… Letters From an American this morning is rich in details on the difference between the MAGA Republican agenda and the Democratic agenda… between the accomplishments of the Biden Administration and the what?… moral depravity of the MAGA Republicans?… it ends with a note that yesterday was the first day of early voting in Georgia… almost twice as many voters voted as in the 2018 election… dare i hope that this favors Democrats?…

… from How to Cherish Your Human Condition: The Poetic Naturalist Loren Eiseley on the Meaning of Life #science #meaning #maria-popova #loren-eiseley #human-condition

Through how many dimensions and how many media will life have to pass? Down how many roads among the stars must man propel himself in search of the final secret? The journey is difficult, immense, at times impossible, yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it… We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.

… will we ever know what life means?… or is that a silly question?… do we loose the ground we seek to gain by consciously attempting to gain it?… or will we (humans), one day know?…

… Anna May Wong Becomes the First Asian Americn on US Currency…

Beginning next Monday, October 24, the United States Mint will begin making quarters imprinted with the face of Anna May Wong, commonly regarded as Hollywood’s first Chinese-American movie star. She will be the first Asian-American person to be honored on any US currency.

… Why Does the Art World Hate Fat People?… the curator of an art show centered on fat artists dealing with the subject of being fat in a culture that abhors fatness writes about her experience…

Curating this show requires not only urgent and caring attention to artworks and artists but also to the living ecology of communities that exist within the radical fat liberation discourse being created between the artists in the show, between myself and the artists, and between the artworks and the audience.

… as i read the article i wonder about all the identities that are stepping forward to claim space and acknowledgement in the “multiarchy,” as i like to call it… the multiarchy is what is struggling now with the patriarchy for control of the country… and the struggle is in part about the right of marginalized peoples to have a seat at the table… it gets confusing and a little tiresome sometimes to listen to and acknowledge all those voices, but it is much more positive in the long run… and anyway, i am borderline obese, have been for much of my adult life… i don’t think of myself as being almost obese, but there we are… is there a scale running from perfect weight, to overweight to obese to fat?… are we ever happy with ourselves, regardless of our place on the weight spectrum?… do we have a right to be?…

… Why Family Isn’t Everything–And How We Can Create More Liberatory Alternatives…

… who doesn’t wonder if family life is all it is cracked up to be?… the author suggests that the capitalist underpinnings of the ideal family unit should be undone, and that we should opt for intergenerational communities of shared labor and love… why this would be any less complicated and messy than the nuclear family unit, i don’t know… what the author is really attacking is capitalism, and doing so through what she believes is its foundational unit, the nuclear family… her suggested replacement is more akin to a complete socialism, even communism… the broad point is that capitalism makes few of us truly happy… i don’t disagree with that point… perhaps it is time for a new vision… i am not sure she makes a compelling case for an alternative, at least in the excerpt linked which i quote liberally from below… but i am intrigued by the effort to reconsider the situation and wonder if the case made for an alternative is better than the rehashing of socialist/communist tropes that haven worked in the past…

Those who breezily deploy it forget that there is a “whole substructure of sacrifices, repressions, suppressions, choices made or forgone, chances taken or lost, balancings of greater and lesser evils,” at the foundation of familial happiness. They ignore “the tears, the fears, the migraines, the injustices, the censorships, the quarrels, the lies, the angers, the cruelties.”

What if _unhappy_ families are all alike, in a structural sense, because _the_ family is a miserable way to organize care—whereas happy ones are miraculous anomalies?

The family is an ideology of work. In the early twenty-first century, as Oster shamelessly details, its credo has become the optimization (via violin-playing and other forms of so-called human capital investment) of a population of high-earning, flexible entrepreneurs.

Realist and gothic traditions alike view family as a field of howling boredom, aching lack, unhealed trauma, unspeakable secrets, buried hurts, wronged ghosts, “knives out,” torture attics, and peeling wallpaper. Yet in “cli fi” and related representations of national emergencies and the apocalypse, authors insist on family as the core relationship we will _need_ to rely on, when all else is stripped away.

Think of the menacing domestic interiors, hostile kitchen appliances, creepy children, murderous kin, and claustrophobic hellscapes of your favorite horror flick. In slasher, home-invasion, and feminist horror canons, the narrative pretends to worry nationalistically about external threats to the family while, in fact, indulging every conceivable fantasy of dismembering and setting fire to it from within.

Together, we can invent accounts of human “nature,” and ways of organizing social reproduction, that are not just economic contracts with the state, or worker training programs in disguise. Together, we can establish consensus-based modes of transgenerational cohabitation, and large-scale methods for distributing and minimizing the burdens of life’s work.

… that will be it for today… we are off to the mainland and have an early ferry to catch…