AUDIO LINKLet’s cut to the chase, in their book, Climate Leviathan, importantly subtitled A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright posit that it’s very likely that we face a future organized by a planetary sovereign which asserts the right to decide what parties, and what peoples, will have to sacrifice (or perhaps be sacrificed) in the face of looming ecological catastrophe and…
AUDIO LINKIn Red Meat Republic author Joshua Specht brings to life a turbulent era marked by Indian wars, Cowboy myths, Chicago labor unrest, and food riots in the streets of New York. He shows how the enduring success of the cattle-beef complex—centralized, low cost, and meatpacker dominated—was a consequence of the meatpackers’ ability to make their interests overlap with those of a hungry public, while the interests…
AUDIO LINK Our opening song is “Lucky Day.” This is Judy Garland’s version from the London sessions of 1960. The first performance of the song was by Harry Richman in a 1926 Broadway revue. “Lucky Day” became a theme song for the 1940s NBC radio show Your Hit Parade which was sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes. Sponsoring radio and television shows and getting celebrities to promote smoking…
AUDIO LINK: Planetary Factory Our conversation with Jasper Bernes, recorded in May of last year, might be called a delayed Part II or even Part III as it features a previous guest extending the parameters of a previous conversation and begins with a consideration of the artist, activist, and social and political critic, photographer and filmmaker, Allan Sekula, who was the subject of another Interchange…
The photo that illustrates this post is of a lynching in Excelsior Springs, Missouri in 1925, ten years before Du Bois’ published Black Reconstruction in America. I think it’s important to see these pictures of the crowds of white people who must be, I suppose, enjoying their presence there while feeling justified at their actions. But I have cropped it so as not to show…
Today’s walk lasted approximately 40 minutes so I could listen to all of Chapter 2 of Black Reconstruction in America, “The White Worker.” What follows is just where my mind took me upon contemplation. Property isn’t a material thing that you can possess; it is a name given to force. Which is to say that it works to hide and valorize violent dispossession. Most people…
This will be necessarily sketchy – but I hope to share what stands out to me while I listen to Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction which was published in 1935 (a universally acclaimed masterpiece). The two things I’ll mention are disfranchisement and the making of “the deplorables.” Du Bois begins with suffrage, and this seems surprising. Which is just to say, I never thought of this…
The previous post on a “squib” of Baudelaire’s was actually not what I had intended to write. Rather, it was a redheaded beggar girl I meant to display. That is, I had been reading Keith Waldrop’s translation (2006) of Fleurs du Mal when I remembered I also had Richard Howard’s (1982) on the shelf. So off I went in order to see how these were…
An oft-quoted line of Baudelaire’s (born in the same year as Melville, 1819) is: Dieu est le seul être qui, pour régner, n’ait même pas besoin d’exister. God is the only being who need not even exist in order to reign. This is from the first of the ““Fusées” or”Squibs” written in 1867 but only published posthumously in 1887. For those of you who wonder,…
A friend asked recently, well, what are you reading now that you’ve stopped doing the radio show (for which all my reading energy was spent)? Honestly, I wasn’t really reading anything. Dipping into many things without real interest. But I’ve not begun reading Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, by Charles…
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