Category Archives: buoys

February 19, 2021

Charged Disclosure

By DP

Now comes the voice of this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Louise Glück, whose quiet excellence we have long admired, and whose aversion to the “collective” tribunal in favor of precarious, accidental intimacy we most certainly share, hence our longstanding rejection of social media. Excerpts from her brief Nobel Lecture below, with the Emily D. poem, strangely (though unsurprisingly) misrepresented on the Nobel website.

 

 

Not unlike how we welcome those who find their way to DP.

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February 12, 2021

Diving Into the Flow

By DP

Now comes novelist Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears, Red Pill and Transmission, with a few illuminating thoughts regarding the social psychology of Q. The entire “Easy Chair” essay, titled Complexity, can be found in the January 2021 issue of Harper’s.

Excerpts below, with images from the artist Mike Jackson’s Birdsong series of Luminograms, relayed from the website of the Foley Gallery in NYC, where they were recently on view.

 

 

 

 

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We note that Kunzru also hosts a podcast titled Into the Zone. We jackknifed briefly into Dead Or Alive, the blurb for which states:

Life’s final border might not be so final after all. From tardigrades to viruses, some things are both dead and alive. Or neither. How do we draw the line between the living and the dead? And how does that line blur in places like in a time capsule buried in ice, or a library on the moon?

Fear not, dear DP reader: we guarantee you that there will never be a DP podcast. That ship sailed over a thousand years ago!

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February 5, 2021

Inspired To Insignificance

By DP

We are forest walkers here at DP; ramblings through local woodlands have offered deep sustenance during Covidzeit. Now comes poet & essayist J. Drew Lanham recounting varied Conversations with Trees, first published in the reliably invigorating digital pages of Wildness. A brief excerpt below, with images from Sally Mann’s Southern Landscapes series, as relayed from her website.

 

 

 

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In closing, we bend an ear to a speculative interview dating from the 1990s with a famous yet unnamed tree-whisperer, via Radical Language of Trees:

 

 

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January 29, 2021

After the Last Sky

By DP

Hard to believe, yet it has been ten years since the blossoming of dissent and creativity known as the Arab Spring. This week, we listen closely to the nuanced voice of the lawyer and writer Rayan Fakhoury, whose illuminating  Still Arab has just been published within the digital scroll of the venerable LAYB.

The essay is worthy of close consideration in its entirety; two brief excerpts below, with images of untitled paintings by Ayman Baalbaki, as relayed from the website of the Dalloul Art Foundation.

 

 

 

 

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January 15, 2021

A Heart Full of Grace

By DP

On this birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., celebrated during times of racist violence and white supremacist insurrection unleashed in the name of “American greatness”, we give full attention to one of MLK’s most powerfully transformative sermons: The Drum Major Instinct, delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968.

We urge close, deep listening to the entirety of the sermon; excerpts transcribed below.

 

 

 

 

We also take note of an op-ed in the Washington Post written by MLK III in opposition to the ruthless executions staged by a racist & omnicidal thanatocracy during its own dying days, with an excerpt relayed below:

 

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January 1, 2021

The Tenth Voyage

By DP

Onwards we sail into the fogbanks of a New Year, grateful for the warm & vibrant community of DP readers.

Please keep sending ideas, links and inspirations; they are the buoys that guide our varied navigations.

 

The good ship Desperado rides out a storm, aware that myriad wrecks have  pleased, and not appeased, the implacable sea.

 

 

 

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December 18, 2020

Habits of Deception

By DP

Now comes David Farrier, author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, with an essay in the venerable and indispensable Orion magazine; it is not too late to purchase a gift subscription!

An ungloved handful of excerpted paragraphs below, with images collected from the tidal wash of the digital ocean.

 

 

 

 

[…]

 

 

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December 11, 2020

Right Livelihood Writ Large

By DP

Today, a man named Brandon Bernard was executed for a a crime committed when he was eighteen, in circumstances clouded by numerous unanswered questions. Appeals for clemency fell on deaf ears.

Now comes the honorable Bryan Stevenson, a winner of this year’s “Right Livelihood” award, for his tireless work exposing, documenting and fighting against the injustices of the Carceral State. Below, his acceptance speech for the award.

Images are from the most powerful work of public art in North America: the museum and memorial created by Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama.

 

Evidence From a Regime of Racial Terror

 

 

Names to Recollect

 

Below, a link to the video of the above speech:

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December 4, 2020

The Cult of Death

By DP

In a fascinating essay in the most recent New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole refers to the rise of “zombie politics”, and to Trumpism as akin to a necromantic death cult. Consistent with his observations, we note that five federal executions have been scheduled between now and the way overdue termination of this relentlessly omnicidal administration.

This week, we bend an ear to the exceptionally strong voice of Sister Helen Prejean, a longstanding opponent of the death penalty, first with an excerpt from a recent interview and then with a passage from her 1993 book, Dead Man Walking. Images added by DP.

 

 

 

 

And now to the passage from Dead Man Walking:

 

 

 

 

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November 6, 2020

Rage For Sale

By DP

Longtime readers of DP know of our deep aversion to social media: we are not linked to Facebook in any way, nor have we ever dipped a single toe into the toxic backwaters of the Twittersphere. We have no Instagram feed, nor do we Snapchat. To be clear, we are not “late adapters”; we were early refusers!

The shallow promises of Social Media, to connect everyone to everybody while feeding egos and pumping addictive endorphins, are nothing but camouflage for the vast data mine that is both social heart and economic engine for Surveillance Capitalism.

The varied platforms of Social Media also incubate and accelerate a detachment of American political life from the world of verifiable facts and evidence, with potentially catastrophic results, as evidenced by the increasingly aberrant outbursts from King Tweet (Exhibit A, below).

The algorithm does not care about truth; the algorithm only cares about behavior.

Below a few lucid remarks from political historian and distinguished essayist Jill Lepore, in an interview following the publication of her recent book about the Simulmatics Corporation, an early probe into the commodification of human subjectivity via the data mine.

 

 

EXHIBIT A

 

Daffy as it may be: amen to that.

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