noelwanblog

[noelwanblog]

books & bites, ep. 5: summer peaches and All the Light We Cannot See

[spoiler alert]

Today’s ruminations are brief—I did not get much sleep last night due to the rowdy new neighbors’ partying until 5am. 😡 This weekend, I have been re-reading bits of Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See in preparation for a writing lesson I am teaching tomorrow. I’ve paired this book with fresh Ontario peaches (it’s 🍑 season here!) because a humble can of peaches foregrounds the stirring resolution of the two protagonists’ entwined fates.

One of my favorite narrative arcs in this book involves the protagonist’s (Marie-Laure) prolonged rationing of a two cans of unknown vegetables and/or fruit. We discovered early on that first can is of string beans. Marie-Laure fervently hopes that the second can contains juicy, syrupy peaches.

Most of the book takes places in St. Malo, a port city in the region of Brittany. After her father is sent to a German prison camp and her other guardian dies, the blind, teenaged Marie-Laure finds herself alone—trapped—in her late great-uncle’s fortified house by the sea. As the Germans storm Saint Malo, she hides in the house’s secret chamber. It is this room in which the book’s second protagonist, the German boy soldier Werner Pfennig, finds Marie-Laure.

Doerr weaves the intricacies of Werner’s and Marie-Laure’s lives a bit too neatly. Coincidences that transcend our imaginations, however, unfailingly make a good story. The apex of the two characters’ entanglement centers on the last can Marie-Laure had been saving for the right moment. It was, indeed, a can of peaches.

As expected, Werner helps Marie-Laure escape Saint Malo. They part ways, never to meet again.

The girl crawls into the wardrobe and climbs a ladder and comes back down clutching a dented tin can. “Can you see what this is?”

“There’s no label.”

“I didn’t think there was.”

“Is it food?”

“Let’s open it and find out.”

With one strike from the brick, he punctures the can with the tip of the knife. Immediately, he can smell it: the perfume is so sweet, so outrageously sweet, that he nearly faints. What is the word? Pêches. Les pêches.

The girl leans forward; the freckles seem to bloom across her cheeks as she inhaled. “We will share,” she says. “For what you did.”

He hammers the knife in a second time, saws away at the metal and bends up the lid. “Careful,” he says, and pauses it to her. She dips in two fingers, digs up a wet, soft, slippery thing. Then he does the same. That first peach slithers down his throat like rapture. A sunrise in his mouth.

They eat. They drink the syrup. They run their fingers around the inside of the can.

(excerpt from All the Light We Cannot See)

[noelwanblog]

books & bites, ep. 4: onigiri and The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Grilled onigiri (Japanese filled rice balls) constitute the perfect midday meal.

There’s a lot to be said about the ways in which rice nourishes a (specifically situated) body. In a Taiwanese family like mine, 80% of all our meals included rice—fried, cooked into porridge, mixed into soup, fresh at dinner and leftover at lunch. While my husband reaches for potatoes and bread as his reliable staples, my brain always turns to rice.

While I was making my usual batch of onigiri this week, it occurred to me that its classic shape really resembles a little house! With Jane Jacobs on my mind, I decided to make a little onigiri neighborhood. 

—

Dear Noël, Jane Jacobs was a transplanted American. She had a great influence on how Toronto developed. Enjoy, Grandma & Grandpa Murray, Christmas 2015.

In 2015 I requested Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities for the Murray (my in-laws) grandparents’ annual Christmas book exchange. Jack and Marg—longtime Torontonians—were also fervent socialists who had participated/organized various NDP rallies and events throughout their lifetimes. They were also deeply committed to building strong, diverse communities and advocating against predatory and inequitable policies in Canadian politics. Jack abruptly passed away last week, which makes this book and the inscription on the jacket something to cherish in his memory. I have been reading this book in fits and starts and now am finally trying to finish it!

Considered one of the most influential urban planning/development texts in modern North American culture, Death and Life champions redundancy, community vibrance, and busy sidewalks in favor of efficiency, universal models, and the spatial centralization of public institutions (esp. cultural and civic centers).

