#anthropocene poetics

[zinjanthropusboisei]

The Poetics of Deep Time:

“One of the defining statements on the Anthropocene within the humanities has been Dipesh Chakrabarty’s assertion that humans have become “geological agents,” partners with planetary systems in shaping Earth's deep future. Yet all living things are creatures of deep time, the inheritors of a legacy of infinitesimal slow change. Chapter 1 explores the intimacy that inheres within the deep time of geologic and evolutionary processes. Thick time refers to the lyric's capacity to put multiple temporalities and scales within a single frame, to “thicken” the present with an awareness of the other times and places. Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney demonstrate how the thick time of the lyric now allows us to imagine the complexity and richness of our enfolding with deep-time processes and explore the sensuous and uncanny aspects of how deep time is experienced in the present. 

Since the idea was first put forward by James Hutton, deep time has been encountered through textures and characterized by a sense of vertigo. The “geologic sublime” is almost a cliché; yet even in John Playfair’s famous, astonished remark on seeing Hutton’s unconformity at Siccar point in 1788 - “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time” - there is the intimation of something even more strange: “We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a superincumbent ocean.” The rock dissolves to sediments; as Playfair imagines himself witness to its formation, he also bears witness to rock’s fluidity. In this early vision of deep time, which has echoed ever since in the geologic imagination, a series of transformations and breaches takes place: the lithic becomes liquid; the weight of water replaces the weight of stone; the body is submerged by rock and sea. Sensuous, fascinated by texture and the possibilities of multiscalar perspective, Playfair’s vision is geophiliac in its attention to stone’s mutability.

...If Chakrabarty’s statement shows how the Anthropocene and its associated crises are a problem for the humanities, indicating a shift in what constitutes the human, the work of Yusoff and Nigel Clark offers the possibility that life, and what it means to be human, has always had a geologic aspect. From habitable landmasses shaped by volcanism to the origins of human culture in Neolithic art daubed in minerals onto cave walls, we have entered our inheritance as human via our relationship with the lithic.”

David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics, 2019

#caveposting #anthropocene #geology #deep time #anthropocene poetics #ecopoetry #david farrier

[eurydicenomadsoul]

Bombyx Mori

Le hasard poétique ou le dénuement des vers

La terre est un poème fait de vers laborieux

Certains eurent un thème

pour le moins malheureux

Tel celui dont la bave en séchant se mua

en un long fil splendide où son corps s'enroula

avant de s'envoler

papillon impavide !

Le cocon déplié du bombyx du mûrier

reçut pour nom la soie

fût-il fil du Dharma!

Une fois récoltés les cocons du bombyx

furent tous déroulés et aussitôt filés

pour vêtir l'empereur les dames et les seigneurs

Déshabiller le ver pour habiller l'empire

l'ingénieux procédé fut tenu au secret

Le monde entier voulut s'emparer du tissu!

On construisit des routes autour de ce mirage

Marco Polo ému prépara ses bagages

Le marchand vénitien importa le butin

Tant de petite mains et de coeurs à l'ouvrage

pour bâtir un destin par dessus un carnage!

Aux insectes l'enfer aux nobles ses atours

le fil de soie scintille tel un rayon d'étoile

Aujourd'hui éveillé l'homme en est revenu

Pour les antispécistes c'est un acte incongru

D'autres moeurs d'autres temps

L'écocide est puni le luxe mis au ban

C'est la démocratie qui gouverne à présent

La terre est un poème fait de vers laborieux

Certains d'entre eux s'incarnent en papillons joyeux

#poetic happenstance or deprivation of worms silk #Fables of the Anthropocene #art of poetry

[hexjulia]

uuugh i need to make this a new post because tumblr dot com is no longer allowing me to reblog my own post to add to it.

ANYWAY mostly for my own convenience. Books read every month so far, or I guess from march or so because I didn't start counting until later in the year and then I forgot what I read exactly (to be added to by the end of the month if this site will let me do that again then. or i will need to copy my list and make a new post again).

