How to Read Now: Essays

This is writing as sleight of hand, as balancing act, writing as parlor trick to be pulled off—not writing as a practice of being in the world, being of the world.

I was seeing something I didn’t know yet that I’d always wanted, always needed, a yearning in me I had yet to name: the erotic tenderness of a lover who protects the space around which you can be vulnerable, and therefore safe, and therefore free.

Committing to being an unexpected reader means committing to the knowledge that what bonds us together is neither the sham empathy that comes from predigested ethnographic sound bites passing as art in late capitalism, nor the vague gestures at free speech that flatter the tenured powerful and scold their freelance critics—but the visceral shock, a

Firs, roses, statues—and the placards that adorn them—are like history books in public: they’re civic sites of collective reading, where the statue tells us to read the ground we’re standing on; to interpret it in a specific way.

Were these works ever truly concerned by justice to begin with? Or were they simply enamored with and appropriative of its language—its culture, its aesthetic, its narrative style? Oppression chic, equalitycore.

The stakes of this fight remind us that intergenerational justice means thinking about intergenerational inheritances, down to the trees and the birds—not least of all because the fact that environmental justice is linked to the legacy of coloniality necessarily means that environmental justice is racial justice.

To mobilize any polity is difficult enough, and the politics mobilized around immediate tragedy have a historically understandable tendency toward triage: treating the life-threatening symptom before addressing the life-shaping cause.

An expected reader always expects to be led by the hand; the unexpected reader knows we get lost in each other.

Certainly modernity has taught us the beguiling story of our porousness; being full of gaps is also a way of being full of market opportunities.