letter three
Ohai!
This week I was surprised to find myself with a lot of unrestricted time, but as it is the middle of the semester, I think I'm starting to feel a bit run down, so I wouldn't say I made the best use of my time. Am hoping to take it slow over the next week, cook, and rest.
Take action (in 2 minutes or less)
A group I organize with (NAPAWF Boston - API womxn & trans* folx) is collecting comments about the public charge rule changes that the current administration is trying to push through. Your comment matters! Click here to write a quick letter + get others to do it too!
This week
Much writing. Spontaneous cat visits. I am always astonished by how challenging the blank page can be, and I appreciated this advice about how to break things down. I also have appreciated my community--y'all-- for always being generous with feedback. I feel like I am currently chiseling away at a block of marble, and starting to see the contours in the piece, getting a sense of what those core ideas might be...
I'm reading
Critical race theory and the learning sciences. Our Declaration. The story of Prince Hall's life. Art of critical pedagogy.
On critique and criticality:
"In ‘criticality’ we have that double occupation in which we are both fully armed with the knowledges of critique, able to analyse and unveil while at the same time sharing and living out the very conditions which we are able to see through. As such we live out a duality that requires at the same time both an analytical mode and a demand to produce new subjectivities that acknowledge that we are what Hannah Arendt has termed ‘fellow sufferers’ of the very conditions we are critically examining." - Irit Rogoff
Other things
Monstress vol. 3 is out. A Fleetwood Mac concert review. 100 websites that shaped the internet. Helen Rosner on Christine McConnell. Sabrina the teenage witch: a horror story.
On time: (and yes, I'm working my way through the Bullet Journal Method book right now!)
People think time "is this ethereal, relative, slippery, conceptual thing. It’s not. It’s 24-hour cycles, seven days a week. You have 168 hours to work with every week. You have to carve out the time if you really want balance.” - Morgenstern
On freedom:
"Hannah Arendt has a definition of freedom as being the freedom to imagine that which you cannot yet imagine. The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can't imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn't matter. It isn't. Much the way you don't know what a writer will go on to write, you don't know what a reader, having read you, will do." - Alexander Chee, via Laura Olin
GIF-spiration
(via Arena)
- P.