Is That Grasp Alone

I posted this a week or so ago, it's important: And here we begin to see how the age of social media resembles the pre-literate, oral world. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other platforms are fostering an emerging linguistic economy that places a high premium on ideas that are pithy, clear, memorable and repeatable (that is to say, viral). Complicated, nuanced thoughts that require context don’t play very well on most social platforms, but a resonant hashtag can have extraordinary influence. Evan Spiegel, the chief executive officer of Snap Inc., grasped the new oral dynamics of social media when he told the Wall Street Journal: “People wonder why their daughter is taking 10,000 photos a day. What they don’t realize is that she isn’t preserving images. She’s talking.”

This is why I my eyes besides can't read novels like I used to. I hate motherfucking epistolmology I don't care how I apprehend a fuck I'm more interested in investigating the fuck itself. Shit be happening faster than I'm used to apprehending, yo. This is not an accident I'm being re-programmed it's why these fucking run-on sentences in straining to keep up my fiction clock fucked up.

• Guess what band's cassette I found last night looking for something else in the basement.
• (Not my) Bleggalgaze.
• So let me get this straight.
• Connoisseurship and Critique (h/t).
• Manufacturing normality: Fortunately, for us, the corporate media is hot on the trail of this motley of scoundrels. As you’re probably aware, The Washington Post recently published a breathtaking piece of Pulitzer-quality investigative journalism shamelessly smearing hundreds of alternative publications (like the one you’re reading) as “peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The piece, a classic McCarthyite smear job perpetrated by the Post‘s Craig Timberg, was based on the groundless, paranoid claims of what Timberg unironically describes as “two teams of independent researchers,” The Foreign Policy Research Institute, a third-rate, former anti-Communist think tank, and an anonymous website, propornot.com, that no one had ever heard of prior to its sudden appearance on the Internet last August, and which, based on the tenor of its tweets and emails, appears to be run by Beavis and Butthead.
• Extinction is the End Game: it’s been clear for some time that we have past the point of no return, triggering multiple tipping points in Earth’s living systems. New findings are continually confirming scientists’ worst nightmares. A key glacier in the Antarctic that holds back 10 feet of sea level rise was just described as breaking apart from the inside out. In other grim news, the long feared carbon bomb has now been quantified and is projected to release the emissions equivalent of an industrial country like the U.S. in the next few decades, prompting researchers to say that “climate change may be considerably more rapid than we thought it was.” Biodiversity loss is another critical threshold we have breeched: “New research shows that local extinctions have already occurred in 47% of the 976 plant and animal species studied.” A new study also reveals that the planet’s tallest animal is facing extinction after its numbers have plummeted in recent years, with the ominous warning that “many species are slipping away before we can even describe them.” Forests are being wiped out by armies of invasive insects. Because of a rapidly changing climate and the vast scale of the problem, the idea that reforestation will somehow save us is a pipe dream. Those forests won’t stay healthy enough to serve as carbon sinks and besides, seven times Earth’s land area would need to be in cultivation in order to reduce the planet’s atmospheric CO2 level down to 350ppm.

• A tale of two countries.
• How will capitalism end? This isn’t the violent overthrow envisaged by Marx and Engels. In The Communist Manifesto, they argued that capitalism’s “gravediggers” would be the proletariat. Nearly 170 years later, Streeck is predicting that the capitalists will be their own gravediggers, through having destroyed the workers and the dissidents they needed to maintain the system. What comes next is not some better replacement but is more akin to the centuries-long rotting away of the Roman empire.
• Something in the street.
• 19 things learned from the election, plus 5 more.
• Imploding.
• Russia! NATO! Trump!
• Throw the celebrity clowns away: What all the celebrities mentioned in the Atlantic piece have in common is that for the last 18 months, they acted as spokespeople for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Some even provided Clinton bit-parts on their shows to help her remove some of the stigma that she had justly accumulated during decades of laying waste to large swathes of the global South. But something interesting happened after Clinton became a failed presidential candidate for the second time. In the deluge of imbecilic and childish cultural texts designed to flatter liberals (including letters from popular fictional characters exhorting their fans to stay the course), a small space has opened up for pointing out that these celebrated celebrity clowns are actually a hindrance to combating a reactionary tide.
• Trump, the man in the crowd.
• Partisan ups and downs. See, this is why I maintain Moribund and Mor(e)ibund.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links. 
• Bottom's Dream. I'm not going to buy it, but now that I can't read fiction I might be able to read it.

EVERYTHING THAT ACTS IS ACTUAL

Denise Levertov

From the tawny light

from the rainy nights

from the imagination finding

itself and more than itself

alone and more than alone

at the bottom of the well where the moon lives,   

can you pull me

into December? a lowland

of space, perception of space

towering of shadows of clouds blown upon

clouds over

                  new ground, new made

under heavy December footsteps? the only

way to live?

The flawed moon

acts on the truth, and makes   

an autumn of tentative

silences.

You lived, but somewhere else,

your presence touched others, ring upon ring,

and changed. Did you think   

I would not change?

                              The black moon

turns away, its work done. A tenderness,

unspoken autumn.   

We are faithful

only to the imagination. What the

imagination

             seizes

as beauty must be truth. What holds you

to what you see of me is

that grasp alone.