Hi dears, welcome back to the seven five best things I’ve found on the internet lately.
Hey also, my memoir, The Resurrection Appearances: Fragments of a Daybook, is now available from Gold Line Press! It’s an account—a selection from a much longer manuscript still unfolding—of a grief year, told through memory, reverie, confession, fragment, and conversation; I’m as proud of it as I am of anything I’ve written. Details on book release events, in Seattle and in PDX, coming soon. In the meantime, I’d be thrilled if you ordered a copy and told me what you thought.
Wanted to take a moment and thank the friends who are supporting me with monthly gifts to do this writing! If you’d like to add a monthly offering to your free subscription, you can do so below.
Every ten minutes, a child in Gaza is killed; please call your representatives for a ceasefire.
Anton Jager, “The ‘One out of Hell’ is Back In Europe.” Our poor wreck of a country is not exactly in a strong position for electoral democratic socialism, but the path, perhaps through a renewed and militant multi-sector labor movement?, remains clearer here than in Europe. In a larger sense, we all remain ruled by the international bond markets, but Jager here spells out the particularly hopeless position of European electoral left politics. The 1991 Treaty of Maastricht—the agreement formally unifying European nations in the E.U., supposedly enshrining centrist-liberal politics for the continent but actually locking in low public spending and “free” markets—strangled crucial aspects of national sovereignty and permanently weakened each nation’s labor unions, long the base for proletarian left organizing. Quality of life in Europe has gotten worse and worse since, and mainstream European politicians have little to say to their increasingly precarious and anxious constitutencies except “you may not like us, but we’re better than the far right.” The centrist capture of Greece’s once-far left party, Syriza, is a stark example of this: the Greeks voted to reject E.U.-imposed austerity and Syriza, catapulted into power as the party of popular left resistance, accepted it anyway.
Under the watch of Europe’s multi-party centrist ruling class, Jager writes, “inequality rose, economies malfunctioned, and public services began to wither. In this parlous setting, the far right gradually managed to position itself as the only credible challenger to the system. After gathering support on the sidelines, its time has come.” This is a far right that, like America’s, depends not on mass fascist mobilization but on widespread demobilization: eking out wins in elections where most voters stay home, and dragging their countries’ center of gravity closer to their positions on immigration and the social safety net. In America, our states are drifting farther and farther apart, but should a democratic socialist win national office, they could at least set a floor—on issues like workplace protections, trade policy, minimum wage, civil rights, green energy, public higher education, and assistance to needy families—that no supernational bureaucracy could bulldoze. The same isn’t true in Europe, and it’s the continent’s far right, not the left, that’s reaping the benefits.
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Ologies, “Quasithanatology: Near-Death Experiences, with Dr. Bruce Greyson.” What is happening as we die? Something like fourteen percent of people who come close to death and survive—whether through traumatic injury, cardiac arrest, bad reaction to anesthesia, etc—report experiencing wonder, mental clarity, bliss, timelessness, and ineffable encounters with the dead or with divine presences; some report seeing their immediate surroundings in a way that shouldn’t be physically possible; most lead radically different lives after their experiences. Host Allie Ward brings loopy, exuberant questions to a sober and reserved scientist, Bruce Greyson, who’s spent his career as a psychiatrist studying near-death experiences and who, thoughtfully and even a little resignedly, says he now believes the mind is not identical with the brain—that consciousness isn’t to be solely identified with neurochemistry. But what, then, is consciousness, and where is it?
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J Dilla, Donuts. Who among us actually ages into tranquility or wisdom? In On Late Style, a posthumous collection of lectures, the wonderful Edward Said praised the late works of artists and thinkers he adored—Strauss, Adorno, Cavafy, Glenn Gould, Beethoven, his friend and comrade Jean Genet—who grew at the end of their lives not into serenity, but into “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.” These artists’ final texts, performances, or compositions are not settled reflections but a shout at the dark, a tugging at what remained irreconcilable, either in life or in the exhausted traditions that entrapped them. In age, we don’t (or don’t only) sit back in contemplation; we rage, we rush, we go wild, we cry out to the void.
I connect this to my friend the poet Zach Savich’s aside in his gorgeous 2016 book—a treatise, a narration of illness, a daybook, an account of a life in art—Diving Makes the Water Deep, about taking in, and making, art through grief or bodily suffering:
I have heard others say this: suffering and loss have caused them to prefer simpler art. But suffering has made me want only more from art. When I imagine myself or my dead resurrected for the duration of a poem, consciousness and world composed again by nothing but the text, their standards are very high. Experiment, comedy, intelligence, wildness, distinct disorientation—they want it all at the hardiest. To access something further through (32).
If you could come back to life for the space of only one work of art, what would you want from that art? This question is on my mind as I came back to Detroit rapper and producer J Dilla’s final beat tape, the beloved Donuts. Dilla, born James Yancey, was a crate-digger, warping and reworking anything from Joe Pass and Stereolab to the Impressions and Giorgio Moroder with beat programming whose intricate, only-apparently-disordered complexity completely revolutionized hip-hop. He produced a few monster hits, many whole albums, and zillions of gorgeous loosies before his death of complications from lupus in February 2006 at age thirty-two.
Donuts, the last record he released in his lifetime (he was tinkering with mixes and sequencing alongside crucial editorial collaborator Jeff Jank while in the hospital), is a beat tape. Over its thirty-one short songs (most just over a minute), the loops jump, overlap, crease back, get chopped up and muddled, lurch and smush together before dissolving. Dilla was mortally ill as he made this music and his spirit was on fire: listening to it, I hear an artist not looking back in serene reflection but trying, joyfully and desperately, to absorb and joke about and scribble on and underline everything that he loved about music. The assembly of Donuts “leaves [Dilla’s] fingerprints all over the surface,” Nate Patrin wrote; Paul Thompson later commented that Donuts “reimagines the past as the future and time as something pliable, another tool.” Donuts—with a track for all but one year of Dilla’s life—is crammed with as much disorientation, experiment, and wildness as forty-three minutes could fit: it’s not a final prayer but a cackle, an angry cry, a monster messy synthesis.
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99% Invisible, “Wickedest Sound.” This is a very short, learned, and bottomlessly entertaining history of Jamaica’s sound system culture. The DJs and promoters running Jamaica’s traveling vinyl street parties in the 50s, 60s, and 70s were responsible for everything from the three-band equalizer (making it literally possible to pump the bass) to toasting (the crucial predecessor to rap) to the rap battle (as the DJs and hype men of competing sound systems verbally sparred) to the bass drop in a dance song’s climax. When American 45s shifted in the early 60s from danceable, swinging rhythm and blues to trebly, pounding rock and roll, promoter Coxsone Dodd and his session musicians stopped importing and began instead producing their own records, beginning with the first song to showcase Jamaica’s characteristic offbeat rhythm: Theophilus Beckford’s “Easy Snapping.” The sound systems switched over to local music as well, and from this flowed all of ska, rock steady, reggae, dub, and eventually dancehall, not to mention (across the water) much of techno and rap. Thrilling listening.
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Revolutions. Done with this podcast, but wanted to remind us that past defeats plant seeds for future successes: Mackandal’s 1758 revolt in Saint-Domingue, Russia’s 1905 Revolution, the failed liberal and nationalist Carbonari revolt throughout the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies: each of these uprisings were crushed violently, but each served to remind a beleaguered and alienated people that the social order wasn’t inevitable, that the contradictions beneath their societies could crack apart, and that their masters weren’t invulnerable. Let’s not forget.
"If you could come back to life for the space of only one work of art, what would you want from that art?" !! Hit me so hard & will follow me around the rest of my life.