The Memory police, Ogawa. (love)

King Stakh's Wild hunt, Karatkevich (good)

The bull from the sea, Renault

This is how you lose the time war, el-mohtar, gladwell.

The honey month by el-mohtar

Parrots of the Wild, Toft

The second body, daisy hilyard (BAD)

Red Shambhala, Znamenski (interesting)

The white road, de Waal (deeply deeply meh, not entirely to be trusted on historical anecdotes)

The hare with amber eyes, de Waal

The Monk, Lewis (YESSS WOOO YES)

Goodbye to all cats, P.G. Wodehouse

Weight, Jeanette Winterson (so bad lol)

Tacitus, Agricola and Germany

Tacitus, The histories

The Peloponessian war, Thucydides

Xenophon, Hellenica

Xenophon, The Expedition of Cyrus

help i think i'm already forgetting which other books i read :(

Unfinished (not on purpose, distracted, will finish later)

Parrots in the ancient world

Twixt the land and sea, joseph conrad

anthropocene poetics, david farrier

enlivenment, weber. ok no im not finishing this because it's terrible.

JULY

20. The Histories, Polybius. Waterfield translation. 21. Hiero the tyrant and other treatises, Xenophon, Waterfield. 22. Ancient rhetoric, Thomas Habinek. 23. The pumpkinification of Claudius, anonymous, possibly Seneca. 24. Gardens and gardeners of the ancient world, linda farrar.

AUGUST

25. Greek Lives, Plutarch. waterfield translation. 26. Hellenistic Lives, Plutarch. waterfield translation. 27. Roman Lives, Plutarcg. waterfield translation 28. Guide to Greece, Pausinias

#read list

[spaceintruderdetector]

https://archive.org/details/1cfca75f-2e57-4f34-85fb-a1585315a2a9/mode/2up

In an increasingly technologized and connected world, it seems as if noise must be increasing. Noise, however, is a complicated term with a complicated history. Noise can be traced through structures of power, theories of knowledge, communication, and scientific practice, as well as through questions of art, sound, and music. Thus, rather than assume that it must be increasing, this work has focused on better understanding the various ways that noise is defined, what that noise can do, and how we can use noise as a strategically political tactic. Noise Thinks the Anthropocene is a textual experiment in noise poetics that uses the growing body of research into noise as source material. It is an experiment in that it results from indeterminate means, alternative grammar, and experimental thinking. The outcome was not predetermined. It uses noise to explain, elucidate, and evoke (akin to other poetic forms) within the textual milieu in a manner that seeks to be less determinate and more improvisational than conventional writing. Noise Thinks the Anthropocene argues that noise poetics is a necessary form for addressing political inequality, coexistence with the (nonhuman) other, the ecological crisis, and sustainability because it approaches these issues as a system of interconnected fragments and excesses and thus has the potential to reach or envision solutions in novel ways.

#noise music #noise #music

[seashellsoldier]

Restoring the Kinship Worldview (2022)  by Wahinkpe Topa and Darcia Narvaez

I saw this title on the always-wonderful University of California, Berkeley’s The Greater Good Science Center site and was intrigued (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/can_the_indigenous_worldview_build_a_better_future?_ga=2.232959710.1321401351.1669667825-1489903705.1660343467), having a profound interest in Native American perspectives, ancient and contemporary. Restoring the Kinship Worldview combines both to champion the ideology of kincentrism to restore place-based knowledge and return to an Earth-based consciousness in this Anthropocene era. Whatever version of a “god” one wants to believe in, through this ideological lens they all get rebranded as Nature. Sadly, “western” culture has nearly separated life from every corner of Nature, and thus we have created our own hell (p. 128). We collectively need to re-embrace a Nature-as-god, Earth-as-fragile-home mindset, if not as religion. Freud called this an “oceanic feeling”; to Maslow it was “peak experience”, and, to Sagan it was the romantic association of us being “made from stardust”. Beautiful, romantic, poetic. 

Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) speaks of a pet theory he has, where: 

“ . . . starting with Hinduism, all of the organized religions have a foundation that relates to original Indigenous worldview. I propose that the enlightened founders, all the way up through Jesus Christ, saw the devolution of human civilization and created ideas for returning to our original loving nature. My theory is that religions are an effort to rectify the horrors of hierarchy and the loss of egalitarianism and Nature-based thinking. Indigenous worldview is thus prevention oriented, knowing about the potential but not experiencing life based on greed and division. Over time, the teachings of the religious founders were modified by the political and social mores of the times to create orthodoxy that weakened the original intent. Post-contact efforts became conventional for maintaining the religion itself. 

If generosity is learned by observing the natural world and our place in it, as I believe it is, Indigenous worldview is a necessity for returning to life based on generosity, it seems” (pp. 162-3). 

While my opinion couldn’t mean any less, I agree with him, even if I choose to ignore the “spiritual” or sentient nature of Nature. Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia Hypothesis/Paradigm works well for me. The Indigenous worldview aligns with so much of “paganism”, Buddhism, Wiccan, druidic, and Transcendentalist perspectives too. This is an incredibly OLD way of looking at the world and understanding our humble place within in, and one I embrace wholeheartedly, but I’m nowhere near perfect yet. This is not a peace-on-earth perspective, though sometimes the readings feel that way. On the one hand, it is our <i>relationship</i> with and to Nature that needs to drastically metamorphose, and on the other it is our relationship to one another that needs to be dynamically reorganized. This all needs to be done quickly too. Time is not on our side here. Humankind needs to endure some growing pains in this transformation, but ultimately it will lead to greater reward for all life on Earth, finding balance and equilibrium, and nurturing a symbiotic relationship to Gaia. 

If you haven’t yet seen the doc film The Year the Earth Changed on Apple TV, hosted by Sir David Attenborough, please do so. The COVID-19 pandemic was a monstrous occurrence (still ongoing) that’s severity could have easily been avoided if morons (beholden solely to their financial portfolios over human lives) weren’t in charge of half the world. One of the only good things the pandemic did was convincingly illustrate how when humankind slows down its consumption, traffic, pollution, and waste, the Earth and its biosystems can vigorously heal. This film is a teaching moment for tectonic change and shows that when humanity is encouraged to act differently, truly incredible things can happen, growing pains included. 

Change is happening of course, but it is both equally small and yet equally significant, from nuclear fusion to quantum computing, from reversible-rust batteries to the growing use of solar panels and wind turbines, from “green concrete” to the proliferation of backyard gardens, discussions about “the future of work”, and the surging e-bike movement across the globe. Momentum, investment, and mind-shifts are required from everyone on the planet. We need to accomplish more with less. We need to consume less, waste less, breed less, and crave less. Replacing the mining of oil with the mining of lithium with the mining of cobalt won’t help. Listening to the voices of the global Indigenous community can lead us into a better future, but we must turn our ears and open our minds to what they have to say. This book is a fantastic starting point, and the sources they cite will help empower every reader to pursue the Indigenous worldview more purposefully. I’ll include my list below to make it easier on folks, but there are plenty more mentioned in the text (I’ve already read several of them, such as Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta). Here’s to a better, more peaceful, inclusive, and humanistic-driven future. 

Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America by Barbara Alice Mann (2016)

Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom by Darcia Narvaez (2014)

Mother Earth Spirituality: Native American Paths to Healing Ourselves and Our World by Ed McGaa (2011)

Unlearning the Language of Conquest: Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America by Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs) (2010)

Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism by Jack Forbes (2008) 

Concentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship by Enrique Salmon (2000)

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram (1997)

Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior by Marimba Ani (1994)

Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples by Jack Forbes (1993)

#bookreview #kincentrism #indigenousculture #gaiahypothesis

[disastergenius]

wanting to write again

So a few months back, I tried to write in the style of Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, writing a short vignette about something I thought of or admired or caught my eye for each day of the year, beginning on my birthday and spanning through one year. For me, I also thought a lot about John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed, since they style fascinated me with the throughline of ranking everything on a 5-star scale.  Embarrassingly, I started the day after my birthday, which really was a good indicator on how the project would go. I am usually up late, and thus would write my entries in my spiral notebook in the early hours of the morning before going to bed. However, because each entry was dated, I felt it would be weird to write for a day I had yet to experience, even if I timestamped them all. My attempts to write lasted approximately 1 month. 

