First Word #7
It's in the air that we breathe—perhaps a drift of wind. Or in "the way an electrode carries a current."
My boyfriend tells me that someone at the coffee shop was telling her friends that this “ecologist or geologist” Mike Davis wrote a pretty interesting essay.
I have nothing novel to say about the fires this week and didn’t find a lot of writers who had a lot meaningful or innovative to say about it either, other than to quote Davis.
On Tuesday I texted my friend who probably lost his childhood home. On Wednesday I was too depressed to leave my room. On Thursday, I coordinated logistics for my boss who had to evacuate, but by Friday I did finally give The Case For Letting Malibu Burn a re-read. On Sunday, bookclub, which happens to already be reading Davis, discussed the chapter for “Ecology of Fear” in brief.
The first first sentence here sums up some thoughts about this experience well:
Talking about fire and Los Angeles is an exercise in repetition.
Joan Didion and Mike Davis understood LA through its fires. // Adrian Daub // The Guardian
A few rest of my ledes seemed to subconsciously circle this image of billowing noxious smoke I can’t seem to shake. These days, ideas/problems seem to always “loom.”
As a childhood asthma sufferer, I wondered if my illness was particularly weak since it seemed to follow colds that became respiratory infections—the asthma creeping in little by little. I held onto some glorified image of the authentic sufferer beset, like a flash of lightning, with the restriction of their breath. “Why couldn’t that have been my problem?” I often fantasized about a scene, as if in a movie, of a person who loses their breath like you lose your keys or wallet or favorite toy.
Why Must I Breathe // Jamieson Webster // Pioneer Works
A few years ago, in a pub in Ireland during the wettest days of spring, I stood on my tip-toes at the edge of the bar stage and asked the band if they could please play Fairytale of New York by the Pogues.
cruel optimism new year // Rayne Fisher-Quann // internet princess
There’s an art to talking for hours without saying much.
Can Podcasts Be Art?: Dispatch from the Red Scare x Harper’s Event // Grace Byron // Study Hall
When asked in 2023 what “men want in women,” the notorious influencer, professional kickboxer, and accused human trafficker Andrew Tate gave a predictable answer: “No one’s going to respect the man who’s with an ultra-promiscuous woman. No one is going to respect the man who’s with a woman who is back-talking him or horrible to him in public. No one is going to respect the man who’s with a woman who clearly isn’t interested in him sexually.” What a man wants is the respect of others, which a woman can only convey, vacantly and impersonally, the way an electrode carries a current.
Mr. Lonely // Zoë Hu // Dissent
Like images of broken light, Webb captured these carbon-rich dust shells around a binary star system. Drifting swiftly outwards, they are seeding their surroundings with carbon - one way elements spread across the universe.
Fussier friends would shiver in the mid-October wind, but Ann Mandelstamm is in her eighties and still hiking, so I grab a table on the patio.
My Friend Chooses How and When to Die // Jeannette Cooperman // The Common Reader
(Found) from Sophie
My boyfriend’s family and I spent a lot of the holiday break painting. We continued this habit when we got back to the city by purchasing a 5 color set, which we’ve been using up some evenings. Last week I made these 3 scenes for my favorite moments in LA—going to a party in Highland Park, a hike in the Palisades, and a beach day in Malibu.
This week I started a new job doing something I love. This weekend I’ll go to Philly for the first time in 5 or so years and visit old friends. And next week I’ll celebrate the anniversary of my best friend being hit by a car. (You can read me spinning out about that a year ago here, I also wrote about Waymo cars being set aflame and about my hypochondria.)
https://substack.com/@paigehtml/p-141583125
This New Year’s Eve I celebrated with her, we arrived to the party with 5 seconds on the countdown to spare. A couple hours later someone set a cybertruck on fire in Las Vegas.
Mike Davis’s mission in Malibu is not just to point out the inequities between LA’s inner core and the hillside neighborhoods that surround the city, but to also bash the reader over the head with the repetition of the fires, which seem happen every few years dating back to invention of Los Angeles. By the time you hit 1993, you’re tired of being predictive: “of course there’s going to be a fire, why won’t anyone do anything to stop this.”
The essay, in my mind, gives you a taste of what it’s like to be Davis himself, often seen as an oracle of the left. It’s not prediction, it’s repetition. I keep this in mind as I’m editing and researching accounts of Silicon Valley’s right-wing “turn” in the months and days to come.
*** as a reminder please send my favorite first lines of what you are reading poamek at gmail dot com ***
Cheers,
pg