…I walked by the Sacramento River the day before my thirty-eighth birthday, along the train tracks to an old rusted truss bridge. It was the first time I’d been alone, I mean alone in physical space, in a long time. I’d spent the Christmas holidays with Harvey, who had an excruciating toothache and no health insurance, and with Amber, this trans girl Harvey had just started seeing. Harvey never complained about the toothache, though. They wandered around their bedroom trying on different outfits, showing off their possessions, infinite sentimental relics, displaying their favorite dick pics on their phone (especially the cum vids), making jokes and asking surreal philosophical questions, while Amber fawned over them, which annoyed Harvey, though they kind of liked it, too. Harvey wanted to be seen, to be loved for their capacity to be seen, for their mere appearing in this world, epiphanic ephemera, the brute autistic weirdness of their creature-existence, but they didn’t really like being complimented, compliments made them uneasy, always seemed silly if not outright suspicious, and they liked being romanticized even less, though they knew it was this resistance to romance in themselves that invited it from others.
Month: January 2024
X Factor
The author emailed this response to Leila Zalokar’s December 1 post, “Planet X,” under the heading, “Awesome.”
Starts with a bang! [couldn’t help myself]
And right off the bat, I can’t think of a word, but that melancholy, ironic, hopefulness(?)
…still, the desire to fuck / morning cigarettes…
To the God of Abraham
You
make me taste your
……………….vastness on my tongue
then dismiss me
one of many loved
……………….beneath the belly of the sun
Two Histories of Germany: Frank Trentmann’s “Out of the Darkness, the Germans, 1942-2022” and Katja Hoyer’s “Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany”
Frank Trentmann, a German-born historian, teaches at the University of London and writes books in felicitous English. The special distinction of his latest study is its focus: Out of the Darkness is a history, not of facts alone but of the successive agonies of conscience besetting the Germans from the years 1942 (with the beginning of the rout at Stalingrad) till the present, with Germany’s diffident support of the Ukraine. It is a history of moral mentalities.
From the Foreword to E.P. Thompson’s “William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary”
What follows below comes from Peter Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance (PM Press, 2014). First of the Month will reprint pieces from Linebaugh’s collection of essays, which has been called a “Commonist Manifesto,” throughout 2024. The following text is an excerpt from a piece of Linebaugh’s that served as the foreword to a revised edition of E.P. Thompson’s biography of William Morris. (Thompson’s book was first published in 1955 — the year before his break with the Communist Party.)
Thompson has been in the cultural conversation lately. (His huffy back-and-forth with Lesezk Kolakowski has been invoked here.) Thompson may have always have been too full of himself. (Like most would-be vanguardists?) His duller certainties deserve skepticism. (I’m recalling just now Thompson’s dimness about a distinguished thing dear to Stuart Hall: “‘How can you be interested in Henry James?’ Edward Thompson once admonished me, with exasperation.”[1]) Thompson’s blankness about certain aspects of “high” intellection, though, deserve more than forbearance since it seems to have allowed him to focus on The Making of the English Working Class and his other histories from below.
Linebaugh has a near familial feeling for Thompson (who was his mentor), but he doesn’t do hagiography. He interrogates Thompson’s takes on Morris without being prosecutorial. Here he gets to what Thompson missed in Morris’s essay “Under the Elm Tree” even as Thompson saluted Morris for…
High/Low Paris at the Dawn of the 20th C. (“New Acquisitions” at the Met)
Last season, at the Met, a curator with Dickensian sensitivity to class matters organized a set of eleven Paris prints and watercolors linked to the Manet/Degas show. These pieces—stuck in that odd, tight corridor between the museum’s grand entrance and the European painting wing—were part of New Acquisitions in Context: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints. (The title wsn’t the only yawner, who’d stop for New Acq‘s silverware prototypes or “Design for Transeptal Altars”?) The Paris scenes, though, were a trip. So much for peintres celébrès down the hall, Marie-Louise-Pierre Vidal’s watercolors floated viewers into luxe-life while Edgar Chahine’s prints dragged them down and out.
On “My Libraries”
Renato Grigoli’s as usual right-on, witty “My Libraries: Finding a Third Place” (October 2023) sends me back in time to childhood visits at my working-class Peoria Public Library branch—the library card an important visa into feeling curious, smart, and grown up—taking books home to read under the summertime backyard pear tree or in winter bed, and on into high school there guided by our watchful nun librarian with permission also to amble—during free class time—to the nearby main public library, later wandering the stacks as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Hartford, getting into the habit of finding things I wasn’t looking for, like a year after 1974 college graduation while working in the basement Harvard Coop shipping room I wandered into Boston Public Library, discovering by chance Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern (World of Yesterday), leading to a German course at Harvard Extension School!
Three Lessons From Mama
Over the years, I shared various ways in which my parents intentionally worked to develop me into a constructive person. Often, because my mother was the primary disciplinarian, she has gotten the short end of the stick because most of my stories about her involve being the enforcer of the law. Yet, Claudette was the drill sergeant who was determined to prepare her child for a war in which I was armed to wrestle with the ghostly demons who desired to manifest their supremacy in flesh and blood.
Bet
https://twitter.com/EvanHAbrams/status/1740804276593795290
H/T Thomas Beller.
2024: The Body Politic on Steroids
[01-01-2024] In light of the upcoming election year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved class-wide labeling changes for all prescription testosterone products, adding a new Warning and updating the Abuse and Dependence section to include new safety information from published literature and case reports regarding the risks associated with abuse and dependence of testosterone and other AAS.
Appointment in Newark
Brick City Grudge Match is a tough-sounding, gritty title for a boxing book, especially when the subtitle is Tony Zale and Rocky Graziano Battle in Newark, 1948.