Joanna Klink, "Elemental", Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy

[“While “essential workers” in the poultry industry were made to feel dirty, nonessential workers in fields like finance and computer engineering—the “people with laptops”—were sheltering in place, more distant from what transpired in industrial slaughterhouses than ever before.

Thanks to FreshDirect and Instacart, consuming meat no longer even requires coming into contact with a deli butcher or grocery clerk. With a few taps on a keyboard or the swipe of a screen, consumers can get as much beef, pork, and chicken as they want delivered to their doors, without ever having to think about where it comes from. And yet, as the popularity of bestselling books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals attests, a lot of Americans do think about this. In recent years, more and more consumers have begun to carefully scrutinize the labels on the packages of the meat and poultry they buy. The ranks of such consumers have grown exponentially, paralleling the rise of the “good food” movement, which promotes healthier eating habits and reform of the industrial food system.

Although the movement is, in Pollan’s words, a “big, lumpy tent,” composed of a broad coalition of advocacy organizations and citizens’ groups that sometimes push for competing agendas, one of its aims is to persuade consumers to become more conscientious shoppers and eaters. Among those who put this idea into practice are so-called locavores, who buy food directly from local farms, ideally from small family-run enterprises that embrace organic, sustainable practices: ranchers who raise grass-fed cows that never set foot in industrial feedlots; farmers who sell eggs that come from free-range chickens reared on a diet of seeds, plants, and insects rather than genetically engineered corn and antibiotics.

Locavores engage in what social scientists call “virtuous consumption,” using their purchasing power to buy food that aligns with their values. The movement appeals to the growing number of Americans who want to feel more connected to the food they eat and to the people who raise it, with whom locavores can interact directly at farmers markets or through community-supported agriculture programs. It is a captivating vision, and the benefits of eating locally grown food—which is likely to be more nutritious, to come from more humanely treated animals, and to be better for the environment—are manifold.

But locavores have some blind spots of their own, most notably when it comes to the experiences of workers on small family farms. As the political scientist Margaret Gray discovered when she set about interviewing farm laborers in New York’s Hudson Valley, the vast majority of these workers are undocumented immigrants or guest workers who toil under abysmal conditions, often working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks for dismal pay. “We live in the shadows,” one worker told her. “They treat us like nothing,” said another. In her book Labor and the Locavore, Gray asked the butcher on a small farm why so few of his customers seemed to notice this.

“They don’t eat the workers,” the farmer told her.

“He went on to explain that, in his experience, his consumers’ primary concern is with what they put in their bodies,” Gray wrote, “and so the labor standards of farmworkers simply do not register as a priority.”]

eyal press, from dirty work: essential labor and the hidden toll of inequality in america, 2021

this is one of my favourite poems ever. it’s so sad yet hopeful. so strong yet short. it’s dusk… your daughter’s tall… it’s dusk! your daughter’s tall!

my favourite comic by gerard donelan 💖

my favorite block on the aids quilt

Sybil Pye, Books bound by Sybil Pye, self-taught British bookbinder, eary 1920s

some pics from  Bodleian Rare Books

“I’m not telling you to make the world better I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it."

Joan Didion

chen chen summer was forever :(

anne carson: simple moving poem about awkward dinners with not-quite-friends and the ennui that comes with realizing this mundane unhappiness is all adult life is sometimes

insane people on twitter: has she ever tried being happy? i like going to dinner with friends, what’s wrong with her? she can afford to go out to dinner, she shouldn’t complain. just be a cooler hang, skill issue. this isn’t my exact experience (i like my friends) therefore this poem is bad and unrelatable and pretentious. she can’t debone a fish? loser.

going through the quote tweets with my jaw hanging

Americans not giving a shit about the wildfires burning down forests and homes in Canada until smoke starts spreading across the border. Meanwhile Indigenous communities across the country are far more likely to be impacted by the fires and I’ve seen all of one link to a charity and about nine million memes. 🙃

The charity is based in Ottawa and accepts in-person donations as well:

[ID: Tweet from @OdawaNFC with an attached image. Text:

Odawa Native Friendship Centre is collecting donations for First Nations community members that have recently been evacuated. Drop donations at Odawa's office at 815 St. Laurent Blvd. When donating online, choose "Wild Fire Evacuees". Miigwetch, Odawa.

Image Text: Needed: Gently used/clean clothing for babies, children, youth and adult sizes. Food donations, gift cards, money donations.

End ID]

Poems are conceived in time, and work is a slow crystallization, and any work in process and progress depends upon the happy accident of insights and foresights and upon the deepest plumbing of the theme that ‘base’ metals may be transmuted into ‘noble’ ones … But speaking and writing, or elucidation and exploration do not serve the same god, and I happen to find that rational emphasis of the one gives little light to that dark in which the yearning for the expressing of beautiful relationships in form, must tunnel and work. One wants time off to know and find out before the fires of time burn out. The poems [are] what I snatched, amongst other things, from the fires of time.

Jean Garrigue, from an autobiographical statement, an artistic credo crafted in 1953, The Hand of the Poet: Poems and Papers in Manuscript, eds. Rodney Phillips, Susan Benesch, Kenneth Benson, and Barbara Bergeron (Rizzoli International Pub., 1997)

— Clarice Lispector, from Complete Stories; “Brasília” (via luthienne)

Slow Dance by Matthew Dickman More than putting another man on the moon, more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga, we need the opportunity to dance with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance between the couch and dinning room table, at the end of the party, while the person we love has gone to bring the car around because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart if any part of us got wet. A slow dance to bring the evening home, to knock it out of the park. Two people rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant. A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey. It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck. Your hands along her spine. Her hips unfolding like a cotton napkin and you begin to think about how all the stars in the sky are dead. The my body is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody, Stairway to Heaven, power-cord slow dance. All my life I’ve made mistakes. Small and cruel. I made my plans. I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine. The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children before they turn four. Like being held in the arms of my brother. The slow dance of siblings. Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him, one of my great loves, he is absolutely human, and when he turns to dip me or I step on his foot because we are both leading, I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer. The slow dance of what’s to come and the slow dance of insomnia pouring across the floor like bath water. When the woman I’m sleeping with stands naked in the bathroom, brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit into the sink. There is no one to save us because there is no need to be saved. I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed the front yard. When the stranger wearing a shear white dress covered in a million beads comes toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life, I take her hand in mine. I spin her out and bring her in. This is the almond grove in the dark slow dance. It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapping for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutang slow dance.

I know y'all should all know by now, but here is a current example of how drag bans actually ban trans people from existing in public spaces

This was the email that was sent to Adria Jawort, a two spirit author scheduled to speak at a Montana library, on the first day of pride month.

I just wanna emphasize the fact that the trans person in question here is an INDIGENOUS TRANS WOMAN and that’s not a coincidence. These laws are disproportionately gonna impact people of color and trans women and above all trans women of color. And her talk was going to focus on the history of Two-Spirit people in Montana