Admittedly, I have not quite finished the book, so I will not summarize Jacob’s arguments here. Rather her book presents an interesting counter-reality to what North American public life has become, particularly in the midst of a pandemic. How does the diversity and liveliness of a city change when physical distancing and aggressive sanitary concerns mark public social interactions? Jacobs’ favorite city structure—the sidewalk—is now a place where people avoid physical proximity. Encouraging social pods to restrict contagion also transforms patterns of diverse intermingling that often can occur only through public encounters.

This is not to say that our society has strayed from Jacobs’ better vision for the city. Although foundational, her book is completely anachronistic and focuses on large urban cities and neighborhoods. She primarily studied New York City, though she occasionally strays to Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, and San Francisco. The sprawl of mid-sized cities and residential-dominated cities developed alongside car culture, which presents structural challenges for urban revitalization. More importantly, everyday reliance on the internet and technology has dramatically changed the way humans interact long before COVID-19 came along and sent us running into our homes.

Nevertheless, Jacobs’ insights are still important. Aggressive gentrification (and NIMBY-ites) has devastated many urban neighborhoods, leaving many people homeless or forced to flee to more affordable outskirts of the city. The economic and social impact of COVID-19 leaves us struggling to re-define public life and envision less capitalistic and more sustainable forms of urban revitalization.

Although we are 60 years removed from Death and Life, our cities have not become more dead or more alive. Perhaps this realization indicates that we should ask how to make (urban) life more meaningful rather than what makes the meaning of (urban) life.

[noelwanblog]

books & bites, ep. 3: longevity noodles and Four Reincarnations

As an end to unusually morose weekend, I want to introduce Max Ritvo’s poetry collection Four Reincarnations, paired (somewhat) unintentionally with some homemade longevity noodles. Like Ritvo’s work, the cultural praxis of longevity noodles engages in some commentary about human life.

Ritvo was an American poet who died at the age of 25 after battling Ewing’s sarcoma for almost 10 years. Four Reincarnations is a dual meditation on materiality and mortality. Ritvo posits the ephemeral body against a refusal of absence; his poetic language is achingly visceral.

The title “Four Reincarnations” supposedly refers to life in persistent renewal. As I was reading Ritvo’s poetry, I started thinking about the different ways in which human civilizations have encultured the concept of life—through events of birth, illness, death, through ritual and ceremony, through science, art, and philosophy. Life is not so much the physiological traces of being as it is “life itself,” as theorist Donna Haraway (quoting Sarah Franklin) declares. That is, what we perceive as “life” is really more a collection of material-semiotic discourses than any sort of primordial ontological energy.

What makes Ritvo’s poetry so captivating is his ability to express the intense quality of being alive in the world of “life itself.” One feels totally ensconced in the finitude of human existence, yet that feeling suffuses, overwhelms, and implodes, shattering us against that hyperobject called Life.

Above is an photo excerpt of "The End." You can read the entire poem here (Lithub).

—

The symbolic/ritualistic consumption of longevity noodles exemplifies how one particular ethnocultural group has embodied “life itself.” Sometimes called birthday or e-fu noodles, Chinese longevity noodles are usually eaten at celebrations and banquets and can be prepared as a stir-fry or in broth. One must serve these noodles without cutting them; unbroken strands signify the prospect of a long, auspicious life. Meanwhile, a severed noodle acts as a metaphor for premature death.

In simple words: Max Ritvo’s noodle was cut. Yet his poetic exploration—his four reincarnations—challenges the terrifyingly clean divide between life and death in Chinese noodle cosmology. Though we may strive against rupturing our wheaten arteries, Ritvo reminds us that a noodle, once severed, can still nourish and sustain. That cessation of breath, however final, is not finite.

—

Most versions of longevity noodles are made with thin egg noodles, such as yi mein (伊麵). Mine are a bit too wide, egg-less, and hand-pulled (拉麵) instead of rolled. Despite these aberrations, I’ve kept the most significant component; each “nest” is actually a single, unbroken noodle around 3ft long. Armed with these delightfully “QQ” (a Chinese term analogous to al dente) noodles, I am looking forward to making one of my favorite childhood dishes: 榨菜肉絲麵 (pork and preserved mustard greens noodles)! Another delicious and simple preparation is scallion oil noodles (蔥油拌麵). Sometimes I'll also throw in some chili with the scallions just to mitigate the abundance of dried chili peppers in my kitchen. Last year’s pepper surplus led to an air-drying project, which subsequently became unremarkable window décor.

