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“The plants themselves encoded something utopian for me, a vision of how the world ought to be. At the same time I had a disinclination to act so powerful it felt ordained. It wasn’t just laziness; it was a sense of the pointlessness of human effort, that almost every action had some damaging consequence, and that it was better to simply let things be. […] Staying power had come later, in my thirties; the helpful revelation that there is no mystery to any creative endeavour save for turning up each day and knuckling down to it, hour after tedious or – but this was far rarer – joyful hour. That was when I started making gardens and writing books, the unhappy years of failed dreaming an increasingly unvisited memory.”
— Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
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Showing posts with label Quotes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quotes. Show all posts
July 11, 2026
July 9, 2026
"...even more immediacy, connection, and public life in art and in performance."
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"And I’ve always had such a difficult, conflicted relationship with performing. All of the things you say are true: I do like the immediacy, connection, and the idea of a public life that are embodied in the act of performance. And, at the same time, I’m disappointed that I haven’t been able to find or create even more immediacy, connection, and public life in art and in performance. There is a sense of ongoing failure that makes the real moments of immediacy and connection in performance all that much more precious. I feel that I’ve wasted my life and I also feel that I haven’t. In a way, for me the act of performance is embodied in this sentiment."
- Jacob Wren, from Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART with Sylvie Lachance and Geneviève Robichaud
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"And I’ve always had such a difficult, conflicted relationship with performing. All of the things you say are true: I do like the immediacy, connection, and the idea of a public life that are embodied in the act of performance. And, at the same time, I’m disappointed that I haven’t been able to find or create even more immediacy, connection, and public life in art and in performance. There is a sense of ongoing failure that makes the real moments of immediacy and connection in performance all that much more precious. I feel that I’ve wasted my life and I also feel that I haven’t. In a way, for me the act of performance is embodied in this sentiment."
- Jacob Wren, from Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART with Sylvie Lachance and Geneviève Robichaud
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June 24, 2026
Kawai Shen Quote
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“Despite the suspension of norms in the mosh pit and the lifting of prohibitions on exercising aggression and violence, moshing was never a free-for-all. Like any social endeavour, there were unwritten rules of conduct. Entering a new millennium ushered in by forest fires, warmongering, and a global pandemic, I repeat to myself the lessons I’ve learned. Grasp the hands of the fallen so they are not trampled. Do not tolerate those monopolizing space for themselves. There is something honest and necessary in the proximity that pain causes, in the urgency to stay connected to each other. There can be unity in disorder. Seek it out, make it grow.”
― Kawai Shen, Wavering Futures
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“Despite the suspension of norms in the mosh pit and the lifting of prohibitions on exercising aggression and violence, moshing was never a free-for-all. Like any social endeavour, there were unwritten rules of conduct. Entering a new millennium ushered in by forest fires, warmongering, and a global pandemic, I repeat to myself the lessons I’ve learned. Grasp the hands of the fallen so they are not trampled. Do not tolerate those monopolizing space for themselves. There is something honest and necessary in the proximity that pain causes, in the urgency to stay connected to each other. There can be unity in disorder. Seek it out, make it grow.”
― Kawai Shen, Wavering Futures
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May 28, 2026
Ten years of Rich and Poor
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Thinking about how my novel Rich and Poor came out in 2016, which is now ten years ago. (And, thanks to Luigi Mangione, it has even started selling again.)
*
“I will kill him. It will solve nothing and help no one, but for me at least, it will bring something to an end. The poor must kill the rich, one at a time, at every opportunity. One man kills another and the message is clear, your wealth is cruel and unnatural. You can put fences, guards and dogs around your home, so you are like a prisoner in your own life, but if you are rich you will live in fear. You will fear your servants. You will look out the window of your limousine and, at every traffic light, wonder if each and every passerby has a gun and bullet with your name on it. It is only that the killing must be completely random. The victims having nothing in common other than their wealth, the killers nothing in common other than their poverty. The message should be clear: if you are rich you can be killed at any time. The police would arrest millions but there would always be another poor man that could suddenly snap. We would only have to kill ten to start, to strike fear in the hearts of every billionaire in the world. And he will be the first. I will see to it.
On a social level, people have to look after each other, but on an ethical level, each of us has to look after ourselves. If you are a billionaire it is because you have done evil in the world. You have exploited and caused untold misery. You have bent laws and governments to your will. I don’t want to shoot him. I want to strangle him with piano wire. I don’t want to escape. I want to be caught and explain my idea to the world. I want to be executed. I now have nothing to lose. We will all be forgotten. But if ten of us manage to kill billionaires those ten will be remembered forever. Our poverty will become history. Wealth is impersonal but we will make it personal again.”
– Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor
.
Thinking about how my novel Rich and Poor came out in 2016, which is now ten years ago. (And, thanks to Luigi Mangione, it has even started selling again.)
*
“I will kill him. It will solve nothing and help no one, but for me at least, it will bring something to an end. The poor must kill the rich, one at a time, at every opportunity. One man kills another and the message is clear, your wealth is cruel and unnatural. You can put fences, guards and dogs around your home, so you are like a prisoner in your own life, but if you are rich you will live in fear. You will fear your servants. You will look out the window of your limousine and, at every traffic light, wonder if each and every passerby has a gun and bullet with your name on it. It is only that the killing must be completely random. The victims having nothing in common other than their wealth, the killers nothing in common other than their poverty. The message should be clear: if you are rich you can be killed at any time. The police would arrest millions but there would always be another poor man that could suddenly snap. We would only have to kill ten to start, to strike fear in the hearts of every billionaire in the world. And he will be the first. I will see to it.
