Last Seen Blogs
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Dex turned the mug over and over in their hands. "It doesn't bother you?" Dex said. "The thought that your life might mean nothing in the end?"
"That's true for all life I've observed. Why would it bother me?" Mosscap's eyes glowed brightly. "Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilerating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infnitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we're just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Isn't that amazing?"
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers
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"You're an animal, Sibling dex. You are not separate or other. You're an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don't know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don't need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That's what most animals do."
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers
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Dex offered an open palm, and Mosscap took it. The robot's hand was so much bigger, but the two fit together all the same. Dex exhaled and squeezed the metal digits tightly, and as they did so, the lights on Mosscap's finger-tips made their skin glow red.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers
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It is difficult for anyone born and raised in human infrastructure to truly internalize the fact that your view of the world is backward. Even if you fully know that you live in a natural world that existed before you and will continue long after, even if you know that the wilderness is the default state of things, and that nature is not something that only happens in carefully curated enclaves between towns, something that pops up in empty spaces if you ignore them for a while, even if you spend your whole life believing yourself to be deeply in touch wit the ebb and flow, the cycle, the ecosystem as it actually is, you will still have trouble picturing an untouched world. You will still struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the place that are the in-between, no the other way around.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers
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Nobody in the world knows where I am right now, they thought, and the notion of that filled them with bubbling excitement. They had canceled their life, bailed out on a whim. The person they knew themself to be should've been rattled by that, but someone else was at the helm now, someone rebellious and reckless, someone who had picked a direction and gone for it as if it were of no more import than choosing a sandwich. Dex didn't know who they were, in that moment. Perhaps that was why they were smiling.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers
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It was an odd feeling. Any other day, the act of going through a door was something Dex gave no more thought to than putting one foot in front of the other. But there was a gravity to leaving a place for good, a deep sense of seismic change.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers
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[O]ne of the paradigms we've created about AIDS is that of the dead genius. Of course, most of the people who died were not geniuses or great. They were just people who did their best or didn't even try at all. Some of them were nasty and lousy, others mediocre. Some knew how to face and deal with problems, others ran away and blamed the people closest to them.
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman
#the gentrification of the mind#sarah schulman#they were just people#which hurts even more#AIDS#queer history
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I think the thing about gay people in that era was that we were not really especially caustic or campy, we just were so far ahead of the regular culture that we got bored very easily, and moved on to the next thing just to keep ourselves interested.
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman
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She was an articulator of the post-sixties bohemian bad girl. Not a hippie but a kind of art thug. Kathy [Acker] was the girl who knew she had something to say that mattered, who loved sex and music and refused to be obedient. Later cultural movements like punk girls, riot grrrls, rockers, goths, and even, weirdly, the deadly chick lit, can trace their origins to the territory she pioneered and the devoted followings she inspired in her day.
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman
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When the novelist Kathy Acker died in 1997 at the age of fifty-one, she was poised to become recognized as America's leading experimentalist. Her predecessors William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg had recently passed away, and it was—in effect—her turn....But truthfully, Kathy has quickly fallen off the radar. Her books are rarely taught, and younger writers seem unaware of her huge influence. What I tend to tell my students is that "when you look in the mirror and see a smart, angry girl who wants to be free, you're seeing a paradigm that Kathy helped bring into the realm of of the recognizable."
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman
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It is helpful in this moment to think back to ACT UP's politics of accountability: If someone hurts you, you have the right to respond. Your response is the consequence of their violating action. Pharmaceutical executives, politicians who have pledged to represent and serve the American people, religious leaders who claim moral authority—anyone who interfered with progress for people with AIDS was made to face a consequence for the pain they caused. To do this, ACT UP had to identify what needed to be changed, identify the individuals who were obstructing that change, clearly propose courses of action that were doable and justifiable, and then force the people with power—through the tactic of direct action—to do something different than what they wanted to do. Making people accountable is always in the interest of justice. The dominant, however, hate accountability. Vagueness, lack of delineation of how things work, the idea that people do not have to keep their promises—these tactics always serve the lying, the obstructive, the hypocritical.
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman
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Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman
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In the early years, people with AIDS had no protections of any kind. Homosexuality itself was still illegal—and sodomy laws would not be repealed until 2003 in the Supreme Court ruling Lawrence v. Texas. There was no antidiscrimination legislation, no gay rights bill in New York City, no benefits, no qualifying for insurance or social services. There were no treatments. Particularly gruesome was that surviving partners or roommates were not allowed to inherit leases that had been in the dead person's name.
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman
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[W]hile literal gentrification was very important to what I was observing, there was also a spiritual gentrification that was affecting people who did not have rights, who were not represented, who did not have power or even consciousness about the reality of their own condition. There was a gentrification of the mind, an internal replacement that alienated people from the concrete process of social and artistic change.
"Introduction" to The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman
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The younger people loved ACT UP. But in some fundamental way they couldn't relate to it. They didn't understand what we had experienced. They had never been that oppressed. They had never been that profoundly oppressed. And yet, they wanted to relate. They also had never been that inspired, that inventive or that effective. They were intelligent and thoughtful. They wanted to understand.
"Introduction" to The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman
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Everyone had suffered profoundly from that magic combination of the mass death of their friends and the mas indifference of government, families, and society. We were laughing and smiling and hugging and flirting, as we always had with each other, but somehow it was being among each other that was the most normalizing. I looked at my friends from ACT UP and I saw people who were somehow both heroes and freaks, because they had achieved the impossible and paid the high price of alienation brought by knowledge, as heroes and freaks always do.
"Introduction" to The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, by Sarah Schulman
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In those thirty seconds something flashed before my eyes: all the queers on TV, their voices singing in musicals even though everyone said it was weird and stupid. I thought of how much our bodies had endured, and Sappho and Oscar Wilde and Adrienne Rich and everyone in between. I thought of Angels in America and Cabaret and Michelangelo, and all the dancers I didn’t know the names of, and the countless dead, the ones who died of AIDS or got beaten up or burned at stakes, and I felt my shoulders spread open a little, like flexing a new muscle in my shoulder blades, like something was growing back there.
Burning Butch, by R/B Mertz
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