One final anecdote: today, I discovered that my tomato plants are not sterile! In April, shortages caused by the pandemic gardening craze forced me to salvage seeds from grocery store (i.e. industrial-mutant) tomatoes. I managed to sprout and transition them to planters by the beginning of summer. After 6 weeks of worrying that Dr. Frankenstein’s tomato plants could bear no progeny, at last...a tiny glimpse of life!

Tomato flowers, endless noodles, the meanings of life, Life, and life itself. Ritvo captures these remote kinships through his Parnassian corporeality:

I have written this poem inside of you I am clutched in with your mother’s blood, feeling your bends in the dark, becoming a soft bend in your body

We are becoming a bulb in the ground of the living in the winter of being alive

from “Heaven Is Us Being a Flower Together”

[noelwanblog]

books & bites, ep. 2: blueberry sour cream pie and If They Come in the Morning

What’s “as American as apple pie”?

The racialization of the prison-industrial complex.

I think many classical musicians often feel a lot of pressure to not express political opinions, simply because they want to avoid the risk of alienating audiences. Most of us don’t have the luxury of a certain kind of celebrity that can cushion the (financial) blow from an empty concert hall. 

So at my own risk, today we ponder pie and [Black] Panthers. 

—

Let me first clarify by saying that I know that “apple pie” is more Americana than American. Apple pie also takes many other forms, which sort of de-centers the pastry’s widely-accepted Americocentrism. Over in Europe, the Dutch make pretty damn good appeltaart and appelvlaai. Also tangential to pie are galettes, tarts, strudels, crisps…so basically, apple pie & apple pie filling appear in lots of places.

Secondly, I’m not even eating apple pie! This sour cream blueberry pie comes from a London, ON institution called Sebastian’s Catering. PM and I received a totally superfluous Sebastian’s gift certificate as a wedding present in August 2019. Because we had to spend the total amount all at once, we decided we would buy several pies, freeze them, and consume them over a period of many months. We finally bought our pies in March, right as the Canadian pandemic lockdown was happening and even more appropriately, a few days before π day.

Sometimes it’s just nice to have a slice of pie that didn’t involve one’s own labor (+ a hot oven in a house with malfunctioning AC).

Some interesting reads about apples and pies:

History of pie (Slate)

Why Americans love their apple pie (Smithsonian Magazine)

Why your supermarket sells only 5 kinds of apples (Mother Jones)

—

Okay, now let’s get to what’s not so nice.

If They Come in the Morning is a collection of essays, letters, and poems, edited by the inimitable Angela Davis (seriously case of #womancrush here). I don’t really feel ready to share a ton of thoughts about race and incarceration, mostly because I am still learning and parsing events and ideas. The major takeaway is, of course, that institutionalized violence against BIPOC is embedded into the very formation of the United States nation-state. The very expressions of liberty and equality espoused within the American sociopolitical ideal disintegrate inside prison walls, immigration detention centers, communities still broken years after Jim Crow laws were declared unconstitutional--the list goes on.

This book encompasses voices of the Civil Rights Movement era—people who were Panthers or advocates of other black radical movements. Above is an excerpt of a poem by Ericka Huggins, who had been a leader in the Black Panther party and was incarcerated for two years during the New Haven Black Panther Trials. She was only 21 at the time of her arrest in 1969.

Some other highlights I have read thus far are Davis’ essay “Political Prisoners, Prisons & Black Liberation” and James Baldwin’s “An Open Letter to my Sister, Angela Davis.” Below are some especially impactful excerpts.

