These are a few of my favourite things
Quotations
How, then, might we set out for New Abraxa? “I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward,” says Le Guin. And so she suggests instead the formula people of the Swampy Cree First Nation have traditionally used in orientation to the future: Usà puyew usu wapiw!
“I go backward, look forward,” it means. It describes the common porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum, backing into a rock crevice, from where it can watch for danger ahead. “In order to speculate safely on an inhabitable future,” she says, “perhaps we would do well to find a rock crevice and go backward.” Far from hyperbolic, the adjective “inhabitable” seems admirably restrained in the face of the social and ecological degradation of accelerating neoliberalism.
From those rocks, the porcupine can plot its own utopias. And, at least as important, going backward, looking forward, it can try to escape the onrushing utopias of those in power.
‘We are all Thomas More’s children’ – 500 years of Utopia, The Guardian, China Miéville
Fri 4 Nov 2016
Essays
This is very sound. If I had one piece of 2018 advice for literally everyone, it would be to talk, loudly and frequently and in detail, about the future you want. You can’t manifest what you don’t share.
“This year, talk about the future you want” by Madeline Ashby
Positive social change results mostly from connecting more deeply to the people around you than rising above them, from coordinated rather than solo action. Among the virtues that matter are those traditionally considered feminine rather than masculine, more nerd than jock: listening, respect, patience, negotiation, strategic planning, storytelling. But we like our lone and exceptional heroes, and the drama of violence and virtue of muscle, or at least that’s what we get, over and over, and in the course of getting them we don’t get much of a picture of how change happens and what our role in it might be, or how ordinary people matter. “Unhappy the land that needs heroes” is a line of Bertold Brecht’s I’ve gone to dozens of times, but now I’m more inclined to think, pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn’t know it has lots and what they look like.
“Rebecca Solnit: When the Hero is the Problem“, LitHub, April 2, 2019