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Joe Milazzo, "Mare Crisium (Sea of Crises)." 2024.

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Today’s necessary noise.

Félicia Atkinson, Space As An Instrument. (Shelter Press, 2024.)

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The book’s resurrection of the poetic essay form (the “largely forgotten and putatively archaic genre,” as Ruby calls it) is reflective of a longer trend in American letters, that of poets existing in proximity to universities as instructors and scholars. Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’s recent Academic Avant-Gardes (2023) analyzes poets such as Jorie Graham and Susan Howe whose relationship with academia, such as teaching and research, became central sources of inspiration in their work. The mock academic essay lives in the same neighborhood as campus novels such as Donna Tartt’s A Secret History and Don DeLillo’s White Noise, providing a non-specialist audience an insight into the workings of the “ivory tower” and giving a face to the neurotic individuals that comprise “higher education.” Another generic fellow-traveler is Vladimir Nabokov’s (in)famous novel-but-not-quite Pale Fire, a long poem by the fictional John Shade and a digressive and misleading commentary by his old friend Charles Kinbote. All of these observations notwithstanding, however, Ruby has beat me to the punch: He already cites Andrews’s monograph in one of the poem’s many footnotes! Because my typical strategies don’t quite work, I will artificially divide myself into Venya-the-academic and Venya-the-poet to capture in full the peculiarities of engaging with Context Collapse.

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Philippe Weisbecker, "Fabrique." 2022.

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Today's necessary noise.

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There is one name, however, that the student of nature could afford to misremember: Homo sapiens. In 2008, the political nonprofit Responsible Policies for Animals (RPA) sent a petition to the ICZN, with a simple demand: change the epithet sapiens, which “promotes and perpetuates an attitude in human beings of their own exceptionalism and superiority.” They suggested an alternative, Homo complexus, which recognizes “hyper-complexity” rather than wisdom as our distinguishing trait. The ICZN never acknowledged receipt and media outlets were unimpressed. “No one responded to the news release of the petition’s submission,” said David Cantor, the founder and director of RPA. But others would soon issue parallel calls.

“An animal that imperils its own future and that of most other life forms and ecosystems does not merit a single ‘sapiens’, let alone the two we now bear,” argued the science writer Julian Cribb in a 2011 letter to Nature. He is referring to Homo sapiens sapiens: our subspecies name in trinomial nomenclature, historically used by paleontologists and anthropologists to distinguish modern humans from extinct precursors. A useful specification or not, the trinomen “sapiens” blows coarser salt into the taxonomic wound, making us not only wise, but the wisest of the wise. “Repeating sapiens doesn’t get us any closer to wisdom,” writes the physician Warren Martin Hern. “It is a meaningless chant.” Cribb concludes his letter with a call for humans to receive a new epithet, one that more accurately describes our collective impact on Earth. In 2015, The Ecologist published a letter addressed to Linnaeus, written by conservation biologist Gianlucca Serra, urging him to rename our species for similar reasons: “That name you gave us 256 years ago sounds frankly ridiculous in the light of the current situation, dear Carl. Do not take it personally, at your time you could have hardly imagined.” Oceanographer Michael P. Belanger repeated this sentiment in 2018, relaying how he sees “no adaptation to a changing environment that would show evidence of human intelligence.” In 2023, Hern offered his own redefinition of humans as Homo ecophagus (the man who devours the ecosystem).

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Tacita Dean, "Quarantania." 2018.

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Today's necessary noise.

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What is the “extra” in a sentence, in a paragraph, in a view, in a scene from a film—and what makes it both extra and necessary as a subliminal presence? I have tried elsewhere to understand this concept through the categories of surplus and uselessness. Concepts like extra, etcetera, and ityadi might help us grasp the decision-making process of selection and rejection that is the spine of the creative act. Robinson Crusoe, returning to the site of his shipwreck, discovers things that he could use: provisions that would keep him alive for some time, and, unexpectedly, writing material—paper and ink. He carries them back to his island and decides to keep a journal of everything he sees there. A few months later, realizing that he is running out of stationery, he makes an important decision—from now on, he will only record “significant” events in his notebook. I think of this moment as loaded with analogous significance: it is the moment when Crusoe will have to select and reject, and in doing so, he will turn from journal keeper into artist.

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Jean Charlot, "Los Ricos En El Infierno [Rich People in Hell]." 1924.

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Today's necessary noise.

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But the sustained prosperity and political stability that these policies were meant to create have proved elusive. The global economy since the 1980s has been riven by repeated financial crises. Latin America endured a “lost decade” of economic growth. The 1990s in Russia were worse than the Great Depression had been in Germany and the United States. The austerity and high-interest-rate policies after the 1997 East Asia crisis restored financial stability but at the cost of domestic recessions, and contributed to political instability and the repudiation of incumbent parties in Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea, as they did again across Europe after 2009–2010. Global economic growth rates in the era of globalization have been about half what they were in the less globalized postwar decades. Around the world, violent racist demagogues keep winning elections, and although they all seem very happy with the idea of private property, they are openly hostile to the rule of law, political liberalism, individual freedom, and other ostensible preconditions and cultural accompaniments to market economies. Both democracy and globalization seem to be in retreat in practice as well as in ideological popularity. 

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Carrie Merrill, "Surfs Up." 2021.

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Today's necessary noise.

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After more than eighty years disarticulated, "Testimony" has finally been issued in a single, complete volume by Black Sparrow Books. Given the extreme rarity of the 1934 volume, which was never reprinted, this is the first occasion most readers have had to take in the entire work. This provides a useful occasion to revisit and reflect upon Reznikoff’s poetry. Because so much of his best-known poetry is drawn from legal material and concerns terrible wrongdoing, people often understand Reznikoff’s great theme to be injustice. I think otherwise—to the extent that his work reflects a principle, that principle is sympathy, and though wrongs cannot be righted, Reznikoff suggests it is relatively easy to do the right thing in the first place. He is a poet of fragile goodness and guarded optimism.

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Saul Steinberg, [Untitled.] ca. 1951.

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Today’s necessary noise.

Maria Bertel, Monophonic. (Relative Pitch Records, 2024.)