On a social level, people have to look after each other, but on an ethical level, each of us has to look after ourselves. If you are a billionaire it is because you have done evil in the world. You have exploited and caused untold misery. You have bent laws and governments to your will. I don’t want to shoot him. I want to strangle him with piano wire. I don’t want to escape. I want to be caught and explain my idea to the world. I want to be executed. I now have nothing to lose. We will all be forgotten. But if ten of us manage to kill billionaires those ten will be remembered forever. Our poverty will become history. Wealth is impersonal but we will make it personal again.”
– Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor
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May 24, 2026
Oliver Fugler Quote
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“Many of our biggest blunders have occurred when trying to keep pace with the industry, when applying pressure that one or many of us can’t bear. Commonly, publishers are portrayed as deadline fiends, hounding willy-nilly artists for their work, and with any extra pressure on any one of the parties, the cycle stutters and heaves.
A disability justice lens, and its rhetorical influence on and co-creation with BIPOC and queer and trans communities, would have us all understand that that kind of pressure serves none of us, in the end. We are here, rather, to care about and for each other, and if it takes time and resources and adjustments, that’s not a barrier but rather the conditions that we must lovingly meet in order to live.”
― Oliver Fugler, from the Intro to Sharp Pink Claws: New Writing by Metonymy Press Authors, Vol. 2
[Check out all the amazing books at Metonymy Press.]
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“Many of our biggest blunders have occurred when trying to keep pace with the industry, when applying pressure that one or many of us can’t bear. Commonly, publishers are portrayed as deadline fiends, hounding willy-nilly artists for their work, and with any extra pressure on any one of the parties, the cycle stutters and heaves.
A disability justice lens, and its rhetorical influence on and co-creation with BIPOC and queer and trans communities, would have us all understand that that kind of pressure serves none of us, in the end. We are here, rather, to care about and for each other, and if it takes time and resources and adjustments, that’s not a barrier but rather the conditions that we must lovingly meet in order to live.”
― Oliver Fugler, from the Intro to Sharp Pink Claws: New Writing by Metonymy Press Authors, Vol. 2
[Check out all the amazing books at Metonymy Press.]
.
February 22, 2026
"the problems of the world will not melt away"
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“As we walked in silence, I realized I couldn’t help myself. I was talking to the Popsicle because I literally had no one else to talk to. At home, I might not have had friends, but there was always someone to talk to. What a sick world this is where you talk to the enemy because there’s literally no one else, feeling so depressed by this idea that, to cheer myself up, I start imagining him as an actual popsicle. A big purple dripping popsicle walking alongside me, two wooden popsicle sticks for legs, angling his frame from side to side with every awkward step. A big purple popsicle with a beautiful popsicle wife and two beautiful popsicle children. Then I imagine him melting, that eventually he will melt away to nothing, leaving a long purple sticky trail behind him, like a purple popsicle snail. And it occurs to me this might be what I most want, for the problems of the world to simply melt away. But the problems of the world will not melt away, we must find tools and strategies to push against them, and I wonder, even here, in this hopeless predicament, what such tools and strategies might be, as the imaginary purple popsicle continues to melt into nothingness beside me.”
- Jacob Wren, Dry Your Eyes to Perfect Your Aim
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“As we walked in silence, I realized I couldn’t help myself. I was talking to the Popsicle because I literally had no one else to talk to. At home, I might not have had friends, but there was always someone to talk to. What a sick world this is where you talk to the enemy because there’s literally no one else, feeling so depressed by this idea that, to cheer myself up, I start imagining him as an actual popsicle. A big purple dripping popsicle walking alongside me, two wooden popsicle sticks for legs, angling his frame from side to side with every awkward step. A big purple popsicle with a beautiful popsicle wife and two beautiful popsicle children. Then I imagine him melting, that eventually he will melt away to nothing, leaving a long purple sticky trail behind him, like a purple popsicle snail. And it occurs to me this might be what I most want, for the problems of the world to simply melt away. But the problems of the world will not melt away, we must find tools and strategies to push against them, and I wonder, even here, in this hopeless predicament, what such tools and strategies might be, as the imaginary purple popsicle continues to melt into nothingness beside me.”
- Jacob Wren, Dry Your Eyes to Perfect Your Aim
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January 24, 2026
Amy Fusselman Quote
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"The parental gaze returned me to a quote I had read a few years earlier, by British child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, in his 1971 book Playing and Reality, in a chapter on adolescent development. Although my kids weren’t yet adolescents when I first read it—two of the three of them are now—it has remained one of the most significant things I have read in my parenting life:
“If you do all you can to promote personal growth in your offspring, you will need to be able to deal with startling results. If your children find themselves at all they will not be contented to find anything but the whole of themselves, and that will include the aggression and destructive elements in themselves as well as the elements that can be labelled loving. There will be this long tussle which you will need to survive.”
In all my parental discussions up to that moment—with teachers, principals, pediatricians, and other significant figures in my parenting work—I had never before heard a peep about the desirability of dealing with “startling results” such as these. The parenting canon as I had seen it seemed rife with experts whose sole aim—I am thinking now of the brightly-titled mega-bestseller 1-2-3 Magic—was to keep the parent secure in his/her domain of wizard-y control. That as brilliant a psychoanalyst as Winnicott should have stated that a death-defying “tussle” is an essential aspect of parenting whole children—and serves as a sign that one has parented well rather than poorly—is a concept I have held onto tightly in part because I have heard it expressed so seldom."
- Amy Fusselman, On the Parental Gaze
.
