The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“Something remarkable happens when you walk a long-distance path. I think you find an honesty that you don’t see in normal life. It unites those who walk in a sort of trail-induced euphoria that gives you a sense of openness, where normally we’re all so closed. I think that’s the place where trail magic comes from.”

— Raynor Winn / Landlines

“My belief in the fluidity 
of the self turns out to mean 
my me is a flow of wellwater,   

without the well, or the bucket, 
a hole dug and seeping.”

— Brenda Shaughnessy / “Liquid Flesh”

“… men pushing themselves as hard as they could push themselves, not exercising, but training, and perhaps not even training, but fighting, fighting the gravity the world exerts on all those who walk upon it, exerts seemingly equally, though in actuality not equally, not equally at all.”

— Moshin Hamid / The Last White Man

“I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.”

— Muriel Rukeyser / “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)”

“I believe we still have a window of time during which we can start healing the harm we have inflicted on the planet—but that window is closing. If we care about the future of our children and theirs, if we care about the health of the natural world, we must get together and take action. Now before it is too late.”

— Jane Goodall & Douglas Abrams / The Book of Hope

“List of things to banish 
Can include words, people, theoretical apparatuses 
Can take the form of a grocery list, a scientific experiment, or a manifesto 
Can read like a personal ad of unwanting 
Can summon aid to help with banishing 
Can be uncertain of what will remain”

— Mia Kang / “Abracadabra”

“Isn’t this the way humanity should approach everything we do on this precious planet? Keeping ourselves to a narrow corridor of use, treading on this one earth lightly and with care.”

— Raynor Winn / Landlines

What I’m Listening To:

“Bunga Bunga or
You’ll
Never work in
Television again”

— The Smile / “You’ll Never Work in Television Again”