It’s been a bit since I’ve tried to write for fun. With school and work and life, my free time is limited. But I miss it. 

I’d like a good writing challenge, something to enjoy again. Maybe like a 30-day writing challenge, but a bit looser because unfortunately I cannot write everyday to the point I would like. Setting a word count doesn’t work for me, but I would like to have something more than 3 paragraphs. 

If anyone could recommend me some ideas, it would be greatly appreciated. Currently, the idea I’m entertaining is: writing along through an album, one entry per each song, written in album order. Can be as loosely related to the song as needed; the song is simply for structure. Perhaps one day I’ll write a review, one day fanfiction, Just something nice and easy and fun.

Thinking about using the Hadestown OBC first? Simply because it is long and poetic and I want an excuse to listen to it all the way through. 

Anyway, if you have any suggestions or ideas to improve this potential project, please leave a comment in any way you want. 

#writing #my writing #writing project #writing challenge #the book of delights #ross gay #john green #the anthropocene reviewed #both of those books are wonderful should you want to read them

[steadfast-unmoving]

OUT/WITH by Josh Philpott

The below was originally published on the Ninetales Collective Blog on September 3rd 2020.

Sometimes when I see an empty space, I like to imagine what would happen if it was filled with concrete, like a Rachael Whiteread sculpture, what shape would the concrete be when it dries and gets extracted? I’m not sure I’m likely to find out too soon, I’m told mixing concrete is back breaking work, and there’s only so many back alleys and window frames you can fill in before someone gets miffed. I find empty spaces poetic though, and I’ve never quite figured out why. Perhaps they’re spaces of possibility, already pregnant with potential to be used, filled with noise or silence, warmth, cold, sanctuary.

Honor Ash’s zine OUT/WITH avidly documents empty spaces and liminal non-places encountered in Norwich, London, Berlin, and Dallas, and it makes me feel some kind of way. Whittled down from 300 images saved from Honor’s Instagram over 6 years, curated into this publication to represent what they describe as “That Vibe” (capitalization their own). The first image and the zine’s cover depicts what may or may not be a shop sign, its letters chaotically spray-painted over. The sign is centered in the photo, even as it can now only communicate its own illegibility through its obfuscated language. All that remains is a lack, a “should” that is unfulfilled. Yet this is the point of interest, unreadable disused signage, a piece of urban decay in passing, a small moment which bears an absurd self-contradiction. Each of the zine’s following 35 pages carries the same befitting stark format, a single photograph framing a poetic moment of hauntological emptiness in urbania. With no people in all but one of the images, there is no sense of time being frozen, nor of any time at all: perhaps the bus window has always been fogged up; perhaps there have always been rose petals on the floor of the tube. The result for me is a pervading feeling of serenity and solitude throughout.

The photos are arranged non-chronologically, matching visual correspondences between image pairings across each spread. Sometimes obvious (a faceless billboard with its rows of light tubes and electrical innards exposed and dead, set against a sunset-depicting Mercedes-Benz Arena screen dominating a cityscape in midnight darkness), sometimes more intuitive (an elevated train station walkway and a large stack of newspapers both sharing a right-angled corner and a sense of holding aloft). It’s tempting to read the pictures as couplets, the zine a pamphlet of poetry. The only text is captured in public signage as incidental subjects within the photographs (themselves examples of unintentional non-internet alt lit: TO THE SHOPS; FALLING FROM OR THROUGH THIS ROOF COULD RESULT IN FATA), but the visual couplets convey a spatial poetry manifesting amidst the built environment. It’s also tempting to read a narrative into the zine, as if this project is the culmination of a 6 year dérive. More likely, these photographs document spontaneous moments of deviation in between passages of commuting and socialising, asides to unseen and unrelated wider narratives.

