Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

It is a time of being sorted by skin and hair, by mother tongue,
as being from here or there, as pepper spray fills in the air
until the whole city stinks of it, and the men who arrived in rented cars
with out-of-state plates, with faces covered, begin their hunt
for carpenters, house maids, dish washers, kindergarten kids,
for anyone who, to them, looks like they aren’t from here.
They’ll pull you through the window of your car.
They will not tell you who they are, who is in command.

— Carolyn Forché / “On Living in the Hour of Cities Under Siege”

The stakes are existential. And that is because, rightly understood, our actual human “attention” – the thing the frackers want, in the form of our eyes on their screens – is nothing less than our ability to care, our ability to think, our ability to give our minds, time and senses to ourselves, the world and each other. To commodify that is to commodify our very beings. The problem isn’t “phones”, and it isn’t “social media”. The problem is human fracking, a world-spanning land-grab into human consciousness – which big tech is treating as a vast, unclaimed territory, ripe for sacking and empire.

— Friends of Attention  / “How can we defend ourselves from the new plague of ‘human fracking’?” / The Guardian

In the mist I see
long lines of people walking
death walks to slave ships
Black footprints
on cathedrals and monuments
of the city

— Jason Allen-Paissant / “Black Walking”

“I worry more about everything we absorb without realizing we’re even doing it,” she said. “The way misinformation colonizes us.” . . . Her generation didn’t like their consumer data being collected. But she wasn’t convinced it was the manipulations of companies and interest groups that alarmed them—more the sneaking suspicion that, one of these days, Jeff Bezos might decide to interest himself in their vibrator-buying habits.

— Lydia Millet / “Tourist” / Atavists

I’d like to see the ocean lap against a glacier
before the end. I’d like to see the northern

lights. I’d like to watch effigies of foul men
burn in the desert. I’d like to be there, reel there,
at the end.
— Amy M. Alvarez / “Burn Out”

… only those safe from fascism and its practices are  likely to think that there might be a benefit in exchanging ideas with fascists. What for such a privileged group is a matter of a potentially productive difference in opinion is, for many of us, a matter of basic survival. The essential quality of fascism (and its attendant racism) is that it kills people and destroys their lives—and it does so because it openly aims so.

— Aleksandar Hemon / “Fascism is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight” / lithub.com

This is what should be said to the coming cities:
you’ll need gas masks, goggles, armbands, milk for your eyes,
the name of someone who will search if you disappear.
When the time comes, take in anyone who needs to hide,
bring pots of food to front lines everywhere,
hot soup and cocoa, a roast potato to warm the hands.
When the time comes, listen to the whistles, the car horns, the cries in the air.

— Carolyn Foché / “On Living in the Hour of Cities Under Siege”

What I’m Listening To:

When they came for the immigrants
I got in their face
When they came for the refugees
I got in their face
When they came for the five-year-olds
I got in their face
When they came to my neighbourhood
I just got in their face
They use tear gas and pepper spray
Against our whistles and our phones
But in this city of heroes
We will protect our home

— Billy Bragg / “City of Heroes”