readingsandnotes

[readingsandnotes]

This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.

Thomas Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race

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Alexander Artway Café, Paris 1930

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Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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All my life I’d been writing poems to write poems. I didn’t conceive of books. But then I thought, I’m going to make a book. I was writing a lot of poems, or beginning a lot of poems, that seemed like they were doing exactly what the poems in Field Guide were doing. And then at a certain point I felt like I was writing another kind of poem. There was a specific change, you can hear it in the first few pages of Praise. “Heroic Simile,” “Meditation at Lagunitas,” and “Against Botticelli” were not necessarily about a long line but about engaging a declarative sentence. Trying to learn to write free verse, my models were strongly accentual versions of that mode—William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder, Ezra Pound, and Denise Levertov to some extent. And the other thing I had acquired, probably from reading Hemingway and American culture in general, was a certain style of masculinity. The ideal of the laconic male who didn’t have a whole lot to say except, Yup. Nope. Yes ma’am. No ma’am. And in Hemingway’s prose the tactic seems to be, like in “Big Two-Hearted River,” just describe what you’re seeing and the reader will guess what you’re feeling. And at a certain point in my life—maybe something I’d learned in marriage—this was not an idiom in which I could think very well or feel very intensely. You didn’t want to be a wall to the person you were living with. And so the breath changed. The flow of the lines got longer than in the music I knew how to hear. And so the writing changed.

Robert Hass, The Art of Poetry No. 108 

#poetry #writing #masculinity #emotion #robert hass #The Paris Review #free verse

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“The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what’s going on, and we let it go on.”

— Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

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Mainstream America accepts pride the same way they accept the Civil Rights Movement: only on the condition that it be framed as a celebration for a battle already won in which they were always blameless and not an ongoing struggle in which they are still very much the oppressors.

@RoseOfWindsong (via azspot)

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Nancy Holt, Views Through a Sand Dune, Narragansett Beach, Rhode Island, 1972

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In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine…The workers are deprived of every individual consistency. Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist. Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salary

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

#jenny odell #how to do nothing #social media #gig economy #capitalism #marxism #productivity #gig workers #labor

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In After the Future, the Marxist theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi ties the defeat of labor movements in the eighties to rise of the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs. In the past, he notes, economic risk was the business of the capitalist, the investor. Today, though, “‘we are all capitalists’…and therefore, we all have to take risks…The essential idea is that we should all consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.”

Jenny Odell, How to do Nothing

#Jenny Odell #How to do nothing #franco berardi #after the future #capitalism #marxism #labor #entrepreneurship #personal brand #gig economy

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In a public space, ideally, you are a citizen with agency; in a faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

#jenny odell #How to do nothing #public space #architecture #design #capitalism #consumerism #urbanism #freedom

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The most obvious difference between public space and other spaces is that you don’t have to buy anything, or pretend to want to buy something, to be there.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

#jenny odell #quotes #how to do nothing #public space #public life #capitalism #society #architecture #urbanism #consumerism

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And to me it seems significant that it’s not eight hours of, say, “leisure” or “education,” but “eight hours of what we will.” Although leisure or education might be involved, the most humane way to describe that period is to refuse to define it.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

#jenny odell #workers rights #capitalism #labor #marxism #work day #leisure time

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We mean to make things over, We are tired of toil for naught With but bare enough to live upon And ne'er an hour for thought. We want to feel the sunshine And we want to smell the flow'rs We are sure that God has willed it And we mean to have eight hours; We're summoning our forces From the shipyard, shop and mill Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest Eight hours for what we will; Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest Eight hours for what we will. The beasts that graze the hillside, And the birds that wander free, In the life that God has meted, Have a better life than we. Oh, hands and hearts are weary, And homes are heavy with dole; If our life's to be filled with drudg'ry, What need of a human soul. Shout, shout the lusty rally, From shipyard, shop, and mill. Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest Eight hours for what we will; Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest Eight hours for what we will. The voice of God within us Is calling us to stand Erect as is becoming To the work of His right hand. Should he, to whom the Maker His glorious image gave, The meanest of His creatures crouch, A bread-and-butter slave? Let the shout ring down the valleys And echo from every hill . Ye deem they're [sic] feeble voices That are raised in labor's cause, But bethink ye of the torrent, And the wild tornado's laws. We say not toil's uprising In terror's shape will come, Yet the world were wise to listen To the monetary hum. Soon, soon the deep toned rally Shall all the nations thrill. Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest Eight hours for what we will; Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest Eight hours for what we will. From factories and workshops In long and weary lines, From all the sweltering forges, And from out the sunless mines, Wherever toil is wasting The force of life to live There the bent and battered armies Come to claim what God doth give And the blazon on the banner Doth with hope the nation fill: Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest Eight hours for what we will; Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest Eight hours for what we will. Hurrah, hurrah for labor, For it shall arise in might It has filled the world with plenty, It shall fill the world with light Hurrah, hurrah for labor, It is mustering all its powers And shall march along to victory With the banner of Eight Hours. Shout, shout the echoing rally Till all the welkin thrill. Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest Eight hours for what we will; Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest Eight hours for what we will.

I.G. Blanchard, “Eight Hours”

Quoted in Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing

#i.g. blanchard #eight hours #workers rights #labor #trade unions #jenny odell #How to do nothing #songs #workers hymns #capitalism

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Ultimately, I argue for a view of the self and of identity that is the opposite of the personal brand: an unstable, shapeshifting thing determined by interactions with others and with different kinds of places.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

#jenny odell #how to do nothing #personal brand #capitalism #social media #identity

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It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. It’s also important because of the parallels between what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention. In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as “not useful” and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go. Because it proceeds from a false understanding of life as atomized and optimizable, this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function. Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow. As it extinguishes one species of thought after

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

#jenny odell #How to do nothing #global warming #productivity #technology #social media #ecology

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The first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That “something else” is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I want to argue for a new “placefulness” that yields sensitivity and responsibility to the historical (what happened here) and the ecological (who and what lives, or lived, here).

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

#jenny odell #How to do nothing #productivity #capitalism #self #social media #technology

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To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual. In an environment completely geared toward capitalist appropriation of even our smallest thoughts, doing this isn’t any less uncomfortable than wearing the wrong outfit to a place with a dress code. To remain in this state takes commitment, discipline, and will. Doing nothing is hard.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

#jenny odell #how to do nothing #capitalism #attention economy #resistance #productivity