“The prison is a key component of the state’s coercive apparatus, the overriding function of which is to ensure social control. The etymology of the term ‘penitentiary’ furnishes a clue to the controlling idea behind the ‘prison system’ at its inception. The penitentiary was projected as the locale for doing penitence for an offense against society, the physical and spiritual purging of proclivities to challenge rules and regulations which command total obedience. While cloaking itself with the bourgeois aura of universality—imprisonment was supposed to cut across all class lines, as crimes were to be defined by the act, not the perpetrator—the prison has actually operated as an instrument of class domination, a means of prohibiting the have-nots from encroaching upon the haves.” (Davis, emphasis mine)

“Or, to put it another way, as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial war. […] What the Americans do not realize is that a war between brothers, in the same cities, on the same soil, is not a racial war but a civil war. But the American delusion is not only that their brothers all are white but that the whites are all their brothers.” (Baldwin)

Read Baldwin's entire letter here (The New York Review of Books). 

[noelwanblog]

books & bites, ep. 1: cà phê sữa đá and Aiiieeeee!

On Sundays, I try to take the day off of posting recording practicing videos to express other facets of my life. In addition to playing the harp, I like to write—often on topics that influenced my doctoral research (i.e. race, gender, identity, capitalism, critical theory). Like many other people, I also like to read and cook, and betwixt those two activities is usually an abundance of thoughtful repose.

Here is a cà phê sữa đá (Vietnamese coffee), made with a phin (Viet coffee filter) I brought from California. The relationship between this cup of coffee and its consumer (me) is one of an encounter situated in the very complex world of Asian America.

To be clear: I cannot speak expertly about the history of cà phê sữa đá and the phin, nor of the political and cultural upheavals that created the Vietnamese diaspora. This is a narrative about how globalization, capitalism, imperialism, and migration have created inextricable layers in my own hybridized identity.

—

I am Taiwanese by ethnicity, American by nationality, and my identity consists of an unstable emulsion of the two: call it Taiwanese-American or more generally, Asian American.

I was also born in San Jose, California, home to the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam. We have “Little Saigon,” a commercial district about 15 minutes from my parents’ house, and our municipal bulletins usually print news in four languages: English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Chinese. Growing up in this kind of mixed community means I can recognize Vietnamese even though I cannot understand it. The recognition itself, however, always yields some comforting nostalgia.

So my childhood appetite was satiated by my mom’s Taiwanese-Chinese cooking as much as it was by the food we ordered in the Vietnamese restaurants we frequented on a weekly basis: phở, bún chả, bún thịt nướng, bánh mì, gỏi cuốn, and all the chè I could eat. These days, I make cà phê sữa đá when I’m feeling far away from my family. There’s something about it that just tastes…well, Asian (it’s the particular flavor and viscosity of the condensed milk).

My parents, like many immigrants, seek familiarity in foreign places. That means we would always eat Chinese food regardless of where we visited, whether it was somewhere we could find good Chinese restaurants (London, UK) or not (Bozeman, Montana). In Paris, however, I remember my mom wanting to dine at this tiny Vietnamese restaurant near the Conservatoire de Paris. Using my very nascent French and a lot of hand gesturing, we managed to order some phở. We had been in France for 3 weeks already, and these little, magical bowls of phở—they tasted like home.

—

Recently, I have been puttering my way through Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers, which focuses on the resistance of Asian Americans to essentialist, racial and cultural dualisms. To be Asian American is not to be equal parts Asian and American, expressed neatly through caricatures of Western vs. Eastern “cultural conflict.” Despite attributing my coffee habit to an politically inevitable coalescence of cultures, I struggle to characterize Asian America as a warm space of solidarity. Deep prejudices towards each other exist and define our communities. White eyes do not see these complex layers of interaction and friction; they often only see the sameness of our yellow skin.

The editors of Aiiieeeee! write: “An American-born Asian, writing from the world as Asian American who does not reverberate to gongs struck hundreds of years ago or snuggle into the doughy clutches of an American hot to coddle something ching chong, is looked upon as a freak, an imitator, a liar. The myth is that Asian Americans have maintained cultural integrity as Asians, that there is some continuity between the great high culture of a China that hasn’t existed for five hundred years and the American-born Asian.”

We’re not yin and yang. Instead I like to imagine Asian Americans as hydrae—multi-headed bodies that survive through adaptive regeneration. And all that speculation over whether hydra are non-senescent?

I’ve been told I look 15.