This work reminds me of several artists whose Instagram feeds depict urban emptiness and absent human leftovers in a similar way, like Matt Calderwood (@mattcalderworld), or Luke Hart (@sculptureinpublic) who photographs things in public that look like sculpture but aren’t. I also think of Anu Vahtra, whose exhibition Completion Through Removal quotes one of Gordon Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture cards, speaking to the use of emptiness as a tool for shaping space and one’s perception of it, for recognizing situations as poetic. I think that OUT/WITH captures “naturally-occurring” instances of this in the urban environment, and in doing so presents a psychogeographical response to the Anthropocene world and the problems it raises, its empty spaces left by unfulfilled futures.

Honor has a joyously varied practice, to which OUT/WITH is a deeply satisfying and alluring addition. The found poetic signage alone continues an established pattern of decontextualizing words, and sometimes removing letters from language entirely to recombine them into words which carry no prescribed meaning, creating new understanding of the function and affects of language. Such manifestations include a maze of hyperlinks, poems, and images (a hyper-poem?) which can* be found on their website, and a sentence of invented words live-tattooed down the length of their spine. They have performed live interactive spoken-word pieces and poetry, and sometimes they perform dance interpretations of Richard Nixon’s resignation speech as 114-Volt.

OUT/WITH is available to read as an e-publication here, and is also accessible on their website alongside more of their work at hnr.fyi. The Instagram for the project is @ out___with.

*could, at the time of publishing

#outwith #photography #josh philpott #honor ash #photographers on tumblr #lensblr #writing about photography #i re-read this every so often and it just makes me so happy that josh saw something in my work that i didn't even see at the time

[sneakers-and-shakes]

Book Review: The Anthropocene Reviewed

5 AM is not a time I normally see. A liminal space that’s too “morning” for staying up and too early to be waking up. Light enough to not feel like night but dark enough to feel like morning, it doesn’t quite feel real.

Perhaps it’s fitting that it’s in this pocket of time I’m reminiscing about what my blog post should be for the beginning of this year. A natural conclusion would be a monthly setup post to supplement last month’s yearly set up. Or maybe I should try a challenge and log my experience? I’ve been reading a lot lately, should I do a review?

My favorite book (in the four I’ve read so far) has been The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. The book feels a lot like 5 AM.

Too nonfiction to be fiction, yet too poetic to simply be facts. Experiences color the pages yet there are no images to fill in. What speaks to me the most if the way it makes you feel. As if you’re on the cusp of something great only to realize that what’s ahead has been with you the entire time.

Whimsy is not a word I use often but there is a sense of wonder in the pages. And the pages flow together despite each chapter being a standalone essay that can be put down once you reach the end.

Yet I wanted to keep going. 

John Green manages the balance between personal and holistic which makes the reader feel like they’re learning something but connecting with the author. Each chapter a different subject to peruse as if talking with a friend. “Oh do you know that song You’ll Never Walk Alone?” or “Hey, let me tell you something about Halley’s Comet.”

Each essay ends with perhaps the most familiar thing to all of us in this day and age, a review. You can rate the song on a radio out of 10 and the restaurant you had dinner at in stars and how you feel in a sliding range of emojis from smiling to crying. It ties up the author’s thoughts, perhaps too simplistically and yet perhaps that’s the point.

Because in the end it’s one person’s take, and you will have your own review if you decide to read the book. 

But for me, I give The Anthropocene Reviewed 5 stars.

#books #book rec #book review #john green #the anthropocene reviewed #lifestyle #lifestyle blog

[zitasaurusrex]

I've finished it.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane is going to be difficult for me to describe in a succinct way, but first and foremost, if you remember nothing else I say, know that it is an utterly gorgeous book.