"The parental gaze returned me to a quote I had read a few years earlier, by British child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, in his 1971 book Playing and Reality, in a chapter on adolescent development. Although my kids weren’t yet adolescents when I first read it—two of the three of them are now—it has remained one of the most significant things I have read in my parenting life:
“If you do all you can to promote personal growth in your offspring, you will need to be able to deal with startling results. If your children find themselves at all they will not be contented to find anything but the whole of themselves, and that will include the aggression and destructive elements in themselves as well as the elements that can be labelled loving. There will be this long tussle which you will need to survive.”
In all my parental discussions up to that moment—with teachers, principals, pediatricians, and other significant figures in my parenting work—I had never before heard a peep about the desirability of dealing with “startling results” such as these. The parenting canon as I had seen it seemed rife with experts whose sole aim—I am thinking now of the brightly-titled mega-bestseller 1-2-3 Magic—was to keep the parent secure in his/her domain of wizard-y control. That as brilliant a psychoanalyst as Winnicott should have stated that a death-defying “tussle” is an essential aspect of parenting whole children—and serves as a sign that one has parented well rather than poorly—is a concept I have held onto tightly in part because I have heard it expressed so seldom."
- Amy Fusselman, On the Parental Gaze
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November 28, 2025
Two Mariame Kaba Quotes
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“But most of us remain just ordinary humans. Not everyone is rising to the occasion because the times you live in do not immediately shape who you are and what you do. The other truth, I believe, is that you rise to the level of your training and practice, not to the level of your imagined self.”
– Mariame Kaba, We Don’t Know Where We Will End Up…
*
“Looking out at the current landscape, visionary leaders or guides are in short supply. Who are the people in our current moment who are focusing on the transformed worlds we could have? Those who are not settling for shrunken horizons under the guise of so-called realism and pragmatism. Who in public life regularly says: “Be realistic - demand the impossible?” The world as currently constituted can be changed. I don’t think enough people truly believe this though and we really need people who help us to see past the current moment towards something different and better.
My father often encouraged me to fail big because it was a guarantee that I would fail at certain things that I tried. And he said that since failure was built into living, it was best to do so boldly and audaciously. And by taking big risks, I would increase the likelihood that I might also sometimes exceed what I thought were my limits. Right now, I think we need public figures we respect telling us not to settle for crumbs and not to allow ourselves to be convinced that what’s on offer is the best that can be done. It isn’t.
We need leaders calling us to a standard in excess of the prescribed pragmatism of these times. We need to be encouraged to take some big swings with others, and that means we will make mistakes. The current construct seeks to limit our imaginations. Who will remind us to shoot for a place beyond the moon? The status quo is unrealistic and impractical. In fact, for most of the planet, it is oppressive and death-making. We want life; we want livingness for all.”
- Mariame Kaba, We Don’t Know Where We Will End Up…
.
“But most of us remain just ordinary humans. Not everyone is rising to the occasion because the times you live in do not immediately shape who you are and what you do. The other truth, I believe, is that you rise to the level of your training and practice, not to the level of your imagined self.”
– Mariame Kaba, We Don’t Know Where We Will End Up…
*
“Looking out at the current landscape, visionary leaders or guides are in short supply. Who are the people in our current moment who are focusing on the transformed worlds we could have? Those who are not settling for shrunken horizons under the guise of so-called realism and pragmatism. Who in public life regularly says: “Be realistic - demand the impossible?” The world as currently constituted can be changed. I don’t think enough people truly believe this though and we really need people who help us to see past the current moment towards something different and better.
My father often encouraged me to fail big because it was a guarantee that I would fail at certain things that I tried. And he said that since failure was built into living, it was best to do so boldly and audaciously. And by taking big risks, I would increase the likelihood that I might also sometimes exceed what I thought were my limits. Right now, I think we need public figures we respect telling us not to settle for crumbs and not to allow ourselves to be convinced that what’s on offer is the best that can be done. It isn’t.
We need leaders calling us to a standard in excess of the prescribed pragmatism of these times. We need to be encouraged to take some big swings with others, and that means we will make mistakes. The current construct seeks to limit our imaginations. Who will remind us to shoot for a place beyond the moon? The status quo is unrealistic and impractical. In fact, for most of the planet, it is oppressive and death-making. We want life; we want livingness for all.”
- Mariame Kaba, We Don’t Know Where We Will End Up…
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July 24, 2025
Francesca Albanese Quote
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“And to the Palestinians and those from all corners of the world standing by them, often at great cost and sacrifice, I say whatever happens, Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter—not as a footnote in the chronicles of would-be conquerors, but as the newest verse in a centuries-long saga of peoples who have risen against injustice, colonialism, and today more than ever neoliberal tyranny.”
- Francesca Albanese
From Francesca Albanese's remarks to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, at the Hague Group Emergency Conference of States in Bogotá, Colombia.
,
“And to the Palestinians and those from all corners of the world standing by them, often at great cost and sacrifice, I say whatever happens, Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter—not as a footnote in the chronicles of would-be conquerors, but as the newest verse in a centuries-long saga of peoples who have risen against injustice, colonialism, and today more than ever neoliberal tyranny.”
- Francesca Albanese
From Francesca Albanese's remarks to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, at the Hague Group Emergency Conference of States in Bogotá, Colombia.
