The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“I am not going
to rot. I will not lie down in the ground
with the cauliflower and the eggshell mushroom,
and grow a fungus out of my stomach
like a foetus, my face sluicing off me . . .
. . . I know what happens in the fire closet,
when the elbow tendons shrink in the heat, and I
want it to happen — I want, dead, to
pull up my hands in fists, I want
to go out as a pugilist.”

— Sharon Olds / “By Fire” / Blood, Tin, Straw

“Not everyone is meant to change the world. We let the world change around us. We let it die if it will. We live small lives, constrained by habit and fear.”

— Sandra Newman / The Men

“Partisan clustering has increased even within households. In 1965, Iyengar said, only about 60 percent of married couples had the same party registration. Today, the figure is greater than 85 percent…”

— Joel Achenbach / “Science is revealing why American politics are so intensely polarized” / Washington Post

“… there are no non-radical options left before us … if you’ve got a problem of racism in your society and then you add climate change to it, then it goes crazy. If you’ve got a problem with inequality and then you add climate change to it, then it becomes sci-fi. So what brings me to this is that I’m not just worried about things getting hotter, and this is what I think that I wish more environmentalists would wrap their heads around: This is not just about things getting hotter and wetter, it’s about things getting meaner. And that’s why we have to talk about values and who we want to be in the face of this crisis.”

— Naomi Klein, to Michael Winship / “Naomi Klein: Climate Change ‘Not Just About Things Getting Hotter… It’s About Things Getting Meaner’” / https://billmoyers.com/story/naomi-klein-climate-change-not-just-about-things-getting-hotter-its-about-things-getting-meaner/

“I felt I could relate to his distress. I walked back to the dining area, feeling completely constipated, but closer to the experience of Christ.”

— Maya Binyam / Hangman

“It takes little courage to mutter a general complaint . . . There are many who pretend that cannon are aimed at them when in reality they are the target merely of opera glasses. They shout their generalized demands . . . They insist upon a generalized justice for which they have never done anything; they ask for a generalized freedom and demand a share of the booty which they have long since enjoyed. They think that truth is only what sounds nice . . . The trouble with them is: they do not know the truth.”

— Bertolt Brecht / “Writing The Truth: Five Difficulties”

“Everyone leaves somewhere.
Everyone leaves everyone.
And there you go.”

— Maira Kalman / Sara Berman’s Closet

What I’m Listening To:

“Rumor is you’re trying to save us
Reimagine and rename us
You’re burning all the books in this town
But you can’t destroy the words in our mouths
So do yourself a little favor
No one asked for a crusader”

— Sleater-Kinney / “Crusader”