Underland is a nonfiction account of several years of the author's personal travel, research, and interviews with experts he uses to build up a picture of the relationship between human beings and underground places, and what he refers to as deep time.

It is also a beautiful work with a poetic skill for synthesizing so many ideas together, connecting all the disparate places he goes and the information he pulls in (ancient civilizations, cave paintings, spelunking, mountaineering, the study of glaciers, dark matter, the Paris catacombs, the interconnected roots of trees, the vaults we are digging to sequester spent nuclear fuel rods, among many things) to envision the Anthropocene (our current geological epoch, the time we are defining as beginning where humanity's permanent impact on the Earth can be measured). Things Macfarlane teaches you about in one place return in another, sometimes haunting, sometimes in such a perfect echo that one pauses to admire how it fits together like the edges of continents that were once part of a whole.

People have, for the entire history of our species, turned to underground places to preserve what is precious to us, and to banish what we find most dangerous. Caves are places that form so slowly and on a timescale so alien to the span of a human life that they feel timeless and connect us to the deep past and future. What did the people who came before us mean by the choices they made? What will our future make of us, are we being good ancestors?

Anyway.

It's really fucking cool, I highly recommend it. (Also, the audiobook is good.)

#books #zita posts #underland by robert macfarlane

[mudthing]

so i saw a post today that had a quote from donna haraway about the chthulucene (a term proposed to describe the modern era), and i remembered reading that same passage from one of my art history classes. i have mixed feelings. so i wanna talk about it.

first, context. i'm not a scientist, but some very cursory research produces a few pieces of information. the holocene, the current geological epoch, has lasted ~11,700 years, since the end of the last ice age. the previous epoch, the pleistocene, lasted around 2.6 million years, according to the most recent definition. as i understand it, epochs are delineated by world-altering shifts in climate or geology, though it seems the holocene is a largely arbitrary distinction based on human presence, as the pleistocene has had multiple continuous ice age/warm period cycles without anything different about this one. (really, they're all subjective divisions - 'science' isn't universal truth, it's people deciding which truths to tell and how, but whatever.)

the anthropocene (allegedly coined in the 60s, gained visibility and use in the 2000s) is the unofficial term generally used to refer to the period in which human activity has radically altered the earth and its climate. various official bodies have examined using it as an official term, but with little agreement over when it should have begun. the effects of human activity have compounded gradually, so there is no single beginning date or inflection point. the industrial revolution is when coal-burning on an unprecedented scale began to significantly alter the atmosphere.

the term 'capitalocene' has been proposed to describe how we live in an era defined by capitalism itself, as a destructive force that reshapes the world. it affects us in many more ways than just carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and tracing the origin of capitalism means going back tens of thousands of years. the term calls for a shift in the way we think and talk about it.

'chthulucene' is a term originated by donna haraway, who rejects the anthropocene and capitalocene as labels and argues for a way of thinking that i'll summarize as 'humans are just animals, other animals actively affect our world, and we need to be aware of mutual interrelations rather than imposing our human wills on everything.' she chooses chthulucene for the root 'cthonic,' meaning 'of the earth,' and for its associations with the tangled relationships of nonhuman organisms. but you can read her own words in her essays here and here.

i have mixed feelings about it. i think she's right in a lot of what she says, i just don't like the term 'chthulucene,' for several reasons.

the first is that the immediate association is with cthulhu, the h p lovecraft monster. she acknowledges that, and argues it has other meanings that take precedence. i don't think it's that easy to shoulder out that association. personally, i think a lot more people would think 'cthulhu the eldritch squid thing' than would think 'chthonic, like the greek underworld deities,' and that has a lot of unwanted connotations for her ideas. why are we giving lovecraft more cultural space, of all people? fuck that guy.

