this is me dumping now 007
Christina Sharpe on the Yale Review & Pinkpantheress on a Michael Jackson sample
From longreads on Percival Everett published earlier in the week to link dumps shaking my fist at the keyboard and begging you to read a Christina Sharpe essay, we’re so back. I’m writing and you’re reading this in the fugue state that is another US general election season. Debates as political theater. A hot-headed old white man spewing lie-filled invectives at a Black and Indian woman using her identity and fraught political record to try and convince the country that she offers the best way forward and not an extension of the status quo. The rigamarole to find and platform the mythical “undecided voter” who definitely isn’t just a Republican either lying to themselves or, plainly, not knowledgeable enough to have made a reasonable decision. Everything is disorienting and a distraction from the work in front of us. Hug your friends and family, find something to bring you comfort, do what you can to sustain your energy, and find something to read. I can help with the last part. Away we go.
Christina Sharpe published an essay on the Yale Review that you should click on and read right now. If I’ve ever added a mandatory read to these roundups, this is that link. Please, pour a cup of a comforting beverage, turn everything else off, print it even, and read the damn thing. Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, one of my favorite books published last year, piloted a new form of writing for Sharpe. Using notes or fragments in lieu of a long block of prose. These fragments next to each other displayed a mind working from one direction to another and back again in ways few forms can. The Yale Review article speaks to the need for writing, above and beyond craft, in the midst of grief from witnessing untold depths of violence. It shows Sharpe changing under the weight of the world, shifting relationships and ways of being to meet the grief carried over months witnessing genocide. Please, if you read any of these links, let it be this one.
What are the words and the forms with which to do and say and make what we need to live in, now? Not only in some future time but now. What is our work to be? isn’t a grand question. It is a simple question. The question at the base of our writing.
The above link reminds me of Dionne Brand—at the height of the pandemic—writing towards the brutal calculus of lives lost to Covid. This world did not learn how to grieve collectively and publicly. We are still living with the memory of so many lost—and still being lost—to Covid. I pray that by the time the accounting of that grief and all the oncoming griefs comes due we’ve built bonds strong enough to pay.
Those in power keep invoking “the normal” as in “when we get back to normal.” I’ve developed an aversion to that word normal. Of course, I understand the more benign meanings of normal; having dinner with friends, going to the movies, going back to work (not so benign). However, I have never used it with any confidence in the first place; now, I find it noxious.
The somewhat controversial opinion I’ll offer today is that the best Michael Jackson album is Off the Wall. Thriller is great, but Off the Wall’s single-minded commitment to disco, sequencing, and the fact that it all works so seamlessly has the album first on my MJ list. I recently heard an old, unreleased Pinkpantheress loosie built around an “Off the Wall” sample that scratches every itch I hope a song will.
It appears I was somewhat wrong about Hello Kitty last week. Wrong in two ways: 1) a more accurate accounting of the brand’s popularity slides it a bit down the scale and 2) there is a nefariousness hiding behind the brand’s popularity: Japan intentionally juiced the brand’s popularity as a bit of reputation management following years of public and documented war crimes. Who would have thought that a stadium full of cardboard hats and plushies washed a nation clean of human rights violations? Thanks for keeping me honest Jasper.
I think our modern day “crisis of masculinity” is both overblown and under-considered. Overblown in that men manufactured the sense of male grievance that fuels the crisis-as-cultural-failing. Under-considered in that the need for a “positive vision” of maleness is somewhat overlooked. There is a void created by the combination of culture, technology, and anti-social behavior men feel jettisoned into and there are figures filling it with filth, violence, and evil rhetoric, namely manosphere commentators like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. I am no real Nietzsche-head and cannot specifically relate to the idea that the crisis of masculinity, the void with which some men feel, could be filled by reading him, but Mat Messerschmidt in The Point Mag presents an interesting case as to why Nietzsche continues to claim such a strong hold on young men trying to fill this gap the manosphere commentariat preys on.
Going to end with a few less links than the usual post, mostly because that Christina Sharpe essay is a vital read. Please take some time to sit with it. I’ll share lighter reads next week, promise. For now, you know the rules: if you have a link, send a link; if you have a comment or a thought, let me know. Until next time.