‘Sleep next to me until
the black
under our eyelids
is no longer the thinnest slip of skin.’
—Michael Wasson, Swallowed Light
I started a substack. I have so many mini-essays, longer pieces, journal entries, various interests I want to write about, and poems I love that I want to share. Hopefully by getting a few subscribers I can help pay for this website and some of my submission fees. And whenever I do publish anything I think it will be a great way to promote the work.
Here is the link:
https://michaelbattisto.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile
Human footprints in New Mexico really may be surprisingly ancient, new dating shows
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/human-footprints-new-mexico-ancient-dating
“This intransigence of the truth”
Anténor Firmin
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/antenor-firmin-anthropology-racism-haiti
This article by Sujata Gupta in Science News introduces us to Anténor Firmin, a Haitian scholar who challenged the racism endemic to the study of human ancestry in the late 19th century. Frimin's 1885 book, The Equality of the Human Races, was mostly unknown outside Haiti until recently. At the time of its publication, one of the main debates among anthropologists was whether humans had a single ancestor or many. Anthropologists supported their racist agendas by dividing populations according to a racial hierarchy.
Firmin's book was intentionally titled as a rebuttal to the extremely influential work by the French white supremacist Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. “Human beings everywhere are endowed with the same qualities and defects, without distinctions based on color or anatomical shape,” Firmin wrote. Since the English translation of The Equality in 2000, a number of anthropologists are calling for Firmin to be recognized as a co-founder of anthropology, since his arguments pre-date the similar arguments of Franz Boas, known as "The father of anthropology", by several decades. Firmin believed ALL of humanity should be studied, and studied with scientific rigor (the lack of which even among his most esteemed colleagues in major European cities at the time was he was highly critical of).
When the translator, Asselin Charles, began looking for the Firmin’s book, which he had been told about by a colleage who had heard of Firmin through a Haitian student, there were only three copies of the book available in the US. It is interesting to consider how Anthropology as a discipline might have advanced much more quickly if Firmin had been as influential as his racist colleagues became. How many might have been less susceptible to racist ideology? But of course that was not allowed to happen. Thinking in this way though helps to remind us of the potentially vast consequences of not adhering to the scientific method.
From the article:
The power of Firmin’s writings stem from his deep commitment to following the evidence, says Niccolo Caldararo, an anthropologist at San Francisco State University. “His criticism of European, especially French scientists, was so careful, was so precise, was so perfectly defined that he undermined their practice as bias rather than empiricism.”
Yale Climate Opinion Maps 2023
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us/
Woodshed - A slang term (also referred to as 'Shedding') which refers to an intense period of practice and self-development that a musician has (or is believed to have) undergone. If a musician has dramatically improved their technique in a short period, a critic may state that the performer has "woodshedded" on technique.
I think it’s important to not only go through a period as described above, but, whenever possible, to take further periods of such focus and dedication. To not worry about submissions. To not allow distractions. To focus as much as you are able on improving your craft.
If more people had the perspective that every day is new, that their lives are constantly changing, and that they themselves change throughout their lifetimes, there would be less cynicism, hopefully, about the idea that two people can be happy together over a shared lifetime. For myself, I love the idea of watching someone change over a lifetime, and to support them in those changes. Instead we believe ourselves to be unchanging entities. The way someone hurt us in the past will be the way they hurt us in the future.
At the same time we expect active work on ‘self-improvement’ both for ourselves and others. We are made skeptical of long-lasting love by witnessing the dissolution of our parents marriages. How often though do we consider the growing social and financial pressures on love and marriage? The idea that we can find true love and live happily ever after is a very new idea in human history. The traditional marriage vows acknowledge that this isn’t the case.
There is also a very new expectation to be always happy. Your person is supposed to be everything you need: lover, best friend, co-parent, roommate, business partner. As we become more isolated as a society, the pressure for our partners to supply all our emotional needs increases. All this while financial stability decreases for large sectors of society, our attention spans are eradicated, social media taunts us with alternate lives, and a climate catastrophe seems increasingly inevitable.
Even as people get married, they know they can get divorced. What is the purpose of marriage then? What is the purpose of any relationship? To have fun and perhaps security for a while, before going through a painful breakup and then having fun and security for a while with someone else? The most interesting person in the world is going to sometimes be boring. If you’ve told someone all your interesting stories, why not make new stories together with them?
My wife will say nothing
of the helplessness
she feels seeing her
men rocking on
their separate seas.
We are three people
bowing our heads to
all she has given us,
to bread and wine and meat.
The windows have gone
dark, but the room is
quiet in yellow light.
Nothing needs be said.
