This book has been so soothing. I have probably learned more about the foreign policies that shape the world just in the first three chapters than I have in at least the last 15 years of news media. 🙃 It's helped clarify a lot of the absolutely batshit nonsense of the current timeline. COMFORT READ

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” - James Baldwin

oh hey! my #poetry chapbook is now available on the kindle store!

its drm-free but if you want a pdf or epub version you can find both on itch.io as a name your own price ebook!

Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today, and when you say of a thing that 'nothing hangs on it,' it sounds like blasphemy. There's never any knowing—(how am I to put it?)—which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever.

« Our consumer culture is organized against history. There is a deprecation of memory and a redicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the now, either an urgent now or éternel now »

Walter Brugeman, 1978

“Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland »

You can’t silence poets. They just keep coming after you

Walter Bruggemàn

« If credibility replaces reality as the decisive determination of truth telling, politicians need not worry about reality if their performance conveys a sense of verisimilitude. »

« introspection involves acknowledging the unpleasant reality that the sexual exploitation of women and girls is a ubiquitous feature of American commercial culture in the 21st century « 

open.substack.com/pub/jacksonk...

This month I will be sharing quotes from British philosopher AC Grayling and American media theorist Neil Postman. Both have much to say about our current cultural moment.

« most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action »

Neil Postman (1985)

« Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials. »

Neil Postman

In Amusing ourselves to death, Neil Postman makes an argument that we’ve lost the academic and philosophical strands of culture in the US, in exchange for celebrity and amusement.

The Epstein files are in line with this entertainment obsession.

The Text and Transmission Research Seminar hosts a Youtube channel, so you can see past lectures---

here's me from yesterday, talking through a condensed version of a chapter in Things Unseen

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kH9...

The Metaphysical club is a place for discussion.

To that end I’m formulating some rules.

1.) let’s not discuss current politics. But let’s discuss new ways of change. Too often discussion is a back and forth that is unproductive