[noelwanblog]

“We want more than inclusion. Inclusion is not enough. Diversity is not enough. And as a matter of fact, we do not wish to be included in a racist society. If we say no to hetero patriarchy, then we do not want to be assimilated into a misogynist and hetero patriarchal society.”

[noelwanblog]

“To be clear, one may look at all of this and argue that by teaming up with Nike, [Colin] Kaepernick is making the smart move of controlling the narrative of his own image, which, if [Angela] Davis is any lesson, will be commodified anyway. But Kaepernick has no control over the way his image is received by Nike consumers. In this instance, he is a proxy—a window-dressing model for the larger project of packaging Black Power images, which is jarringly similar to the cultural reimagining that deemed Davis’s style and the black leather jackets and berets of her contemporaries irresistibly and undeniably cool. In offering himself as a campaign spokesperson, Kaepernick is validating (and, thus, making more profitable) a form of social-justice capitalism that compromises a large-scale political protest’s longevity and efficacy. It’s important to consider the high costs of assisting a corporation in peddling a social struggle, as Davis forewarned that historical revolutions could be reduced to trends.”

- Saida Grundy, “The Risky Business of Branding Black Pain”

[noelwanblog]

“Structural racism is about how Britain’s relationship with race infects and distorts equal opportunity. I think that we, as a nation, placate ourselves with the concept of meritocracy, and by insisting that we just don’t see race. This makes us feel progressive. But to claim not to see race is to demand compulsory assimilation. Colour-blindness does not accept the existence of structural racism or a history of white racial dominance. Indulging the myth that we are all equal denies the economic, political and social legacy of a British society that has historically been organised by race.

My blackness has been politicised against my will, because racism has given it meaning. This is a situation I didn’t choose, but I don’t want it wilfully ignored in an effort to instil some sort of precarious, false harmony. And, though many are happy to console themselves with a doctrine of colour-blindness, the huge differences in life chances between white and non-white people prove that while it may be preached by our institutions, it is not being practised.

Colour-blindness is used to silence talk about structural racism while we continue to fool ourselves with the lie of meritocracy. In 2014, I interviewed the black feminist academic Dr Kimberlé Crenshaw, who elaborated on the politics of colourblindness. ‘It’s this idea that, to eliminate race, you have to eliminate all discourse, including efforts to acknowledge racial structures and hierarchies and address them,’ she said. ‘It’s those cosmopolitan-thinking, 21st-century, “not trying to carry the burdens of the past and you shouldn’t either” [people]. There are people who consider themselves left, progressive and very critical, who have convinced themselves that the only way to get beyond race is to stop talking about race. By taking this stance, they align themselves with the post-racial liberals and self-styled colour-blind conservatives.’”

Also consider: Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracist reading list

[noelwanblog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/05/photos-fire-and-protests-twin-cities/612325/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/americas-racial-contract-showing/611389/

I have been struggling over whether I should write anything about the recent tragedies (Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd). The complicity of silence burns, not only my own conscience, but those grieving, and the only thing that feels appropriate is an expression of solidarity.

All I can say is we cannot remain compliant by ignoring the atrocities of racism, by propping up institutions of privilege that structurally exclude and deny the presence of non-white people. To families who are suffering and have suffered from centuries of oppression and violence: you are not alone. We will share in your anger at incidents of overwhelming racial injustice. We will listen to your fear, your fury.

We will fight for you.

We will fight with you.

[noelwanblog]

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/len-mccluskey-unite-union-why-you-should-be-trade-unionist

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/n7j8zw/amazon-whole-foods-instacart-workers-organize-a-historic-mass-strike

as much as I acknowledge how many people are relying (or have no choice but to rely) on these companies to earn wages during this time, it's important to show solidarity over fair pay and working conditions. don't just continue using these services and justify that your $$ are going to workers' pockets. they're not. 

if you are in the position to do so (i.e. able to follow public safety precautions and are not health-compromised), suffer a little inconvenience and boycott capitalist predators. 

power to the people. 

