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“With the land transfer finalized, Hazel Powless believes the land itself can now begin to heal.”

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“Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one's "normal" state, and occasions a radical intimacy with—and radical alienation from— one's body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)? What about the fact that Harry is neither male nor female? I'm a special—a two for one, his character Valentine explains in By Hook or By Crook.

When or how do new kinship systems mime older nuclear-family arrangements and when or how do they radically recontextualize them in a way that constitutes a rethinking of kinship? (Judith Butler) How can you tell; or, rather, who's to tell?

…

To align oneself with the real while intimating that others an at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identiny, also has a finger in psychosis. If a man who thinks be is a king s mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.

Perhaps this is why psychologist D. W. Winnicot's notion of “feeling real" is so moving to me. One can aspire to feel real. one can help others to feel real, and one can oneself feel real-a feeling Winnicott describes as the collected, primary sensation of aliveness, "the aliveness of the body tissues and working of body-functions, including the hear's action and breathing." which makes spontaneous gesture possible. For Winnicott. feeling real is not reactive to external stimuli, nor is it an identity. It is a sensation— a sensation that spreads. Among other things, it makes one want to live.”

[The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson]

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“The Thing Is,” by Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you down like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

[rebgarof]

TRANSFORMING SCHOOL FOOD POLITICS AROUND THE WORLD, edited by Jennifer E Gaddis and Sarah A Robert

“Debates about school lunch are fundamentally about care: what it means to care well, how much care is worth, and whether caring for public goods like children and the environment should be the private responsibility of individuals in the home or a public responsibility that is collectivized and shared."

Care is an activity that includes "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as poss-ble. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. As a form of government-sponsored care infrastructure, public school meal programs are a vital arena to begin renegotiating both economic and ecolog!-cal relationships. One way to do this is by practicing care-at-a-distance, holding distant others in emotional closeness rather than physical closeness through values-based supply chains that connect buyers with producers who emphasize fair labor standards, healthy food access, communily empowerment, and ecological sustainability.

As a commodified form of care nested within a fiercely contested state institution, the labor of educating and feeding children at school is tethered to a legacy of feminization, racialization, and devaluation that is common across occupations that involve care work.* What's more, women do the majority of food work-often for low wages or in an unpaid capacity— in countries around the world, yet they control fewer resources and hold limited decision-making power over food policy or industry practices.

However, they are not without agency, and in this volume, we highlight numerous ways that women are leading efforts to remake social, economic, and environmental relationships through school food politics. We con-ceptualize their efforts within the broad umbrella of care-centered politics, which "has the capacity to provide values and ideas, and a perspective about change that not only challenges the neoliberal political consensus and its long-standing capitalist and market-centered underpinnings but the more extreme versions of the anticare politics that neoliberalism has bred too."

By using the verb "transforming" in our title, we assert a critical need to understand and do school food politics differently. We argue that a transformative school food politics is an inherently feminist politics of food and education. It is driven by inclusive policymaking processes that draw from the lived expertise of those most impacted. It is welcoming of collaborations that include a wide range of stakeholders-for example, students, their caregivers, teachers, cafeteria workers and other school support staff, labor unions, grassroots activists and nonprofit organizations, policymak-ers, and the private sector-while centering the voices and perspectives of the students and frontline workers who have historically held the least power in determining school food problems, policy, and practice. It pushes back against the economic devaluation of the gendered labor that goes into caring for, feeding, and educating children. Lastly, we conceptualize transformative school food politics as a distributed, transnational movement capable of learning from local, state, regional, national, and international examples.”

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“When prisoners are tasked with the food service, rather than everything being contracted out to private companies, the food is better.”

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Yaya Bey: Tiny Desk Concert <3

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https://www.urbancny.com/attorney-general-james-reaches-175000-settlement-with-syracuse-landlord-for-failing-to-address-lead-based-paint-hazards/

“In July 2023, Attorney General James, County Executive McMahon, and Mayor Walsh filed a lawsuit against Hobbs and his companies, alleging that he repeatedly and persistently violated lead safety laws at more than a dozen rental properties around Syracuse. Over the last eight years, there were 413 violations of lead safety laws at 19 different properties owned by Hobbs. At least 11 children were poisoned by lead while living at these properties.

Lead-based paint in residential housing is a pervasive problem in Syracuse, where 81 percent of the housing stock was built before lead-based paint was banned in New York in 1970. Lead poisoning in Onondaga County is highest among children of color, the majority of whom live in Syracuse. In 2022, 510 children in Onondaga County had elevated levels of lead in their blood, and 90 percent of those children lived in Syracuse. Approximately 11 percent of the Black children tested in Onondaga County in 2022 had elevated blood lead levels, compared to under two percent of white children tested.

Lead is a highly toxic metal that can cause serious and irreversible adverse health effects. Children who have been exposed to even very low levels of lead are at risk for neurological and physical problems during critical stages of early development. Children under the age of six are more likely to be exposed to lead than any other age group, as their normal behaviors have resulted in chewing lead paint chips and breathing in or swallowing dust from old lead paint that gets on floors, windowsills, and hands.

