Quentin's Weeknotes 8/11/18- 8/17/18
This week:
- I finished reading Mike Davis’s newest collection “Old Gods, New Enigma’s: Marx’s lost theory”. Davis is a wonderfully readable radical historian of labor, urbanism, and ecology (or in the case of “City of Quartz” his astonishing history of Los Angeles, all three) and he brings to bear his vast knowledge on his first published commentary on Marx. It’s worth the price of admission alone for his incredibly funny introduction in which he lays out all the times he’s tried to read Marx and failed. There are four essays, all of which are insightful in different ways, but what’s stuck with me the most is his quote from the last essay on global warming and urbanism:
P.S. Mike Davis wrote one of the most interesting and readable accounts of the 2016 election that I ran across as I was trying to make sense of the chaos and irrationalism around me.
- I read with great interest this article about (mostly art) Museums recent efforts at diversifying curatorship positions. Museums have always been sites of complicated racial politics and have been frequently exclusionary of people of color.
- I learned that I need to stop shopping at Dollar General, which has outpaced Wal-mart as the most insidious destroyer of rural communities, with more stores than McDonald’s restaurants.
- I learned from the redoubtable Debbie Reese (who you should absolutely follow on twitter) that the 19 Pueblo tribes of New Mexico do NOT refer to their ancestors as Anasazi, and ask others to use the term Ancestral Pueblo or Puebloan.
