No More Bombs, No More War
12 things I found this month
This weekend, I took a 48-hour trip to Denver, Colorado, to represent Milkweed Editions and my forthcoming book at the Winter Institute.
Alongside mentor and fellow Milkweed author Helen Whybrow, I met dozens of impassioned bookstore owners, ran up Cherry Creek in shorts (so warm), drank beer and shared burgers with one of my all-time heroes, Robert Macfarlane—he went for the black bean patty with extra jalapeños, because you’re curious—in one of Denver’s oldest bars haunted by Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, watched a keynote on the political power of language and bookstores and libraries by the great Ocean Vuong, found my new favorite Marxist bookshop/printing press, and experienced the best cortado in Colorado—fight me.
I’m still orienting myself to the increasing torque of this phase in the book’s lifecycle, this phase of promotion and blurb asks and media outreach and book tour setup.
It’s actually a process I’m finding endlessly fascinating, a Wild West wrestling match with the inner critic-flatterer-imposter. I’ve never been so excited and nervous, so proud and insecure, so at peace and anxious to continue making more work, more art, more beauty.
12 things I found this month…
DRUGS. Digital drugs, that is. This interview with Stanford psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke on Whac-a-Mole dopamine addiction and endemic narcissism was nothing short of enlightening—and confronting.
ACID. A few years ago, I was obsessed with The Bomb, a multidisciplinary art, film, and sound experience created around anti-nuclear advocacy (trailer here). Their film is exceptional, but I’ve been falling back in love with the score, composed entirely by The Acid. No more bombs, no more war.
CONTRADICTIONS. Maria Popova’s The Marginalian is perhaps the only newsletter I read every single time, without fail, and this recent piece, “Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World,” was catnip: “What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds,” and this: “True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization…We need them.”
LONELINESS. The Atlantic’s viral piece on loneliness, by Derek Thompson, was set on my radar by friend Brendan Leonard, and this podcast breaks down its essential parts. I’ve started to follow Thompson’s show, Plain English with Derek Thompson. This episode on “Is There a Scientific Case for Believing in God?” I found smart, if not frustrating.
MOBY DICK is on Blue Sky Social (also, follow me?) and it’s helping me weather these nutso times. It’s just curated lines from the novel, like: “What’s made in fire must properly belong to fire; and so hell’s probable.”
REWILD. Though I was only able to catch one film at the wonderful Big Sky Film Festival, this one, “The Shepherd and the Bear,” followed the complexities of brown bear rewilding in the French Pyrenees. It left me speechless, just as the mountains were becoming…sheepless.
MYSTIC. I’ve actually been working on a very exciting project about rewilding (sort of) for Emergence Magazine that I can’t wait to tell you about, and have been reading a lot about Christian anarchism. Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Merton’s corpus, and, most recently, Simon Weil, a French mystic intellectual activist who starved herself to death in her mid-thirties but left some of the most captivating writing and thinking I’ve come across in some time. Start with this audio and Popova’s whip-smart take, then either Gravity & Grace (currently reading) or Waiting for God (queued.)
ANTI-CIV. I’ve been a big fan of the author Paul Kingsnorth ever since The Dark Mountain launched in 2009 (I wrote for them about megafire and Robinson Jeffers), but have lost track of him lately. Fun fact: Kingsnorth edited a very early version of The Way Around. I told him to throw a bomb on it. He did. In 2021, he turned to Eastern Orthodox Christianity—a curveball for many—along with Martin Shaw (great interview with him here, though he nearly co-opts Gary Snyder’s “etiquette of freedom.” Shaw’s new YouTube series, Jawbone, is also wonderful). I’m finding this whole trend toward Christianity among ecologist-mythologist types interesting, unsettling, and curious. Kingsnorth’s recent talk, “Against Christian Civilization,” for the Erasmus Lecture, sort of blew my mind.
BUBBLES. “Crazies change the world.” The episode featuring Spanish chef Andrea León, on celebrating the living ocean through high-end experimental recipes like eel mochi and edible ocean bubbles, is absolutely fucking next level.
FLOWERS. Rateliff and Isakov just made a recent jam that’s worthy of listening at least 50 times consecutively.
UMWELT. Anyone who knows me knows how much of an Ed Yong fan I am. A Pulitzer-Prize-winning Atlantic journalist who reported full-tilt during COVID, Yong wrote his previous book on the sensory lives of other species (Book #86 on the Mandorla 200), and was recently interviewed on what he’s working on now—as well as burnout, birding, and his definition of hope.
PILES. As our oligarchic administration continues to follow the coup-for-dummies playbook and is turning this country into a steaming pile of anti-intellectual, slash-and-burn psycho-warfare, I’ve been enjoying the zine-style, small-scale witnessing accounts on social, like Pilelands, “documenting piles as clues, stories, symbols, ephemera, and material manifestations of our lifescapes.” (For larger takes, I’m constantly turning to Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder as necessary signals in the noise, if you’re not already there.)
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with my submitted caption, my photo, my pile of river…
Why not here? Why not on the corner, an accumulation? What’s this corner of Roosevelt and Woodford have to say about it, anyway? Admire our tented collective, water frozen in trust, snowflakes pushed together looking all ogre-tough-guy, all plowed into each other to evade inescapable melt but knowing full well our pile won’t last. This art, too, will die. Why not make a pithy monument out of disappearance. Why not stack some grace before returning to the Great Body. What you might see is hierarchy but, in fact, it’s no such thing. Just all of us, here, all bitty kings and queens and serfs at once, holding on to one another until the river accepts us again. One anarchic pile of river.
So much treasure in here, “was catnip” among them.
Gratitude for your curation 🙏🏼
Wow this was awesome.