Since 2014, Hobbs has owned and managed at least 62 rental properties with at least 91 individual residential units in the Syracuse area. According to city and county records, all of Hobbs’ rental properties were built prior to 1960, and therefore presumed to contain lead-based paint. Most of these properties are rented by low-income families of color.

As a result of this settlement, Hobbs will pay $175,000, $55,000 of which will go to current and former tenants harmed by lead paint exposure at the properties he owned over the past eight years, and $120,000 of which will go towards addressing lead hazards at the 19 properties that Hobbs owns with lead-related violations. Hobbs will be barred from selling any of these properties without OAG’s approval until all lead hazards are resolved.

“Safe housing for all families in Syracuse should be the rule, but too often that is not the case,” said Paul Ciavarri, Community Organizer for Legal Services of Central New York. “We applaud Attorney General Letitia James and her multi-agency team in their fight for relief and justice on behalf of Syracuse tenants. Lead poisoning causes untold harm to our community’s most vulnerable families, and negligent landlords should expect to be held accountable to find and fix hazards in their tenants’ homes.”

“People should feel safe in their homes and not worry if they are being poisoned by lead. Yet, Black and Brown children in Syracuse have some of the nation’s highest rates of lead poisoning, which puts their education, health, and safety at risk,” said Lanessa Owens-Chaplin, Director of NYCLU’s Racial Justice Center. “Childhood lead poisoning is an environmental justice problem, and holding landlords accountable for it is a racial justice imperative. We commend the AG’s office for taking these necessary steps.”

“We applaud this latest action for safe housing in Syracuse from Attorney General Letitia James. The fragile shell of safety that is the home is shattered with every case of landlord negligence,” said Darlene Medley and Oceanna Fair of Families for Lead Freedom Now. “This action against Todd Hobbs is further proof of every landlord’s clear responsibility to deliver safe housing conditions. The high costs to our community when they don’t are already only too obvious. Our hearts go out to the families harmed, and meanwhile we see a horizon of hope for Syracusans in the important work of Attorney General James to hold another landlord to a common-sense standard of safety and health.”

[rebgarof]

“Sooki and I shined our flashlights against the smooth bark of the trees that lay across the streets. We shined them into the beds of purple iris that stood tall and straight, untouched. We climbed over branches, met an impasse, turned to walk another way. The water in the creek a block away skimmed the bottom of the footbridge. We talked and then we didn't. It was enough just to be together in all that darkness.”

“These Precious Days.” Ann Patchett

[rebgarof]

“It's the same way she looks at me—me with the books and no children-like not having children was some spectacular idea that I alone came up with. That is, after all, Robin's superpower: to love the person in front of her as she is, to see all the glorious light inside them and reflect it back, everywhere.”

There Are No Children Here, Ann Patchett

“For as many times as the horrible thing happens, a thousand times in every day the horrible thing passes us by. A meteor could be skating past Earth's atmosphere this very min ute. We'll never know how close we came to annihilation, but today/ saw it- everything I had and stood to lose and did not lose. Thanks 10 this fleeting clarity, the glow from the fluorescent tubes on the celings of this small cardiac recovery room lights up the entire word.”

These Precious Days, Ann Patchett

[rebgarof]

“Sam knew that after her mother died, the last worries and pains would fall away. Sam would see her mother as not merely her mother, but as a full, perfect human. Sam would apprehend the whole of her mother's life, her girlhood through her old age, the whole of her body, her mind, her heart. Her existence on earth would be clear and perfect. Sam was from her, a part of her, and Sam would feel, in a profound way, that she remained a version of her, a derivative. This soothed Sam, to feel her mother's traces in every molecule, her light in every aspect. Her mother would die, but Sam would still be here. She didn't quite believe it yet, but she knew it just the same.

…

Sam slept for nine hours without waking. In the morning, as her consciousness streamed in with the sun, a vision came to her, unbidden but not unwelcome: of the ends of things, the time between now and then, the world without her.”

“Wayward,” Dana Spiotta

(learning to read, this on a snow day)

[rebgarof]

“Heat and sweat; she couldn't breathe and threw off her blanket.

The air was cold, but she burned inside.

Sam did not check the time or pick up her phone. She knew it was two or three. Four is an early morning; one is a late night. Two or three are only for violence and prayer. Desperate hours. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. She felt the floorboards under her bare feet. The house throbbed against her. She heard the wind in the trees outside. The city was out there. She was in the house and the house was in the city. The city was in the world.

This was why you came here. You came here to witness, to see the world and then to act and make it better. To re-form it. She was fake poor, Sullivan's Travels, slumming-it "poor." But now she understood her obligation. The obligation of history, of her wealth, of her position. Even recasting her losses as gifts emerged with new purpose: the night waking drove her out to the street; her invisibility made her seem as innocuous as the pavement. She was a secret creature, a cryptogon. Her loneliness, with its grotesque emo-tions, outsized in the suburbs, here made her feel the pain-the weight-of what she saw. What was the extra-life for? You woke because it was not the time for gentle sleep. You sought the world with clarity, and it turned out it had been here all along, waiting for you to see it.

She was in the house. The house was in the city. The city was in the world. The world was history. This was why she bought this house in this place.”

“Wayward,” Dana Spoiotta

(admittedly too close, set 1.5 miles from home)

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