24 July 2023

I’m starting to rethink the way I read. Rather than putting all my strength into sitting down (or standing at my desk), I’m getting comfortable with a dispersed reading habit. Every spatially distinct experience of reading conditions how I receive the text. I’m sure this is not a huge revelation but I’m surprised by how deeply devoted I was to an elusive condition of the perfect reading conditions to receive a text — a condition that does not exist.

This past week I started reading Clint Smith’s remarkable cover story, “Monuments to the Unthinkable,” in The Atlantic about his visits to German sites of the Holocaust to learn about memorialization. These visits include everyday memorials like the famous Stolpersteine that are laid into the streets where Jewish families lived and state-sanctioned sites of remembrance. I did not know this had been published until I had the wonderful experience of picking up a print version of The Atlantic at my local neighborhood library. Smith’s piece is especially a political call to action. “I was reminded, too, that many of Germany’s most powerful memorials did not begin as state-sanctioned projects, but emerged—and are still emerging—from ordinary people outside the government who pushed the country to be honest about its past.”

Memory is made at the “ordinary” level and he casts doubt on the sincerity and purpose of the state in taking over operations of constructing memorials. I sat down to read the piece in a lounge chair. The library is loud with kids at that hour. Children are important actors in Smith’s thesis about who and what memory is for. I didn’t need to finish every word in the library. I decided to let the piece go and maybe find it later. Or not…I imagine Smith, the prolific author, is working on another book about memory, so eventually there will be more chances to encounter his words again, I think.

A few days later I save the online link to the piece in Discord for one project, and post it again into a Slack where I try to keep all my readings. And as I start to write these notes today, I’m already 28 minutes into the audio version of the piece read by Smith himself, which is much more profound than the library, and I notice details I had missed, like the point about how few Jews live in present-day Germany and how often they feel that they serve more as a dead lesson for a German consciousness than as living people. I think here about indigenous people in the United States also as a presence that countless “Americans” are comfortable with as a “part” of “who we are” but merely as if they were a deceased romantic primitive foundation, or as Smith takes away from one of his Jewish interlocutors: “more as empty canvases upon which Germans can paint their repentance.”

In my own readings (I have never been to Germany), the Stolpersteine (the magazine issue presents one on the cover) are almost unanimously praised as a powerful, affirming and dignifying design of memorialization. Smith’s reporting does an incredible job finding voices that engage directly with the knot of placing such engravings into the ground when the actual sites of life were in the adjacent buildings. However, landlords have been hardly cooperative, usually. There, in fact, are Jewish people that do not care for the Stolpersteine — because the compromise of lowering the memorials to the ground, where they are trampled and soiled, is understood as undignified.

One memory activist tells Smith that memorials are always contentious; they’re approximate and never replicas of what happened. As approximate, they seem to be perpetually trapped in a state of infusion: whatever politics can be injected into them, they will hold those contradictions, and the question put to Smith is what would Germany be if it did not at least try to solidify into material form the atrocities of the past. And yet I continue to wonder if it is only through design that practices of memory can bear upon the present.

In e-flux, Samia Henni has a piece about “Jerboasite” which is the glassified sand produced by French nuclear testing in the Sahara. Jerboas, or gerboises in French, are the jumping mice-like mammals of the desert that the French code-named their nuclear tests after (linking each test to a specific color from the French and Algerian flags). Can practices of wording a material after-life also be practices of memorializing without the theatrical stage-setting of monuments?

More links: Gail Radford speaks with Daniel Denvir on The Dig podcast on modern housing — and modern as the operative term, not as a stylistic classification, but as an architecture that met communal needs as seen through the key figure of the activist and critic, Catherine Bauer. I haven’t finished listening to this incredible interview, but the best that I came away with so far is how the “progressivism” trumpeted by YIMBY activists today is not much better than Herbert Hoover housing policy. Newsletter here. The United States is naming a warship after its invasion of Fallujah. In the same country that just named a ship for an occupation, The House of Representatives passed the farcical Puerto Rico “status act” that “gives” “Puerto Ricans” (who would qualify as eligible? Do tax-evading “mainlanders” vote? Do Puerto Ricans in the diaspora get to vote?) a binding path to “decolonization.” It will now languish in the Senate. The right-wing statehood party has embraced the bill, mostly because it clarifies the putrid ideological core of their political opponents in the colonial status-quo “commonwealth” party that has opposed the bill. The nuclear fusion energy news was largely overlooked, other than, to my knowledge, in this article, as a milestone of weapons’ testing furtherance. Propublica published a journalist’s account of searching for the truth about Zero Units, murder and kidnapping squadrons of Afghan special forces trained by the CIA and partly staffed by US special forces.