—from “Words” by Philip Levine
The engagement with nature that I find in much of American haiku is an engagement with the suburban garden. I would like to write and read more haiku that engages with a wider variance of nature—the mountain field, the horse, the moose, the osprey, the wild fish—and not just domesticated species of plants, squirrels, an occasional bird, and the sky. Those of course are wonderful things, but the natural world is so much more extensive than that.
What can and should be the limitations to free speech?
The US constitution has certain categories of speech that are not protected by the first amendment. Things like incitement to imminent violence and defamation are exceptions to the first amendment—but so-called “hate speech” generally is not. Is there any way to find consistency in these exceptions? Why should neo-nazis have the right to spew their racist theories while it’s illegal to damage someone’s reputation? If there are exceptions to free speech, should it really only be a group of nine judges elected for life who can decide what those exceptions should be and how they are to be applied? What does it mean for our future if students on universities cannot be allowed to protest genocide?
A fantastic list of poetry podcasts compiled by the poet Megan Nichols:
https://megannicholswriter.com/2024/01/18/poetry-podcasts-craft-interview-focused/
The nation's homeless population grew by 12 percent in 2023, with nearly 654,000 people without housing. Real wages continue to fall as the uber-rich continue to get richer. Over the last four years, the five richest men in the world got significantly richer. The five billion poorest people in the world got poorer.
‘In the horror of no longer being tricked he moves towards his last resort—he tries to trick someone else in order to trick himself for an instant.’ —Bataille, Literature and Evil, 160
The bodies of the drowned collect
light from the farthest stars and rise
at night to glow without song.
No one believes that to die
is beautiful.
—from “Belief” by Philip Levine
“The victims of history are permanently exiled from home, within and without. The practitioners of memory are also. We live as foreigners, as translators…We see the point of rescribing everything written on the body.” —Don Mee Choi, DMZ Colony
It is frightening how much censorship is happening for those in support of the people of Palestine.
From Democracy Now:
We spend the hour looking at how artists, writers and other cultural workers in the United States and Europe are facing a growing backlash after expressing solidarity for Palestine. We begin with one of these “canceled” cultural workers: renowned Palestinian American artist Samia Halaby, whose first U.S. retrospective was canceled by her graduate alma mater, Indiana University, after she criticized Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. The school’s provost said this week the show would have been a “lightning rod” that carried a “risk of violence.” Halaby expresses her shock and disappointment at the betrayal of “academic freedom” evidenced by the decision. “The administration has lost sight of their responsibility to the community, to the students that are there,” she says, and adds, “This is much larger than I am,” citing the suppression of pro-Palestine student activism around the country and calling it “a kind of attempt at mind control.”
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/1/18/censorship_palestinian_solidarity?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=7b96aef6db-Daily_Digest_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-7b96aef6db-19313858
Some Extraordinary Books I Read in 2023:
Rose Mclarney - Its Day Being Gone
Cesar Aira - Ghosts
John Crowley - Little, Big
Lucie Brock-Broido - The Master Letters
Anne Carson - Autobiography Of Red
Franny Choi - Soft Science
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar - The Madwoman In The Attic
Stephen Greenblatt - Renaissance Self-Fashioning
Stephen Greenblatt - Shakespearean Negotiations
Ben Lerner - The Lichtenberg Figures
Benjamin Labutut - When We Cease To Understand the World
Josie Sigler - Living Must Bury
Barbara Comyns - Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead
W. G. Sebald - Vertigo
Garth Greenwell - What Belongs to You
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan - de Kooning: An American Master
Ben Okri - The Famished Road
Jane Austen - Emma
Carl Phillips - Then the War
Ilya Kaminsky - Dancing In Odessa
Karisma Price - I’m Always So Serious
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 100 Years of Solitude
Valeria Luiselli - Faces In The Crowd
Ed Skoog - Rough Day
From Doubles: Studies in Literary History by Karl Miller, which is very interesting in the context of our own time:
During the 1880’s and 1890’s duality underwent a revival which carried the subject, together with its predicated psychic state, into the century that followed. During these years, which are sometimes mistaken for the inaugural years of the subject, a hunger for pseudonyms, masks, new identities, new conceptions of human nature, declared itself. Men became women. Women became men. Gender and country were put in doubt: the single life was found to harbor two sexes and two nations…James’s tale of 1894, “The Death of the Lion”, describes an age in which there seemed to be three sexes, and age tormented by genders and pronouns and pen-names, by the identity of authors, by the “he” and the “she” and the “who” of it all. Proteus stole down the back streets of the Late Victorian Babylon, and his portrait came to life. Anglo-America, and well beyond, rang to the cry of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll: “This, too, was myself.”