👊🏾 👊🏿 👊🏼 👊🏽 👊🏻

[noelwanblog]

I often struggle with contemporary permutations of liberalism and identity politics, especially those that result in tokenism and representational activism that ignores structural inequalities. In classical music, the blind screen audition has become the symbol of a post-racial, post-gender meritocracy but ignores the possibility of what I call a racialized, gendered institutional aurality. It's hard to criticize liberalism without turning into either a raging communist (even though I am sympathetic to socialism) or a Patrick Deneen/Adrian Vermeule. So what are the options? This article suggests something called "radical liberalism."

"One good place to start is the work of CUNY philosopher Charles Mills. Mills’s most famous book, The Racial Contract (1997), is a fundamental critique of the Enlightenment political tradition, arguing that racist attitudes expressed by philosophical giants like Immanuel Kant are not some alien parasite on their theories, but vital to their intellectual enterprises.

It’s the kind of thoroughgoing dissection you might expect from a socialist or black nationalist, someone willing to scrap liberalism altogether. Yet at the end of his most recent book, Black Rights/White Wrongs, Mills explains that his project is not aimed at supplanting liberalism but rather rescuing it — by developing what he calls “black radical liberalism.”

Central to black radical liberalism is the idea of “corrective justice”: the notion that liberalism as it has been practiced historically has fallen badly short of its highest ideals of guaranteeing equal freedom, and that the task of modern liberalism ought to be rectifying the racial inequalities of its past incarnations.

Mills’s approach is refreshing because it moves beyond the strange conservatism in so much liberal writing today. His work is not an uncritical valorization of the Enlightenment nor a paean to dead white thinkers; it does not aim to Make Liberalism Great Again. It is instead a harshly critical account of liberalism’s history that nonetheless aims to advance liberalism’s core values and secure its greatest accomplishments."

[noelwanblog]

“In our world, we no longer work in order to satisfy our own needs. Instead, we work for Capital. Capital generates needs of its own; mistakenly, we perceive these needs as if they belonged to us.” - Byung-Chul Han

[noelwanblog]

"9 am" / "5 pm"

[noelwanblog]

rip takaya, or reflections on covid-19 and re-defining the red pill

yesterday, cbc reported that the remarkably lone sea wolf Takaya had been shot on vancouver island. Takaya presented an anomaly to our human knowledge of wolves; despite our common use of the phrase "lone wolf," a wolf living on its own for years and years isn't normal. like many mammals, wolves thrive in packs. no community, no life. what had made Takaya so fascinating and extraordinary was his apparent ability to survive outside the proximity of a community. 

although Takaya's death offers sobering lessons on environmental preservation and the hubris behind modern human survival, this news is also uncannily framed for the present time; Takaya subverts our understanding of survival and community. during the current global crisis of covid-19, the phrases "social distancing," "self-isolation," and "quarantine" have overwhelmed daily life, leading to questions about how community can still survive amidst the total incapacity for being physically together. the internet has become completely indispensable as we turn to social media, online messaging, video conferencing, online shopping, and food delivery to take care of our physical and emotional needs. covid-19 is virtualizing social infrastructures and institutions; it is also virtualizing our material engagement with the world. i joked to my sister that we no longer can say that the matrix is a thing of the future. living via the internet is living in the matrix.   

of course, i don't believe in the clear dichotomy of taking the red pill or the blue pill. it's an existential hyperbole. but as a maximal introvert, i often fantasize about completely unplugging from social media and cutting myself off from all the friends, acquaintances, and strangers online who are privy to what I post online. honestly, i am easily bored by the lives of other people: mundane observations about your morning coffee, mindless re-shares of memes and articles, that amazing thing your spouse did for you the other day (good for them). i also tend to unfollow anyone who engages in too much indulgent self-promotion or has a bit too much of the good old american entrepreneurial spirit, mostly because those posts actually exhaust me and (tongue-in-cheek) #selfcare, amiright? at the end of the day, all that's left in my facebook newsfeed is the new yorker. i realize that my own lack of posting, sharing, and commenting relegates me into the position of being a virtual wallflower, and i'm actually content with that. 

