#london review of books

[luthienne]

Don’t Look Away, by Selma Dabbagh as featured in the London Review of Books

[tea-tuesday]

london stationery haul for my stationery freaks !!! i went a little crazy with stationery on this trip but to my defense, it was all funded by my state tax return hehe... these are the various things i got, which i linked:

yellow hard shell charger case from London Graphic Centre

special edition totebag from London Review of Books

gallimard journal from Choosing Keeping

brass hand clip from Choosing Keeping (honestly my fave purchase on this trip !!)

vintage bus blind journal from Choosing Keeping

kaweco perkeo fountain pen and inks from Present & Correct

grid flatlay book from Present & Correct

the epicurean notebook from Magma London

i also visited Smythson of Bond Street and Mount Street Printers but they were out of my budget. beautiful places to get luxury stationery goods!

[alanshemper]

There are other reasons why environmentalism might have looked like a bourgeois playground to Said. The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer – it was a key part of the Zionist ‘back to the land’ pioneer ethos. And in this context trees, specifically, have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation. It’s not only the countless olive and pistachio trees that have been uprooted to make way for settlements and Israeli-only roads. It’s also the sprawling pine and eucalyptus forests that have been planted over those orchards, as well as over Palestinian villages, most notoriously by the Jewish National Fund, which, under its slogan ‘Turning the Desert Green’, boasts of having planted 250 million trees in Israel since 1901, many of them non-native to the region. In publicity materials, the JNF bills itself as just another green NGO, concerned with forest and water management, parks and recreation. It also happens to be the largest private landowner in the state of Israel, and despite a number of complicated legal challenges, it still refuses to lease or sell land to non-Jews.

...

The JNF is an extreme and recent example of what some call ‘green colonialism’. But the phenomenon is hardly new, nor is it unique to Israel. There is a long and painful history in the Americas of beautiful pieces of wilderness being turned into conservation parks – and then that designation being used to prevent Indigenous people from accessing their ancestral territories to hunt and fish, or simply to live. It has happened again and again. A contemporary version of this phenomenon is the carbon offset. Indigenous people from Brazil to Uganda are finding that some of the most aggressive land grabbing is being done by conservation organisations. A forest is suddenly rebranded a carbon offset and is put off-limits to its traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a whole new class of ‘green’ human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands. Said’s comment about tree-huggers should be seen in this context.

...

But this only scratches the surface of what we can learn from reading Said in a warming world. He was, of course, a giant in the study of ‘othering’ – what is described in Orientalism as ‘disregarding, essentialising, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region’. And once the other has been firmly established, the ground is softened for any transgression: violent expulsion, land theft, occupation, invasion. Because the whole point of othering is that the other doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as those making the distinction. What does this have to do with climate change? Perhaps everything.

We have dangerously warmed our world already, and our governments still refuse to take the actions necessary to halt the trend. There was a time when many had the right to claim ignorance. But for the past three decades, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created and climate negotiations began, this refusal to lower emissions has been accompanied with full awareness of the dangers. And this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without Orientalism, without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools – of ranking the relative value of humans – are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.

2 June 2016

[introvertedpedant]

For your listening pleasure!

[impromptu-manifesto]

The Shoah after Gaza (a long read by Pankaj Mishra, in the London Review of Books)

[shakespearenews]

That promise to return to the real world is crucial to the comic conclusion in Frye’s formulation. It is entirely absent from Twelfth Night. Illyria is not a spa, and there is no prospect of return. Viola and her twin brother, Sebastian, enter Illyria never to leave it. But even if they did leave, where would they go back to? We don’t meet Sebastian until a whole act after our introduction to Orsino’s Illyria and Viola’s arrival. Act II, Scene i is one of several oddnesses in Twelfth Night’s set-up – Viola’s plan to become a eunuch, for instance, or the strangely overemphasised role of the sea captain. In it, Sebastian reveals to his companion, Antonio, that he is not who he seems. ‘You must know of me, Antonio, that my name is Sebastian, which I called Roderigo.’ But why has Sebastian been pretending to be called Roderigo? Or, more pertinently, why would a skilled playwright introduce a character by having him disavow an assumed identity that hasn’t been used and will never be referred to again? ‘My father,’ Sebastian then announces, ‘was that Sebastian of Messaline whom I know you have heard of.’

[transpondster]

A meme bounced around Brooklyn last summer: ‘What if we kissed at the Tom Verlaine book sale?’ Verlaine, who formed and fronted the band Television, died on 28 January 2023. Over the years he had acquired fifty thousand books – twenty tons or more – on any number of subjects: art, acoustics, astrological signs, UFOs. The sale of those books – a two-day affair in August, run out of adjacent garages in Brooklyn – was a serious draw. Arto Lindsay, the avant-pop musician, walked by. Tony Oursler made a short video and posted it on Instagram. Old friends, some of whom looked as if they hadn’t seen daylight in decades, found each other in the long line. Verlaine had split his enormous collection between storage units: one a short walk from his Chelsea one-bedroom, four more across the river in Red Hook, near the foot of the Gowanus Canal. Verlaine didn’t use Uber. To get to the Brooklyn facility he’d take a rickety grocery cart on the F train, ride it out to Smith and Ninth Street, the highest Subway station in the city, and walk the rest of the way. In a crowd, Verlaine stood out. He was tall, thin, fine-featured. (‘Tom Verlaine has the most beautiful neck in rock and roll,’ Patti Smith wrote in 1974. ‘Real swan like.’) He had never quit smoking and wore a car coat, like a character out of film noir. But there he had been, bumping his cart down several sets of stairs and escalators and wheeling it, under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, across seven lanes of traffic, to Red Hook. The books had to go somewhere.

Alex Abramovich | At the Tom Verlaine Book Sale

You can still buy Verlaine’s books from Better Read than Dead and Capitol Hill’s websites. His record collection will go on sale, one of these days, at the Academy Record annexes in Greenpoint and the East Village. They’re a reminder of different days in a different city, where the bookstores and record stores stayed open late, and you could poke around in them even after a night out at CBGB, and the stuff that you’d get there was cheap, and the space that you needed to store them was cheap, and, even if you worked in a bookstore, you could afford an offset press and start your own poetry imprint, or find a loft space in SoHo and start your own band.

[m-a-salter]

Hi William!

[jeffalessandrelli]

So,​ your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.

A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.

When I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a symptom particularly mortifying to me was that my handwriting disintegrated. I used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks, shelves of them, day after day, year after year. Now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, slant loses its smooth smart angle, it all looks embarrassing. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.

[thegirlwholovessynchronicity]

So,​ your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.

A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.

- ‘Gloves Off’ by Anne Carson published in the London Review of Books (Volume 46 Number 16)

[introvertedpedant]

On the 80th Anniversary of D-Day, Stephen Dillane reads an extract from the diary of the meteorologist Lawrence Hogben, one of those charged with forecasting when would be the best conditions for the Allies to launch their attack on the French beaches.

[thelastgoodcountry]

"It’s hard to keep Orpheus and Eurydice out of your thoughts as you watch the film. What if he was always going to fail to bring her back from the dead, even if he hadn’t turned around?"

— Michael Wood on Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera

in London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 10 · 23 May 2024

[allnewastromarta]

I'm either very stupid or very smart. After reading apocaliptic predictions about AI from people working on AI, I really want to see a computer turning evil without human input that made it evil.