‣ Handwriting is one of those topics that will never cease to fascinate me, and poet Anne Carson’s new essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books casts it in a new light. On writing with Parkinson’s, Cy Twombly, and more, she writes:
Like certain other artists of the modern era Twombly seems to have been intent on leaving the self behind, evading the ego and its marks, positing emptiness as more interesting than presence. Twombly was best friends with John Cage, the composer of 4’33” and other ego-emptying artworks. As Cage put it, ‘something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices.’ What Cage did was to introduce chance operations into his work. What Twombly did was to find his way to a handwriting that has no person in it. Critics sometimes refer to Twombly’s line as ‘graffiti-like’; I don’t think Twombly enjoyed hearing this. Graffiti is often ugly and usually, on some level, activist. Its character is that of ‘the egotistical sublime’, as Keats said of Wordsworth. I once asked the artist Tacita Dean about Twombly’s attitude to all this. She came to know him very well while making a 16 mm film about him. ‘For Cy,’ she said,
I always believed it was about the encounter and a bit like a medium with a Ouija board. When he’s in the moment, he cannot be interrupted (even by himself) or the connection is broken. When he’s in the moment, the encounter becomes the painting and nothing else matters.
This ‘moment’ is one that Barthes locates inside Twombly’s handwriting. Barthes remarks on the lightness of Twombly’s line, his impulse to ‘link in a single state what appears and what disappears; [not] to separate the exaltation of life and the fear of death [but] to produce a single affect: neither Eros nor Thanatos, but Life-Death, in a single thought, a single gesture’. And here is an interesting incidental fact about exaltation: when a Twombly painting called Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) was exhibited in Houston a few years ago, a guard found a Frenchwoman standing in front of the canvas totally unclothed. ‘The painting makes me want to run naked,’ she wrote in the guest book. Twombly was delighted. ‘No one can top that!’ he told the New York Times.
‣ Considering the outsized legacy of singer Roberta Flack, who died on February 24, Hanif Abdurraqib pinpoints what made her voice one of a kind for the New Yorker:
This was, to me, the superpower of Flack: her willingness not just to take you to a feeling but to first build a place to contain it. In the song, there are sad young men, yes, sitting in bars. But it is the way Flack takes her time with the verses of the song, each comprising just a few lines of lyric, that makes you understand that these are sad young men who are seeking someone and fighting against time itself. They’re “growing old / that’s the cruelest part.” It is, perhaps, because Flack had sung the song in a bar so frequently, and for so long, that she came to understand its engine to be less “about” the ache echoing through the bar itself than about everything that carries someone inside a bar. Loneliness might be the song’s wings, but loneliness, pressed against the brutalities of time, is what makes it take flight.
‣ Legacy media is not okay, y’all. The Los Angeles Times‘s solution to the media literacy issue is an AI-generated political rating for opinion pieces to combat “echo chambers” … what could possibly go wrong? Lois Beckett reports for the Guardian:
Another opinion column on Ukraine, “Trump is surrendering a century’s worth of US global power in a matter of weeks,” is followed by an AI-generated summary of “different views” that includes a description of Trump’s Ukraine policy “a pragmatic reset of US foreign policy”, and notes: “Advocates of Trump’s approach assert that European allies have free-ridden on US security guarantees for decades and must now shoulder more responsibility.”
A Los Angeles Times staff editorial that argues “Keeping at-risk residents from losing their housing will be a key to solving homelessness,” is now followed by AI-generated commentary that critics have also focused on “chronic underfunding and bureaucratic inefficiencies, particularly within the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority,” and: “Over 60% of Angelenos at risk of homelessness are not leaseholders, limiting the impact of eviction defense programs and requiring broader strategies.”
The union representing Los Angeles Times journalists has repeatedly raised concerns about Soon-Shiong’s efforts to use outside AI tools to produce commentary on the newspaper’s own journalism.
“We support efforts to improve media literacy and clearly distinguish our news report from our opinion pages. But we don’t think this approach – AI-generated analysis unvetted by editorial staff – will do much to enhance trust in the media,” Matt Hamilton, vice-chair of LATimes Guild, said in a statement on Monday. “Quite the contrary: this tool risks further eroding confidence in the news. And the money for this endeavor could have been directed elsewhere: supporting our journalists on the ground who have had no cost-of-living increase since 2021.”
‣ And in another Guardian piece, Environment Editor Damian Carrington discusses the “fossilization” of human-made trash that will be our archaeological legacy:
Fossils are not just objects left behind, but also the traces of life’s activity written into the rocks and humanity is leaving a gigantic footprint. For example, we have drilled more than 50m kilometres of oil and gas wells, each piercing down through geological strata.
There have also been about 1,500 nuclear weapons tests conducted underground. While relatively rare, the results were geologically spectacular: large spherical caves lined with melted rock that collapsed into a mass of radioactive rubble and are surrounded by a complex web of fractures. Along with mines and other boreholes, “this global rash of underground scars is pretty much indelible”, say Gabbott and Zalasiewicz.
