Resource Roundup #74
For the week of May 1st.
Hello Folks,
First off, I am sorry in advance for not getting one of these out to you in the last few weeks. Somehow, in the rush of travel, finals, and podcast recording, the last month totally got away from me. We’ll be back on a more regular post schedule from now on, but in the meantime, do check out all the new episodes of the podcast that have gone out in the last few weeks— there’s some really great ones in there, as well as our first live set from the Good Folk x Live From the Nest collab!
Speaking of music, there’s been so many great releases out of North Carolina lately. Starting with the new Indigo de Souza…
And a new album from Wednesday:
A new track from our friends at The Violet Exploit:
Loving this Snail Mail track as we transition here into spring and early summer:
And I’ve been deep in Durhamite Alice Gerrard’s discography for another project I’m working on…
Speaking of that project, come out to the incredible Down Yonder Farm this weekend and see two of our favorite people: Palmyra and Dissimilar South.
If you’re looking for a new summer read, Hub City has a great e-book deal going on right now.
Learn more about the life of Emily Meggett, Gullah Geechee chef and cookbook author from Edisto Island, SC, who passed away last week.
I 100000% think Mergoat is the coolest magazine out there right now. Every single thing they say in this call for entries for their third issue. Every. Single. Thing:
Transition is not only a movement from one physical state to another, it is also a psychic and societal operation. It is the enfleshment of hope, possibility, and self-determination. What else might the queerness of Appalachia teach us about our hills and heritage? Can we lift the veil of separation hanging between our desire for a new future and the currents of our bleak reality? Can we project another world, another future, into the void left by industrial capitalism — a world characterized by ecological reciprocity. Can we transition? Will we transition?
The old colonial definition of “nature” is wielded like a weapon against trans people. The geography of queer bodies has become the archetype for what many deem “unnatural” — a metaphor we reject outright. So, as we cloak ourselves in grief at the passing of the holocene. As we seek insight from the people wounded by the ill-wrought vocabulary of “nature” that laid the groundwork for colonial violence and domination within the holocene. We seek to build a new vocabulary, one of reciprocity, deference, and care.
When faced with the grim realities of ecological collapse, we defy the sedentary logic of despair, apocalypse, and inaction. We receive the appearance of the void upon history’s horizon not as the apocalyptic impossibility of a future, but as an opening for the creation of futures heretofore unimaginable. There is a challenge at hand, though — how do we deconstruct the colonial image of “nature” as something wholly other than human society? Then, as we move through the grief of losing that once treasured ideal, how do we inaugurate the process of producing new futures?
Not related to the South at all, but I found this conversation on found families in fandom culture really interesting.
Kyle Ingram for UNC on the Moore County protests and the power of local drag queen Naomi Dix.
Tressie McMillan Cotton in the New York Times on why she keeps her eyes on the South. Yes:
We like to look to the horizon instead of to the soil because we bury the people we do not care about in the South. It is where we have put migrants and poor people and sick people. It is where we put the social problems we are willing to accept in exchange for the promise of individual opportunity in places that sound more sophisticated. But the South is still a laboratory for the political disenfranchisement that works just as well in Wisconsin as it does in Florida. Americans are never as far from the graves we dig for other people as we hope…
…I keep my eyes on the South for a lot of reasons. This is my home. It is the region of this nation’s original sin. Nothing about the future of this country can be resolved unless it is first resolved here: not the climate crisis or the border or life expectancy or anything else of national importance, unless you solve it in the South and with the people of the South.