Stirring Sagacity

"When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through. I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers."

I went to grad school for nonfiction writing and every single person kept submitting shit about her last breakup. Every single one. Nobody liked my work either but the professors at least considered it a breath of fresh air because I'd never dated anyone, so my writing was about shit like the time Buzz Aldrin stole my boss's chocolate.

Got possessed in the middle of my work shift.

A string of Posts about transfem Parker from Twitter, with point of origin:

This is the Bregenzer Festspiele opera house, and it’s worth noting that this is not a one-off. Every single one of their productions looks like a boss battle and/or smash bros stage

It is easy to forget just how central military violence has been and remains to business as usual. More than 5 per cent of annual CO2 emissions stem from the militaries around the world. We often talk about flying and how bad it is for the climate, and it is bad, but civil aviation accounts for about 3 per cent of the total. And the 5 per cent that comes from militaries precede actual war: these are peacetime emissions, made in the process of maintaining the logistical apparatuses and fighting capacities of armies before they go to war. When they do go into battle, the fuel is set on fire and the bombs rain down in bursts of concentrated additional emissions. The US, of course, is at the centre of all this. The emissions from the occupation army during the war on Gaza might be counted as just another category of American emissions. The US outweighs every other country; indeed, as Neta C. Crawford notes, 'the US military is the single largest institutional fossil fuel user in the world and thus the world's single largest greenhouse gas emitter In her book The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War, she brilliantly charts the development of what she calls 'the deep cycle' The militaries of first the UK and then the US found coal, followed by oil, to be indispensable for waging war: for manufacturing weapons, transporting soldiers into the battlefield, providing mobility once engaged, bringing firepower to bear on the enemy. By basing its operations on fossil fuels, the US military contributed to their spread throughout the economy; and when both the military and economy were thoroughly dependent on them, the protection of this essential commodity itself became an imperative of war. No part of the world has been so deeply formed and scarred by this cycle as the Middle East. Although Palestine is at its centre, the devastation clearly extends to other countries too: think only of Iraq and Yemen.