Just as enduring but far more subtle will be the toxic chemical signal left by humanity, not least the aptly named “forever chemicals”, such as PTFE. The metal in a non-stick frying pan is likely to dissolve away over millions of years underground, say the geologists, but the PTFE coating will persist as a thin flexible film.
‣ On the other hand, Daphne Chouliaraki Milner writes for Atmos about whether Shein’s decline in sales might be reflective of a larger shift away from wasteful, exploitative fast fashion:
But what if stringent regulations were enforced? What if we were to take news of the ultra-fast fashion market stagnation—and Shein’s losses—as an opportunity to enforce ethical standards, strengthen labor protections, and invest in a fashion industry rooted in regeneration and justice?
“There are already so many small, ethical, independent brands who know every part of their supply chain and who are examples of truly sustainable and circular models,” said La Manna.
One such example is Buzigahill, a clothing label based in Kampala, Uganda, that repurposes the West’s secondhand garments and sends them back to the countries from which they came. “In my world, a just future for fashion requires the destabilization of these huge, mass companies: luxury conglomerates, fast fashion—the system of growth for the sake of growth,” said Bobby Kolade, the fashion designer who founded Buzigahill. “The dream solution is to just stop, and to create newness with what already exists. That’s what we’re trying to do [at Buzigahill]. If the statistics are right, we already have enough clothes in circulation for the next six generations.”
‣ Columbia University is continuing to target students who speak out in support of Palestine, accusing them of “harassment.” The Associated Press‘s Jake Offenhartz reports on the pressure from Trump underlying this crusade, which is far from a new tactic for university administrations:
Those who have met with investigators say they were asked to name other people involved in pro-Palestinian groups and protests on campus. They said the investigators did not provide clear guidance on whether certain terms — such as “Zionist” or “genocide” — would be considered harassment.
Several students and faculty who spoke with the AP said the committee accused them of participating in demonstrations they did not attend or helping to circulate social media messages they did not post.
Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student who served as a negotiator for pro-Palestinian protesters during the previous spring’s encampment, said he was accused by the office of misconduct just weeks before his graduation this December. “I have around 13 allegations against me, most of them are social media posts that I had nothing to do with,” he said.
‣ Meanwhile, poet, scholar, and Hyperallergic contributor Eileen G’Sell reviews a new book for Jacobin on the trap of upward mobility that academia routinely sets for low-income students:
At Knox, I was from a humbler background than most of my peers, but few were flying to pricey resorts for spring break or pulling up to campus in a BMW (neither are uncommon where I teach now). My best friend was the eldest of four boys and grew up in an even humbler household. We bonded over childhoods spent in cramped quarters, bringing cheap Carl Buddig lunch meat to school every day. Had I attended a more elite university and lacked such companions, I would have done everything possible to conceal my lack of pedigree. By the time I lived in New York in my twenties, I was doing it all the time. My best friend in grad school had attended Bard, which I had never heard of. A guy I played pool with joked about his trust fund; even having aced Intro Economics, I had no clue what one was (and of course, I didn’t ask).
“Low-income and first-generation students often describe a feeling of mismatch between the working-class cultural capital they come to college with and the upper-class capital that is normative and expected in higher education environments,” Osborne writes. “This mismatch leads some students to manage their identities through suppressing their working-class backgrounds and habitus while others construct morally based narratives that justify and exalt their class position relative to their more affluent peers.”
‣ Eve L. Ewings’s new book on public education and racism is making waves, and Naomi Elias spoke with her for the Nation about its practical takeaways in the age of Trump’s attacks on education:
As you and I are talking right now, we are looking ahead to what the next presidential administration is going to look like, and by the time this is published, we’ll already have a little bit of a sense of it. But there are also certain things that we know we can expect. A lot of the conversation that has been happening around censorship, book bannings, what content should or should not be allowed to be taught in classrooms, and the way that the Trump administration wants to curtail that and control that, I think it’s really easy, because the idea of individual freedom is so central to American ideology. It’s really easy for us to focus on these questions of curriculum as questions of individual freedom, free speech, and First Amendment rights—the rights of individual authors to have their work disseminated, the rights of individual teachers to do individual things.
As with everything that the Trump administration does, part of the tactic is always to overwhelm you with such a deluge of policies that are so awful that it becomes hard to even understand where to begin. That’s a tactic that makes it hard to zoom out and see the bigger picture. But if we do zoom out and see the bigger picture, we should see these efforts at repression as not merely a matter of individual censorship or of individual rights being curtailed, but as a broader ideological agenda of using schools to normalize and perpetuate fascism, and using schools to normalize and perpetuate the prevailing political agenda, in which people are less empowered to speak out or to act critically against government authority—not only for fear of reprisal, but also because the goal is to raise a generation of young people that doesn’t even have the kind of intellectual schema or conceptual framework to understand what resistance looks like.
‣ Mel Bochner passed away last month, and the Jewish Museum in New York shared a precious clip of the artist granting us a glimpse into his painting “The Joys of Yiddish”:
‣ Late-1990s babies will recognize this horrifying moment of revelation:
‣ The only thing that will get me to the gym:
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