most critics of the internet would probably agree that it isn't inherently a bad thing. i would add, however, that there's a huge difference between using the vast reach of the internet as a helpful tool (or to re-conceptualize aspects of society) and developing a crippling reliance on it to fuel every aspect of your life. yet in the midst of a pandemic, the internet has suddenly become a lifeline for most people, a way to figure out exactly what's going in the world (breaking news every few minutes), a way to be supplied with necessities, and a way to not be alone (because dying alone is an anathema, or just a fucking scary concept).  

these days, many are asking why being isolated or alone is so difficult for us. one could offer a response using the language of biological determinism: "humans being are fundamentally x" or "human beings are hardwired to be y."* maybe that's true. but i also think  and perhaps that has been cultivated by behavioral practices (i.e. ostracization as form of punishment, such as in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or more explicitly, through penal acts of solitary confinement). there are lots of studies out there that try to figure out why humans hate being alone; i'll leave that task of discovery to you. more interestingly, i want to point out that social isolation in the middle of covid-19 isn't really punishment, though. we're being told (by the government and well-intentioned celebrities) that isolation, when done together, is solidarity; it's weirdly ironic. 

so maybe there's a way to get off social media and still be social, to be physically alone but also recognize that our bodily matter is still entangled within the world in so many other ways. for me, taking the red pill isn't only about the philosophy behind a "real truth" obscured by the matrix. maybe the red pill doesn't thrust us outside of the internet-matrix so we can see the truth of reality. taking the red pill just lets us leave and allows us to explore multiplicities of possibility outside the matrix. it's an existential choice about ontology, not a moral one about epistemology. 

https://www.wired.com/story/matrix-red-pill-vs-blue-pill/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/27/canada-mourns-takaya-the-lone-sea-wolf-whose-spirit-captured-the-world-aoe

--

*i am always bothered by this rationale, which seems lazy and irresponsible to the obvious ways in which culture and environment have intervened on our biological "drives." this is most evident in, for example, epigenetics. this is not to say we don't possess some biological and behavioral universalities; i just want people to think more deeply about a phenomenon and not default to assumptions about what is fundamental.  

[noelwanblog]

“After the ferociously talented harpist Bridget Kibbey unpacked her 47-stringed instrument at our NPR Music offices, she proceeded to crush the stereotype of the genteel harp, plucked by angels. She proved that the instrument can be as tempestuous as a tango, as complex as a Bach fugue and sing as serenely as a church choir.”

—

let me just disclaim that this is not a critique of Bridget Kibbey (whom I greatly respect as an industry professional).

instead I would like to briefly criticize NPR writers and other writers/journalists who write shit like “stereotype of the genteel harp, plucked by angels.” seriously, stop creating such utterances (esp. using bro jargon like “crush” to signify some sort of gender performative coolness) that make it SO difficult to respect aesthetic differences (the irony) and ultimately emphasize negating stereotypes instead of exploring other non-stereotype shattering facets of our instrument.

not all harpists choose to “crush” it, and sometimes some of us are trying to but don’t fit the description of “crushing it” because we’re not necessarily focused on creating countermyths of angelic femininity. most of us don’t define ourselves by this stereotype anyway. it’s public perceptions of the harp that ultimately keep fucking us up.

—

on a more positive note...loving loving loving d smoke’s 🔥 visual for black habits i!!!

I'm black as the concrete, black as the street that's lined with the palm trees / I'm black as the night sky when you broke and your bread and your bacon just don't meet / Black as the bottom of Chuck Taylors, black on some "Fuck haters" / Black as the burnt rubber, hittin' donuts in front of the store where two months later / They got stopped and the cops found a black burner underneath the seat on some Nat Turner / Black as the judge robe when the case closed, now your life on the back burner

just as a reminder: https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/3-ways-black-solidarity-was-given-to-asians-that-we-dont-talk-about/

[noelwanblog]

content v. 1

spectating

les parapluies de cherbourg

tierra whack / whack world

megan thee stallion tiny desk

musing

ocean vuong / on earth we’re briefly gorgeous

billy-ray belcourt / my wound is a world

nick estes x tni / red planet

[noelwanblog]

Diversity panels be like:

— Octavia Butler knew... (@NotNikyatu)

May 1, 2018

Also, a great article about diversity in genres here.