,
April 16, 2025
Nick Romeo on José María Arizmendiarrieta
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In his collected writings, José María Arizmendiarrieta championed a revolutionary pragmatism. To deserve the name, idealists must take their own goals seriously enough to try to realize them. “The ideal thing is to do the good that can be done, not the good that is dreamt of,” he wrote. The value of lofty ideals lies in their capacity to inspire action: “Great ideals do not have to be precisely attainable to be useful to us.” For those who critique current systems but create nothing better to replace them, his words still offer a pointed challenge: build institutions, develop capacities, and change legislation. “No moans but action,” he urged. The noblest ideals risk becoming empty rhetoric if not married to effective and disciplined execution. “Being badly organized should not be confused with having respect for freedom.”
Despite his eloquent insistence on pragmatic action, Arizmendiarrieta also rejected a utilitarianism that values only results. How something is achieved matters. “It is not enough for the managers and bosses to perform good deeds, it is necessary that the workers participate,” he wrote. If an enlightened executive in a traditional company chose to cap their pay at six times the salary of the lowest-paid employee, this would be good. It would also resemble the decree of an enlightened monarch. Within Mondragon, members of the cooperatives have voted democratically on the ratio between the highest and lowest compensation levels. Particular cooperatives are free to have a ratio smaller than 6:1, as many do; member-owners could also vote to expand the ratio in the future. Mondragon’s institutional design depends on democracy. It can flourish only if most individuals continue to value its traditions of equality and solidarity. Rather than assuming that markets alchemize private greed into public good, Arizmendiarrieta built the cooperatives in a way that emphasized both institutional safeguards and individual moral character: “There can never be great works without people giving generously and without them sacrificing their selfish appetites,” he wrote.
Arizmendiarrieta’s defiance of easy categorization makes him a provocative challenge to many contemporary shibboleths. He created effective institutions without ignoring the importance of individual ethics; he recognized the value of capital and profit but saw both as subordinate to broader social aims; he created a business structure that competed effectively in international markets while rejecting basic assumptions of capitalist firms. Perhaps most astonishing of all, his insights were not merely theoretical achievements; they were realized in a dense web of structures that have become the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world.
– Nick Romeo, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
.
In his collected writings, José María Arizmendiarrieta championed a revolutionary pragmatism. To deserve the name, idealists must take their own goals seriously enough to try to realize them. “The ideal thing is to do the good that can be done, not the good that is dreamt of,” he wrote. The value of lofty ideals lies in their capacity to inspire action: “Great ideals do not have to be precisely attainable to be useful to us.” For those who critique current systems but create nothing better to replace them, his words still offer a pointed challenge: build institutions, develop capacities, and change legislation. “No moans but action,” he urged. The noblest ideals risk becoming empty rhetoric if not married to effective and disciplined execution. “Being badly organized should not be confused with having respect for freedom.”
Despite his eloquent insistence on pragmatic action, Arizmendiarrieta also rejected a utilitarianism that values only results. How something is achieved matters. “It is not enough for the managers and bosses to perform good deeds, it is necessary that the workers participate,” he wrote. If an enlightened executive in a traditional company chose to cap their pay at six times the salary of the lowest-paid employee, this would be good. It would also resemble the decree of an enlightened monarch. Within Mondragon, members of the cooperatives have voted democratically on the ratio between the highest and lowest compensation levels. Particular cooperatives are free to have a ratio smaller than 6:1, as many do; member-owners could also vote to expand the ratio in the future. Mondragon’s institutional design depends on democracy. It can flourish only if most individuals continue to value its traditions of equality and solidarity. Rather than assuming that markets alchemize private greed into public good, Arizmendiarrieta built the cooperatives in a way that emphasized both institutional safeguards and individual moral character: “There can never be great works without people giving generously and without them sacrificing their selfish appetites,” he wrote.
Arizmendiarrieta’s defiance of easy categorization makes him a provocative challenge to many contemporary shibboleths. He created effective institutions without ignoring the importance of individual ethics; he recognized the value of capital and profit but saw both as subordinate to broader social aims; he created a business structure that competed effectively in international markets while rejecting basic assumptions of capitalist firms. Perhaps most astonishing of all, his insights were not merely theoretical achievements; they were realized in a dense web of structures that have become the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world.
– Nick Romeo, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
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April 10, 2025
Two short quotes from Rich and Poor
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“I start to think fear is the most furious part of courage. Knowing how full and real and justified your fears are but still not letting them stop you.”
- Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor (p. 144)
“I must experience everything that is about to happen to me as fully as possible, I must experience it as some kind of joy. I can’t just let it all speed by without living it fully. I can’t let this life or this struggle happen without me.”
- Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor (p. 176)
*
Someone posted these two quotes on Goodreads and, even though I don't remember writing either of them, they struck me as things I was rather happy to have written.
Also, I suppose thanks to Luigi Mangione, more people seem to be reading my 2016 novel Rich and Poor. (It’s about a man who washes dishes for a living who decides to kill a billionaire as a political act.)
You can read my favourite review of Rich and Poor here.
.
“I start to think fear is the most furious part of courage. Knowing how full and real and justified your fears are but still not letting them stop you.”
- Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor (p. 144)
“I must experience everything that is about to happen to me as fully as possible, I must experience it as some kind of joy. I can’t just let it all speed by without living it fully. I can’t let this life or this struggle happen without me.”
- Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor (p. 176)
*
Someone posted these two quotes on Goodreads and, even though I don't remember writing either of them, they struck me as things I was rather happy to have written.
Also, I suppose thanks to Luigi Mangione, more people seem to be reading my 2016 novel Rich and Poor. (It’s about a man who washes dishes for a living who decides to kill a billionaire as a political act.)
You can read my favourite review of Rich and Poor here.
.
