Nomads don’t need Archives
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is an exhibition organized in Australia, now travelling to Europe and the US. It looks a lot like an exhibition of paintings, and it would command close attention and...
Category: history
Writing and Responding
Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) is a book about the contemporary relationship between plants and people. More specifically, it is about the conflict and potential reconciliation between a botanical, scientific, written understanding of plants, and the orally transmitted...
Inherit the Wind
If you google “inherit the wind,” you’re overwhelmed with information about the film by that name from 1960. It is a dramatization of the infamous 1925 Scopes Trial, in which a schoolteacher is accused...
“Modernism”
David Antin’s wonderful remark about modernism has been coming back to me a lot lately: “From the modernism you want, you get the postmodernism you deserve”. I’m guessing he said it sometime in the 1970s...
Mysterious Minoan: Crete and Linear A
Among the many memories of a recent trip to Crete are two different scripts that were developed there. Linear B is an early form of Greek, but Linear A, which seems to use the same...
Educated and Groundless
I finished reading Educated yesterday, Tara Westover’s memoir of her survivalist Mormon upbringing and subsequent separation from it. By her account, the separation was achieved by means of formal education. Only once in the book...