It began when a continent was drawn into cutlets
It began when Kublai Khan told Marco, Begin at the beginning...
What does this winter have in store for us? We’re still 21 days away from its official start but predictions have been rolling in. Cailin, reporting from BeeTok, said we’re in for a cold long one: “drones have been kicked out early, honey is being stored right next to the queen. they’re battening down the hatches it seems.” According to one of my favorite newsletters NYC Microseasons, cracking open persimmon seeds is another natural world predictor: “If it resembles a fork, a mild winter is ahead; a spoon foretells enough snow to shovel; and a knife is an ominous prediction of cutting, icy cold.” Writer Allison C. Meier opened three seeds from a persimmon tree in Prospect Park and got three forks… so maybe it won’t be so bad?
Whichever way the winter will go, it’s been cold this week. So cold in fact that Code Blue has been in effect. When the temperature drops to 32 degrees or below, the city is required to accept every person seeking shelter. But newly arrived neighbors are waiting in line for 12 to 15 hours daily in the freezing cold to get assigned a shelter bed, sleeping on the sidewalk to not lose their spot. There are a million ways to plug in and help (including writing back to this newsletter for more info!)
We’ve also started helping folks with their asylum applications and each story has been more harrowing than the next. We’ve been setting up shop at our local library, a short walk from the shelter. Our public libraries have been always been the beating heart of this city, some of the few indoor spaces that welcome everyone to rest, to work, to dream. Due to the budget cuts from the Adams administration, branches will now be closed on Sundays and the last day of service is December 17. From Chelsea, here’s where you can sign a letter to protest and hopefully bring these much-needed services back.
The line between migrant and refugee is blurred to the point of being nonexistent - no one I have encountered has left their family behind to run for their lives on the basis of “economic opportunity” alone. As British-Somali poet Warsan Shire writes, “no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark”. Kristine and I watched Ava DuVernay’s new film Origin last night. It’s based on Isabel Wilkerson's 2020 bestseller Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents, which draws connections between India’s caste system, the dehumanization of Jews during Nazi Germany and the ongoing racism very much alive in America.
In a Variety interview the filmmaker said: “What I want people to do is be activated and to think. I hope that we’re making a film that sticks to your ribs and keeps you full. That you’re thinking about it the next day. That a month from now something happens, and you’ll be like, “Is that caste?” and start to metabolize it, start to understand it and how it works in our everyday. That’s really the goal.”
Nationality feels like the latest iteration of caste. All immigrants who arrive in the US get assigned an Alien registration number, a dehumanizing word our pro bono lawyer refuses to use. My Dad sent me Joseph Berger’s op-ed “What Today’s Migrant Crisis Looks Like to a Holocaust Refugee” and wrote “Your grandparents did not need to say in NYC upon arriving in there in 1949, since Aunt Elaine in Pittsburgh found them a sponsor who would vouch for them. They were met on arrival, and were driven to Pittsburgh.” Deeply lucky, ready to keep surviving and shape-shifting, eventually flourishing but forever traumatized.
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by Franny Choi
Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of boats:
boats of prisoners, boats cracking under sky-iron, boats making corpses
bloom like algae on the shore. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse
of the bombed mosque. There was the apocalypse of the taxi driver warped
by flame. There was the apocalypse of the leaving, and the having left—
of my mother unsticking herself from her mother’s grave as the plane
barreled down the runway. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse
of planes. There was the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way
through sacred water, and the apocalypse of the dogs. Before which was
the apocalypse of the dogs and the hoses. Before which, the apocalypse
of dogs and slave catchers whose faces glowed by lantern-light.
Before the apocalypse, the apocalypse of bees. The apocalypse of buses.
Border fence apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse. Apocalypse in
the textbooks’ selective silences. There was the apocalypse of the settlement
and the soda machine; the apocalypse of the settlement and
the jars of scalps; there was the bedlam of the cannery; the radioactive rain;
the chairless martyr demanding a name. I was born from an apocalypse
and have come to tell you what I know—which is that the apocalypse began
when Columbus praised God and lowered his anchor. It began when a continent
was drawn into cutlets. It began when Kublai Khan told Marco, Begin
at the beginning. By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already
ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending
world spun in its place. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees,
drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled,
the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse—it drifted
slowly from the trees all around us, so loud we stopped hearing it.
I’ve been completely taken by the portraits Algerian photographer Lazhar Mansouri took from the 1950s to the 1970s in the back of a grocery store. “During Mansouri’s lifetime, the demographic of the Aurès Mountain region saw a resurgence of Islamic culture after over 130 years of French occupation. For tribes such as the local Chaoui within the Imazighen, Mansouri's images could have been the only photograph across their entire lifetime, and inadvertently the last generation of Amazigh women to undergo facial tattooing called Ushem or Tchiradh in local dialects.” When he died in 1985, his family planned to burn all of his work, considering it too controversial. Fortunately, another photographer, Mouhand Abouda, understood the historical importance of the collection and saved the archive, some tens of thousands of negatives.
“There is power in thinking like a parasite—stealing time from corporations, buying and burning medical debt, masquerading as Eli Lilly on Twitter to declare insulin free for all. A shark cannot sink the submarine alone, but it can certainly encumber it. How can we use underestimation to our advantage and steal power back, crumb by crumb? Never disregard the less powerful, for we are scrappy and hungry and always ready to take a bite.” Sabrina Imbler’s latest essay from Cake Zine’s fourth volume, “Tough Cookie” is an absolute banger.
write a killer newsletter but her latest installment is maybe my favorite yet. It’s all about artists and their hobbies - Vladimir Nabokov was a butterfly collector! Haruki Murakami ran a jazz bar named after his cat!! John Cage was a mushroom forager!!! Sylvia Plath was a beekeeper!!!! Mark Twain patented inventions like the bra strap!?!?Two endings from two radically different, yet equally mind-blowing, movies have me looping their respective final songs on repeat.
Saltburn (still screaming!):
All Of Us Strangers (still weeping!):
Michael sent this video about insanely great endings according to screenwriter Michael Arndt and both of the movies very much fit the bill to me.
OK, one final video… Olivia Colman as Oblivia Coalmine, the latex clad oil exec paid for by the £88 billion of UK pensions invested in fossil fuels.
Field trip!
What: Rally to Defend New York’s Legal Right to Shelter, on the 44th anniversary of The Callahan v. Carey lawsuit that paved the way for the legal right to receive emergency housing for anyone who asks for it.
Where: Bowling Green
When: Tuesday December 5 at 11A
Till next time,
ASK
Thank you so much Ani for including me! 🥰 And what are the odds that it would be in this edition: my mother’s lineage is Chaoui! My grandmother had one of those face tattoos (which my grandfather had her remove once they immigrated to France) 🧿 Love that you featured that Algerian photographer’s work!