The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“now the parts in our hair and our soles wither and the fairies lie half-charred at the stake”

— Hans Arp / “The Swallow’s Testicle”

“According to Albrecht, those suffering solastalgia feel a sense of dislocation from their home environment, a melancholia; it is, he said, ‘the homesickness you have when you are still at home’. People interviewed by Albrecht spoke of their distress not only at the destruction of the land around them, but its effect on their physical and mental health, and their frustration at their powerlessness to stop it.”

— Damien Gayle / “That grief or longing you feel for a time before climate crisis? There’s a word for that” / The Guardian

“From between stars are the words we now refuse;
loneliness, longing, whatever suffering
might follow your life into the sky.

Once those are gone, the life you had
against your own will, the hope, even the prayers
take you one more bend around the river of sky.”

— Linda Hogan / “Lost in the Milky Way”

“I’m always reading many books at once. Some I finish, some I come back to later. I order books through my local second-hand bookstore, both new and second-hand. Sometimes I dive right into the latest one to come into the house. Other times I scan my own bookshelves to see which one I might want to go on with, or start.”

— Lydia Davis / “If Lydia Davis Wasn’t a Writer, She’d Devote Herself to Climate Activism” / Lithub

“I too keep rewinding this mixtape
of the plague years until I can hear it snap like a tendon
or a tent pole.”

— Jenny Browne / “I Am Trying to Love the Whole World”

“‘The fact that we’re seeing this record hot year means record human suffering,’ said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. ‘Within this year, extreme heatwaves and droughts made much worse by these extreme temperatures have caused thousands of deaths, people losing their livelihoods, being displaced etc. These are the records that matter.’”

— Ajit Noranjan / “2023 on track to be the hottest year on record, say scientists” / The Guardian

“Strange fall. Trees drop ballots into the yard 
without fear of our tampering”

— J. Estanislao Lopez / “The Systemic”

What I’m Listening To:

“There’s a flavor to the sound of walking
No one ever noticed before”

— Julia Holter / “In the Green Wild”