that if a lumpenish kid like I was worked hard and was lucky, instead of a jailbird, a hooker, a radical, I could be a professor who publishes critical essays about Emily Dickinson.
From June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights,” in Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).
A poem as writ, to insider and outsider. Most of the chorus cannot claim they embody the intersectional position in Jordan’s “I,” and yet Jordan was also a wobbly, young form possibly seated in one of the same wooden seats in Sage Chapel where I, too, sat, without attachment to the genealogies of the wealthy, without a clear sense of the “promise” (of safety, of medical care, of affirmation).
Some examples: Robert Mueller, George H. W. Bush
Another example: Christopher A. Wry.
And others: Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch.
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Johnny Quong’s Hawaiian was later turned into a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall.
“SRO” is the acronym for single-resident-occupancy. SROs are semi-temporary, low-income housing. In the twentieth century, many SROs operated in the remains of nineteenth-century hotels in downtown Seattle (the original skid row), Portland, and Salt Lake City. I remember stopping by a number of SROs in Seattle as a kid, searching for my grandfather.
Since her return forty-five years ago, my mother has boycotted Israeli-made products; in the mid-70s, in Brooklyn, she used to wear a red-and-white checked keffiyeh and whenever schools were bombed she wrote furious letters (in her old-fashioned looping penmanship) to the implicated governments. Her relationship is different than say Jean Genet’s (who visited Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan in 1970) or, of course, Edward Said, whose contextualizing and seminal text Orientalism was published in 1978. Her visit is not only in between these critical nodes but it without the intellectual structures that inform Said and Genet’s analysis nor the male elite privilege that marks say Michel Auder’s spoiled, sexist, orientalist video trolls through Northern Africa. I’ll hazard that Auder thought he was too stoned to be considered a colonist or that perhaps Genet thought he was too gay to be an orientalist but I will also admit that my mother, as poor and fierce and queer and brave as Genet, was nevertheless stoned and weird and colonizing in her own manner. What she perceives as love I perceive as fetishism. This year, she tattoos a replica of Picasso’s camel to her shoulder and I wince and she shrugs off my wince. What she perceives as mutual, I perceive as inequitable.
But what sort of fictive logics emerge when white-supremacist investments in racializing comes to the fore? Data is not being visualized; psychological crises are being made into form.
Mary Norton, Borrowers Afield (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1955), 147.
In the last volume, The Borrowers Avenged, Arrietty is clearly a pubescent Borrower. Following a move to an ancient vicarage, she initially experiences a fright when encountering the buildings’ ghosts. She comes to realize she can simply walk through the massive, translucent volumes of a human ghost, a dead human endlessly re-performing his own traumas. She will be unscathed.
Me, I think the contraption looks like many sculptures made in 2013 … castings and clean, ready-made hardware with dense conceptual backstories →.
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See →. Dig deep into the Kennis & Kennis website. It is hard to imagine that SNL has not. The images are informed by bones and DNA, sure, but also by the artists’ own subjectivity. What do we begin to understand about how Kennis & Kennis feel about national belonging; sexual attraction; familial drama; and masculine embodiments. Don’t these get tangled in a way that a comedian and/or an academic cannot resist tugging at?
See The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (Dir. Adam and Zach Khalil in collaboration with Jackson Polys) for a North American dimension to how white supremacists attempt to shape narratives around beings exhumed →.
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The political prisoners included over forty IWW organizers, including African-American IWW organizer Ben Fletcher (central to the longshoreman's strike in Philadelphia).
1919: An officer of the Medical Corps, in charge of the surgical clinics for the Hospital of the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, makes a casual checklist of spring migration. The barracks are situated on acres of uplands and river bottoms. Birds also cling to the buildings themselves. Purple martins nesting on the outer prison walls. The officer’s checklist includes a note regarding the freedom of the purple martins against the stillness of the prisoners. Officer David C. Hilton’s bird checklists for the Wilson Bulletin produced scores of calls and songs (over 150). Using Cornell’s ornithology archives, I looked up each bird listed and wrote down the specific calls: chew tuck chip chaa whaa phew joree chwirk sip pink zweet choo wichety grunt hiss yink … Full disclosure: in 2017, I made a sculptural installation, based on the Leavenworth research, for the Ulrich Museum, Wichita, Kansas.
Embedded Track: Vocal Tract Organ playing a synthesized form of grave-looted Nesyamun’s speech after death, after disinterment, after surviving a WWII Nazi air raid on the Leeds Museum, after 3-D scanning, after going viral. A DJ makes a loop, mixing it with another forced mummy audio track, Ötzi the Iceman’s vowels. Is this an illegal rave?
Circa 1999. Soundtrack lists were attached to the print columns in Punk Planet. Simultaneously fascinated, alienated, disbelieving, I scanned their cool. To be influenced? To inherit? To pilfer? You scan this, too. We barter? Historic disinheritance makes a sunny sonic barter impossible.
Revision Track: While in the process of revising this essay I listen to much music but also to a June Jordan interview conducted by Julius Lester on Pacifica radio in 1968. After Lester laughingly relays a cartoon about a white man stealing a heart from a living black man’s body, he invites Jordan to read “Uhuru in the O.R.” and her voice, low-toned yet urgent, delivers: The only successful transplant, from the first five attempts, means that a black heart kept alive a white man who upheld apartheid. At that moment, washing dishes, I recall that sometimes I imagine that the 45th president’s body is packed with looted organs. Isn’t that one way to reign forever, to make his brand of white power endless?
Jordan’s audio rolls on: I like love anonymous / more than murder incorporated or / shall we say South Africa / I like the Valentine the heart the power / incorruptible but failing body / flowers of the world. Then, a second verse: From my death the white man / takes new breath he stands as / formerly he stood and he commands me / for his good
These years, boarding schools pay radical poets to speak—not as poets, but sorcerers, paid to purify, to sterilize the instrument. Maybe these poets utter forked runes … cursing a student replica Kavanaugh and a proto Christopher A. Wry and blessing the ones who will betray their secret societies. (Supposedly it is only at death that University of Virginia’s Seven Society reveals a member to the public—by leaving a wreath of black magnolias, typically arranged in the shape of the numeral seven. Perhaps these poets are anointing with words those who might wreck the Seven Society after expertly sliding in. No black magnolia 7 for their grave.)