February 2, 2025
Sam Kriss Quote
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“When, occasionally, genuinely significant things happen to Musk, Walter Isaacson largely ignores them. In May 2002, Elon’s first wife Justine gave birth to their first child, a son. They named him Nevada, because he’d been conceived at Burning Man. When Nevada was ten weeks old, he suddenly stopped breathing in his sleep. Paramedics managed to resuscitate him, but his brain had been starved of oxygen. Three days later, his parents decided to turn off his life support and let him die. You could write an entire novel about this one incident. This brash, thoughtless millionaire, with all his abstract ambitions, suddenly encountering the frailty of human life. And that was only the beginning. Elon had invited his father to visit from South Africa and meet his grandson; Errol only found out that the grandson was dead once he landed. Elon, in deep anguish, decided he wanted his violent, abusive father to stick around. He bought a house in Malibu for Errol and his new family. But things swiftly got weird. Errol’s second wife, nineteen years his junior, started to develop some sort of untoward relationship with her stepson. (Errol commented: “She saw Elon now as the provider in her life and not me.”) Meanwhile, Errol was beginning to develop some sort of untoward relationship with his own fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Jana. (They currently have two children together.) This seedy drama, guilt and money and sex, all swirling around the death of a child. It’s a Harold Pinter play. It’s a Greek tragedy. Walter Isaacson dispenses with the whole thing in less than three pages. He ends the chapter with his grand conclusion, his final word on this intense human experience. It’s this: “Personal networks are more complex than digital ones.” The next chapter is about building rockets. So is the next one. So is the one after that.”
- Sam Kriss, Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer
.
“When, occasionally, genuinely significant things happen to Musk, Walter Isaacson largely ignores them. In May 2002, Elon’s first wife Justine gave birth to their first child, a son. They named him Nevada, because he’d been conceived at Burning Man. When Nevada was ten weeks old, he suddenly stopped breathing in his sleep. Paramedics managed to resuscitate him, but his brain had been starved of oxygen. Three days later, his parents decided to turn off his life support and let him die. You could write an entire novel about this one incident. This brash, thoughtless millionaire, with all his abstract ambitions, suddenly encountering the frailty of human life. And that was only the beginning. Elon had invited his father to visit from South Africa and meet his grandson; Errol only found out that the grandson was dead once he landed. Elon, in deep anguish, decided he wanted his violent, abusive father to stick around. He bought a house in Malibu for Errol and his new family. But things swiftly got weird. Errol’s second wife, nineteen years his junior, started to develop some sort of untoward relationship with her stepson. (Errol commented: “She saw Elon now as the provider in her life and not me.”) Meanwhile, Errol was beginning to develop some sort of untoward relationship with his own fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Jana. (They currently have two children together.) This seedy drama, guilt and money and sex, all swirling around the death of a child. It’s a Harold Pinter play. It’s a Greek tragedy. Walter Isaacson dispenses with the whole thing in less than three pages. He ends the chapter with his grand conclusion, his final word on this intense human experience. It’s this: “Personal networks are more complex than digital ones.” The next chapter is about building rockets. So is the next one. So is the one after that.”
- Sam Kriss, Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer
.
January 15, 2025
Camilla Townsend Quote
.
“In the privacy of their own homes, away from the eyes of the Spaniards, what the Nahuatl speakers most often wrote was history. Before the conquest, they had a tradition called the xiuhpohualli (shoo-po-WA-lee), which meant “year count” or “yearly account,” even though Western historians have nicknamed the sources “annals.” In the old days, trained historians stood and gave accounts of the people’s history at public gatherings in the courtyards located between palaces and temples. They proceeded carefully year by year; in moments of high drama different speakers stepped forward to cover the same time period again, until all perspectives taken together yielded an understanding of the whole series of events. The pattern mimicked the rotational, reciprocal format of all aspects of their lives: in their world tasks were shared or passed back and forth, so that no one group would have to handle something unpleasant all the time or be accorded unlimited power all the time. Such performances generally recounted stories that would be of interest to the larger group – the rise of chiefs and later their deaths (timely or untimely), the wars they fought and the reasons for them, remarkable natural phenomena, and major celebrations or horrifying executions. Although certain subjects were favored, the texts were hardly devoid of personality: different communities and different individuals included different details. Political schisms were illustrated via colorful dialogue between leaders of different schools of thought. The speakers would sometimes even slip into the present tense as they delivered such leaders’ lines, as if they were in a play. Occasionally they would shout questions that eager audience members were expected to answer.”
– Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
.
“In the privacy of their own homes, away from the eyes of the Spaniards, what the Nahuatl speakers most often wrote was history. Before the conquest, they had a tradition called the xiuhpohualli (shoo-po-WA-lee), which meant “year count” or “yearly account,” even though Western historians have nicknamed the sources “annals.” In the old days, trained historians stood and gave accounts of the people’s history at public gatherings in the courtyards located between palaces and temples. They proceeded carefully year by year; in moments of high drama different speakers stepped forward to cover the same time period again, until all perspectives taken together yielded an understanding of the whole series of events. The pattern mimicked the rotational, reciprocal format of all aspects of their lives: in their world tasks were shared or passed back and forth, so that no one group would have to handle something unpleasant all the time or be accorded unlimited power all the time. Such performances generally recounted stories that would be of interest to the larger group – the rise of chiefs and later their deaths (timely or untimely), the wars they fought and the reasons for them, remarkable natural phenomena, and major celebrations or horrifying executions. Although certain subjects were favored, the texts were hardly devoid of personality: different communities and different individuals included different details. Political schisms were illustrated via colorful dialogue between leaders of different schools of thought. The speakers would sometimes even slip into the present tense as they delivered such leaders’ lines, as if they were in a play. Occasionally they would shout questions that eager audience members were expected to answer.”
– Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
.
January 8, 2025
Francesca Polletta Quote
.
“What comes across in the stories that Myles Horton tells, in SNCC workers’ tales of best organizers, and in the broader literature on organizing is good organizers’ creativity: their ability to respond to local conditions, to capitalize on sudden opportunities, to turn to advantage a seeming setback, to know when to exploit teachable moments and when to concentrate on winning an immediate objective. Sometimes you insist on fully participatory decision-making; sometimes you do not. Albany SNCC project head Charles Sherrod urged fellow organizers not to “let the project go to the dogs because you feel you must be democratic to the letter.” Horton recounted on numerous occasions an experience that he had had in a union organizing effort. At the time, the highway patrol was escorting scabs through the picket line, and the strike committee was at its wit’s end about how to counter this threat to strikers’ solidarity. After considering and rejecting numerous proposals, exhausted committee members demanded advice from Horton. When he refused, one of them pulled a gun. “I was tempted then to become an instant expert, right on the spot!” Horton confessed. “But I knew that if I did that, all would be lost and then all of the rest of them would start asking me what to do. So I said: ‘No. Go ahead and shoot if you want to, but I’m not going to tell you.’ And the others calmed him down.”
Giving in would have defeated the purpose of persuading the strikers that they had the knowledge to make the decision themselves. But Horton sometimes told another story. When he was once asked to speak to a group of Tennessee farmers about organizing a cooperative, he knew, he said, that since “their expectation was that I would speak as an expert… if I didn’t speak, and said, ‘let’s have a discussion about this,’ they’d say, that this guy doesn’t know anything.” So Horton “made a speech, the best speech I could. Then after it was over, while we were still there, I said, let’s discuss what I have said. Well now, that was just one step removed, but close enough to their expectation that I was able to carry them along… You do have to make concessions like that.” What better time to make a concession than when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun? Horton presumably knew that he could get away with refusing to be an expert in the first situation and not in the second. Perhaps the difference was that he was unknown to the farmers and was known to the strikers. But one could argue that a relationship with a history could tolerate aberrant exercises of leadership while first impressions die harder. In other words, extracting rules from the stories that Horton tells is difficult. When to lead and when to defer, when to ask leadings questions and when to remain silent, when to focus on the limited objective and when to encourage people to see the circumscribed character of that objective – the answers depend on the situation and are not always readily evident.”
– Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements
.
“What comes across in the stories that Myles Horton tells, in SNCC workers’ tales of best organizers, and in the broader literature on organizing is good organizers’ creativity: their ability to respond to local conditions, to capitalize on sudden opportunities, to turn to advantage a seeming setback, to know when to exploit teachable moments and when to concentrate on winning an immediate objective. Sometimes you insist on fully participatory decision-making; sometimes you do not. Albany SNCC project head Charles Sherrod urged fellow organizers not to “let the project go to the dogs because you feel you must be democratic to the letter.” Horton recounted on numerous occasions an experience that he had had in a union organizing effort. At the time, the highway patrol was escorting scabs through the picket line, and the strike committee was at its wit’s end about how to counter this threat to strikers’ solidarity. After considering and rejecting numerous proposals, exhausted committee members demanded advice from Horton. When he refused, one of them pulled a gun. “I was tempted then to become an instant expert, right on the spot!” Horton confessed. “But I knew that if I did that, all would be lost and then all of the rest of them would start asking me what to do. So I said: ‘No. Go ahead and shoot if you want to, but I’m not going to tell you.’ And the others calmed him down.”
Giving in would have defeated the purpose of persuading the strikers that they had the knowledge to make the decision themselves. But Horton sometimes told another story. When he was once asked to speak to a group of Tennessee farmers about organizing a cooperative, he knew, he said, that since “their expectation was that I would speak as an expert… if I didn’t speak, and said, ‘let’s have a discussion about this,’ they’d say, that this guy doesn’t know anything.” So Horton “made a speech, the best speech I could. Then after it was over, while we were still there, I said, let’s discuss what I have said. Well now, that was just one step removed, but close enough to their expectation that I was able to carry them along… You do have to make concessions like that.” What better time to make a concession than when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun? Horton presumably knew that he could get away with refusing to be an expert in the first situation and not in the second. Perhaps the difference was that he was unknown to the farmers and was known to the strikers. But one could argue that a relationship with a history could tolerate aberrant exercises of leadership while first impressions die harder. In other words, extracting rules from the stories that Horton tells is difficult. When to lead and when to defer, when to ask leadings questions and when to remain silent, when to focus on the limited objective and when to encourage people to see the circumscribed character of that objective – the answers depend on the situation and are not always readily evident.”
– Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements
.
November 25, 2024
Eunsong Kim Quote
.
“Because of TZ, I want to write a treatise against the ways in which utilitarian thinking has mutated our activism, our education, our action, our lives. I want to write declarations that defend trying, and trying again, because why not. This would be a manifesto that proclaims empowerment is not the state of feeling good in this reality, but a practice of life unsurrendered to living.”
- Eunsong Kim, “What I Did Not Do, Will Change Me”
.
“Because of TZ, I want to write a treatise against the ways in which utilitarian thinking has mutated our activism, our education, our action, our lives. I want to write declarations that defend trying, and trying again, because why not. This would be a manifesto that proclaims empowerment is not the state of feeling good in this reality, but a practice of life unsurrendered to living.”
- Eunsong Kim, “What I Did Not Do, Will Change Me”
.