the second is that 'chthulucene' isn't really a geological period (and capitalocene isn't either). the reason the anthropocene exists at all as a term is to define 'a period in which the planet was altered by human activities to such an extent that it will be permanently visible in the geological and fossil records.' changing atmospheric composition, rising ocean levels, artificially altered geographies, mass species die-offs - these things will leave traces for millions of years. we have entered a period of climatic change significant enough to be measured on the scale of geological time. that's a timescale where you have to count in the hundreds of millions of years in order to get to the next interesting thing happening, and it took us a tiny fraction of that time to become a very interesting thing for whoever comes after us. see this comic for a visual depiction of how jarring this change is, over just the last 22,000 years.

i take issue with the name because the chthulucene is using naming conventions of existing periods - the holocene, pleistocene, etc - to describe something that isn't any kind of geological period. it's trying to say something about How the World Is, Generally. but who's to say the chthulucene won't end ten years from now, to be replaced by the orochicene or the cosmocene or some other miscellaneous greek- or latin-derived word, that has a better theory to argue with?

that leads into the third thing, which is - donna haraway just came up with a name she liked. that's how everything ever has been named, so it's not unusual. it's just that it isn't any more accurate than anything else. the point she's arguing - that we need new ways of thinking and relating to the world, framing humans as part of a whole-earth ecosystem where we need every other part, rather than humans as masters of a passive nature - is entirely correct. but if the goal is specifically to resist enlightenment concepts of dominance through intellectual mastery, why are you also suggesting we have an official name for the period? if we're trying to find ways of knowing that don't require western scientific authority, why is this new age following the same convention as every older one, using the '''official''' linguistic jargon of western scientific authority?

maybe i just don't like the way that harraway writes. i mean -

"Bacteria and fungi abound to give us metaphors; but, metaphors aside (good luck with that!), we have a mammalian job to do, with our biotic and abiotic sym-poietic collaborators, co-laborers. We need to make kin sym-chthonically, sym-poetically. Who and whatever we are, we need to make-with—become-with, compose-with—the earth-bound (thanks for that term, Bruno Latour-in-anglophone-mode).13" from here

which is, uh, a lot. and yet she says in the other essay that "Anthropocene is a term most easily meaningful and usable by intellectuals in wealthy classes and regions; it is not an idiomatic term for climate, weather, land, care of country, or much else in great swathes of the world, especially but not only among indigenous peoples."

honestly, if you're complaining about intellectuals and you're using phrases like 'abiotic sym-poietic collaborators' and 'make kin sym-chthonically,' you're an intellectual. sorry not sorry but that's how it is. also, tell me you honestly think that 'chthulucene' is a term that's going to be meaningful and usable to people across the world? please.

anyways in summary i think haraway is right about a lot of what she's saying, i just can't stand the way she says it most of the time, and i'm less concerned about a lack of scientific rigor than i am annoyed by people who claim to be fighting established institutions of something-or-other and yet whose writing is incomprehensible to anyone without a liberal arts degree

#donna haraway #anthropocene #chthulucene

[enactivewebs]

11.10

Kōrero with Bridget

Decolonising western structures in film

(auto)ethnography - tracing and untangling, emotion, response, affect, senses, understanding of my own ethnicity in relation to other things 

Concept is that it’s a journey that is exploring the entanglement of all of these design theories

Poetic filmmaking/journey exploring the design perspectives of the global south - owning my perspective 

Acknowledging and documenting my decolonising 

Find another term - poetic self-reflexive journey responsive to different design languages of the global south and issues around embodiment, senses, affect

Radical dimension of perspective 

Symbiotic closed loop system between my journey, and journeys/stories of others - responsive to others’ perspectives - the film is enacting it’s own journey (mine, others, and non-humans)

Open ended 

Exploratory 

Co-subjectivity - intersubjectivity

Themes: overriding idea - > resource extraction, poverty, 

Issue I’m wanting to communicate as a designer 

Freire and Baol clearly in my sights - 

Underlying impulse is educational in terms of design

Is there an educational 

Theatre of the Oppressed - dialogue happening there - is my film made in response to a text?

Am I making a film in response to Designs for the Pluriverse?