November 23, 2024
From Jody Chan’s Boycott Giller Speech
.
"We learn commitment and discipline not from the soulless neoliberal conditioning that turns radicalism into a brand rather than a practice, that tells us the only way we can make change as writers is to “witness” or to “speak out” as individuals, but from the examples of revolutionary writers, who are also some of our greatest organization-builders, who have sacrificed everything for their people.
We learn from Ghassan Kanafani, who said to his niece Lamees the day before they were both martyred by Zionist forces in 1972, when she asked him if he would ever focus more on his writing than his revolutionary activities, “I write well because I believe in a cause, in principles. The day I leave these principles, my stories will become empty.”
We learn from George Jackson, who wrote more than fifty years ago from prison, “Understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved… Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”
As writers we are trained in description and critique, in imagination. But what we need more of is practice. Practice withholding our labour, practice talking to each other, practice organizing our own alternative spaces that aren’t beholden to corporate sponsors who profit from producing death, practice giving something up to help each other survive.
Every campaign we wage together is practice. It goes beyond any one prize, any one sponsor.
We’ve fielded a lot of critiques since this campaign started, some genuine, many in bad faith from elites now attending the Giller gala across the street—for expanding our targets to include Indigo Books and the Azrieli Foundation, for not trying to make slow institutional change from the inside, for not trying to find a third way, a more “pragmatic” way.
To that, I want to share the words of the political theorist Joy James, who writes, “If you’re going to use the term ‘pragmatic’ to discipline radicals, my preference is that you say nothing…If you want to discipline rebels then pony up something tangible: raise bail funds, pay for their attorneys, feed their kids while they are inside, or try to get them out. You cannot lecture risk-taking people about being politically ‘infantile’ out of your fear or out of your accumulations…There’s nobody we admire who is pragmatic… Everybody could have been ‘pragmatic.’ But if they were, we would not have any ancestors.”
I want to do away with this false binary between writers and organizers. Culture alone, the work we do on the page, will not be enough. Reasoning with or trying to reform the cultural institutions that prop up this settler colonial state will not be enough. We have to be willing, at the very least, to take risks for each other, to relinquish the false accolades, the fancy galas, all of them the oppressor’s incentives to keep us from actively building solidarity with each other."
- from Jody Chan’s Boycott Giller Speech
.
"We learn commitment and discipline not from the soulless neoliberal conditioning that turns radicalism into a brand rather than a practice, that tells us the only way we can make change as writers is to “witness” or to “speak out” as individuals, but from the examples of revolutionary writers, who are also some of our greatest organization-builders, who have sacrificed everything for their people.
We learn from Ghassan Kanafani, who said to his niece Lamees the day before they were both martyred by Zionist forces in 1972, when she asked him if he would ever focus more on his writing than his revolutionary activities, “I write well because I believe in a cause, in principles. The day I leave these principles, my stories will become empty.”
We learn from George Jackson, who wrote more than fifty years ago from prison, “Understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved… Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”
As writers we are trained in description and critique, in imagination. But what we need more of is practice. Practice withholding our labour, practice talking to each other, practice organizing our own alternative spaces that aren’t beholden to corporate sponsors who profit from producing death, practice giving something up to help each other survive.
Every campaign we wage together is practice. It goes beyond any one prize, any one sponsor.
We’ve fielded a lot of critiques since this campaign started, some genuine, many in bad faith from elites now attending the Giller gala across the street—for expanding our targets to include Indigo Books and the Azrieli Foundation, for not trying to make slow institutional change from the inside, for not trying to find a third way, a more “pragmatic” way.
To that, I want to share the words of the political theorist Joy James, who writes, “If you’re going to use the term ‘pragmatic’ to discipline radicals, my preference is that you say nothing…If you want to discipline rebels then pony up something tangible: raise bail funds, pay for their attorneys, feed their kids while they are inside, or try to get them out. You cannot lecture risk-taking people about being politically ‘infantile’ out of your fear or out of your accumulations…There’s nobody we admire who is pragmatic… Everybody could have been ‘pragmatic.’ But if they were, we would not have any ancestors.”
I want to do away with this false binary between writers and organizers. Culture alone, the work we do on the page, will not be enough. Reasoning with or trying to reform the cultural institutions that prop up this settler colonial state will not be enough. We have to be willing, at the very least, to take risks for each other, to relinquish the false accolades, the fancy galas, all of them the oppressor’s incentives to keep us from actively building solidarity with each other."
- from Jody Chan’s Boycott Giller Speech
.
May 10, 2024
Lilly Dancyger Quote
.
"I always tell my writing students not to try to wrap things up in a neat little bow when they’re actually complicated and unresolved. That the lack of closure can be a better ending than manufactured closure that’s not genuine. The parts of the story that don’t seem to fit together can often be where the real story is. I encourage them to look for those spots of friction and write into the complexity. That’s where the good stuff is."
- Lilly Dancyger
From this interview: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/finding-the-story-a-conversation-with-lilly-dancyger/
.
"I always tell my writing students not to try to wrap things up in a neat little bow when they’re actually complicated and unresolved. That the lack of closure can be a better ending than manufactured closure that’s not genuine. The parts of the story that don’t seem to fit together can often be where the real story is. I encourage them to look for those spots of friction and write into the complexity. That’s where the good stuff is."
- Lilly Dancyger
From this interview: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/finding-the-story-a-conversation-with-lilly-dancyger/
.
April 16, 2024
Miguel Gutierrez Quote
.
“Living longer means you witness the daily onslaught of stupid and mean that passes for reality.
Living longer means you witness the toggle between progression and backlash, over and over like a tennis game from hell.
Living longer means you meet young people who are better or worse versions of who you once were.
Living longer means you draw the logic of your perspective into a latticework of meaning that purportedly helps you see patterns, something you might call “maturity.” But more often than not it feels like you’re just decorating a cage of your own design, rendering yourself unsupple and resistant to change.
Living longer means coming to terms with whether or not this is true, every day.”
- Miguel Gutierrez, Aging Awfully
,
“Living longer means you witness the daily onslaught of stupid and mean that passes for reality.
Living longer means you witness the toggle between progression and backlash, over and over like a tennis game from hell.
Living longer means you meet young people who are better or worse versions of who you once were.
Living longer means you draw the logic of your perspective into a latticework of meaning that purportedly helps you see patterns, something you might call “maturity.” But more often than not it feels like you’re just decorating a cage of your own design, rendering yourself unsupple and resistant to change.
Living longer means coming to terms with whether or not this is true, every day.”
- Miguel Gutierrez, Aging Awfully
,
April 4, 2024
Two Robert Wyatt Quotes
.
Ryan Dombal: “…your career is a good example of how being an underdog isn’t necessarily something to overcome.”
Robert Wyatt: “Well, that’s about the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in years. I hope that’s the truth. It’s not even a moral question. It’s a question of pride. You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, and I don’t know how some people do that. God knows I’ve been so wicked and selfish in the past, but nevertheless, I do really think the things I think and support the people I support. I would encourage people to realize that you don’t have to panic if you’re not part of a mainstream or if you find yourself outside the flow. If it doesn’t suit you, don’t go along with it. Just sit it out and get your stuff done. Don’t just sit moaning or getting drunk—I spent some years doing that. But if you can just come up with something of your own, however minor it is, that’s going to be easier to live with when you’re at the end of your life.”
From this piece: https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/9544-robert-wyatt/
*
“I kind of had nervous breakdown in ‘95. I felt burnt out before my time and just collapsed. I just didn’t want to be me anymore. I was tired of it, though not suicidal. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about is me attempting to find an identity outside of the given one, whether it’s listening to Spanish music or Russian communist music or black music. They’re all ways of getting out of the prison of self, really. But at that point, I couldn’t get out. I just felt trapped. Maybe that was a decade-late delay about the accident – at last, the difficulty I was in kicked in. Alfie and I spent most of our time in a sort of fancy wooden cabin on the coast at this point, half an hour away from where we lived in Lincolnshire, and there was no electricity. We didn’t even have records. We listened to stories you could get on cassette.
I got some treatment. I actually went to the doctor and went to anxiety management classes. Alfie said, “I can’t handle this at all,” because I’d gone mad. She’d dealt with everything up to that point, but not that. I came out of that and started working on a record, which became Shleep, and that’s really what took me out of it.
I’d been making records on my own, and somebody said, “Why don’t you get some other people in? You don’t have to marry them. They can just spend a couple of days at your house and do a song with you.” And I thought, "Why not?" From that point on, my records got more crowded. [laughs] It’s helped me. I made two or three records totally solo, and I was going mad in this musical isolation. I just felt so cut off from the world.”
– Robert Wyatt
From this piece: https://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/8776-robert-wyatt/
.
Ryan Dombal: “…your career is a good example of how being an underdog isn’t necessarily something to overcome.”
Robert Wyatt: “Well, that’s about the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in years. I hope that’s the truth. It’s not even a moral question. It’s a question of pride. You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, and I don’t know how some people do that. God knows I’ve been so wicked and selfish in the past, but nevertheless, I do really think the things I think and support the people I support. I would encourage people to realize that you don’t have to panic if you’re not part of a mainstream or if you find yourself outside the flow. If it doesn’t suit you, don’t go along with it. Just sit it out and get your stuff done. Don’t just sit moaning or getting drunk—I spent some years doing that. But if you can just come up with something of your own, however minor it is, that’s going to be easier to live with when you’re at the end of your life.”
From this piece: https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/9544-robert-wyatt/
*
“I kind of had nervous breakdown in ‘95. I felt burnt out before my time and just collapsed. I just didn’t want to be me anymore. I was tired of it, though not suicidal. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about is me attempting to find an identity outside of the given one, whether it’s listening to Spanish music or Russian communist music or black music. They’re all ways of getting out of the prison of self, really. But at that point, I couldn’t get out. I just felt trapped. Maybe that was a decade-late delay about the accident – at last, the difficulty I was in kicked in. Alfie and I spent most of our time in a sort of fancy wooden cabin on the coast at this point, half an hour away from where we lived in Lincolnshire, and there was no electricity. We didn’t even have records. We listened to stories you could get on cassette.
I got some treatment. I actually went to the doctor and went to anxiety management classes. Alfie said, “I can’t handle this at all,” because I’d gone mad. She’d dealt with everything up to that point, but not that. I came out of that and started working on a record, which became Shleep, and that’s really what took me out of it.
I’d been making records on my own, and somebody said, “Why don’t you get some other people in? You don’t have to marry them. They can just spend a couple of days at your house and do a song with you.” And I thought, "Why not?" From that point on, my records got more crowded. [laughs] It’s helped me. I made two or three records totally solo, and I was going mad in this musical isolation. I just felt so cut off from the world.”
– Robert Wyatt
From this piece: https://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/8776-robert-wyatt/
.
February 26, 2024
Final Words
.
“My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active duty member of the US airforce, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine!”
.
“My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active duty member of the US airforce, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine!”
.
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