Going on journey in response to philosophical inspirations - 

Film is in response to or in dialogue with these texts (Escobar, 2018; Manzini, 2015; Varela et al., )

Respond positively and find solutions to a particular text 

These thinkers have created a landscape that I am exploring

Magnetic force has drawn me in… 

Languages and ways to give voice and give a response to particular texts

Ghosts in my film - who came before them? - dialogue with history (Maturana, 

Understand something through lived experience

Follow or be in dialogue with a thinker and document this

In the era of the anthropocene, era of climate tipping point, decolonisation ?? Sense of a perspective 

Voices and thinking echoes in these places - in dialogue with that 

Living force in the film - 

Journey to find my ghost - thinking and words in this place 

Echo in the landscape - 

Echoes across the pacific 

Follow his journey - walk, bike ride, physical thing that he did

Empower people beyond the corporates and the greedy - 

Geographical journey that is an echo of one of these guys

[webionaire]

Poet-artists Christian Bök and Karin Bolender pose two interventions into bioart, with radically different conceptions of the nonhumans involved. In Böks Xenotext project (2002–present), a microbe becomes an archive and writing machine through DNA manipulation. Bolender’s The Unnaming of Aliass (2002–2020) documents her life with the ass Aliass and the unexpected results it yields. Both projects attempt to establish communication with nonhumans, but their approaches have drastically different consequences. Bök ultimately ends up reinscribing well-worn anthropocentric biases. In contrast, Bolender’s capacious version of animal husbandry moves away from machines and mastery over circumstances and animals, following a principle akin to Karen Barad’s “intra-action” to suggest a course correction for bioartists’ work with nonhumans.

[linguistlist-blog]

TOC, English Text Construction Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)

ICYMI: 2022. v, 83 pp. Table of Contents Introduction: The (in)visibility politics of absences/presences Jessica Maufort & Marc Maufort pp. 113–117 Articles Animals squawking their mysteries: Narrative, poetic form, and the nonhuman in Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country Marco Caracciolo pp. 118–137 “Shadowtime”: Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter and ghosts of the Anthropocene Shannon Lambert pp. 138–155 A more perfect dissolution: Mining nostalgia in Samuel D. Hunter’s Greater Clements Lau http://dlvr.it/SrQQnL

[hexjulia]

ok so for nonfiction I think I'm going to try reading this month:

Red shambhala: magic, prophecy, and geopolitics in the heart of asia, Znamenski. Anthropocene poetics: deep time, sacrifice zones and extinction, Farrier. Year of four emperors, wellesley. Birds in the ancient world, myott. Ecocriticism, ecology and the cultures of antiquity, Schliephake

any of you read any of these/have an opinion on them?

supposedly the Znamenski book isn't very well written but the topic is fascinating (it focusses on specific historical figures I wanted to read more about also) + he draws on a lot of resources not available in english. so if anyone has an alternative to suggest that'd nice.

[globalync]

The Anthropocene Hymnal Anthology is here – thrilled to be a contributor #poetry #climate change — Short Prose

cover art ‘New World’ by Kerfe Roig, Time to put yourself first? I don’t think so. It is time to put our planet first. If not there will be no you, I, us. The Anthropocene Hymnal anthology is here. Ingrid Wilson, who complied and edited The Anthropocene Hymnal, describes it as “a poetic response to the […] The Anthropocene Hymnal Anthology is here – thrilled to be a contributor #poetry #climate…

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[magpiepoet]

Where to Submit Your Creative Writing

#SubmissionCalls #GetPublished #OpenCall #Writers

Anthropocene Poetry Deadline 30th June Accepting Poetry Bath Magg Deadline 30th June Accepting Poetry Cosmic Daffodil  Deadline 25th July Theme Natura Accepting Poetry, Flash Fiction, Photography & Art  Healthline Zine  Deadline 10th July Theme Confessions Accepting Poetry, Prose, Photography & Art  Poetic Insights For those who are curious Read my book ‘Home’ Hotel life Get 2…

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#art #Fiction #lit mag #nature #poetry #writing