I. On January 13, 2011 a 6-year old boy was killed in downtown St. Petersburg by a giant icicle. This happened a block away from the apartment building where my grandmother used to live, two blocks away from the identical apartment building where my parents still live. The boy was an orphan, living with his grandparents. His grandmother was taking him to an outpatient clinic for a check-up after a recent cold. When he stepped outside his apartment building, the icicle became dislodged from the roof of the building and cracked the boy’s head. His grandmother, emerging from the building directly behind him, collapsed with a heart attack.

The next day, the press was astir trying to establish the party responsible for this incident. Who was to blame: the building, the block, the district, or the city administration? For a city located at the latitude of 60°N, St. Petersburg has been criminally poorly prepared for snow. Snow somehow always comes as a surprise in St. Petersburg. A few days after the death of the boy, as a bomb exploded in Moscow’s airport, St. Petersburg had another snow-related disaster: the roof of a mega-market “O’Key” caved in under a giant pile of snow. One person died and seventeen were injured.

Counter to its reputation, St. Petersburg doesn’t enjoy long, cold “Russian” winters. Instead, the flashes of cold weather alternate with periods of thaw, when snow melts forming ice on the ground and ice on the roofs of the buildings, from which snow has not been cleaned off. The last two years saw unusually high levels of snowfall—and the icicles have also grown to massive proportions. Theoretically, cleaning the roofs of the apartment buildings is a daily job. Practically, who is going to pay for it? And where to find workers willing to do the job? Money in the city’s budget allocated toward infrastructure needs has a tendency to mysteriously dematerialize. In the aftermath of the recent deaths, St. Petersburg’s governor Valentina Matvienko has proposed using the homeless as the workforce to clean the snow, and also developing laser technology to get rid of the snow “scientifically.”

II. The news of St. Petersburg’s latest battles with snow gather in my inbox as I’m in the middle of reading and rereading Clark Coolidge’s book-length poem This Time We Are Both, published in 2010 by Ugly Duckling Presse. The title is the first thing that grabs my attention. READ MORE >

I feel like Person by Sam Pink, published by Lazy Fascist Press, is, as Ann Beattie said of Wittgenstein’s Mistress,  “a novel that can be parsed like a sentence.”

What I mean is the sentences, one per paragraph one by one, slowly present an image of existence—particular, funny, sad, moving, and sometimes surprising.

The book is thematic at the language level, and phrases recur mantra-like.

“It feels like practice,” Sam writes, again and again.

READ MORE >

Finished this today. I started it a few years back and put it down; the introduction seemed a bit impenetrable. Then, last year, as I was driving through Yosemite park, I thought of the trees as temporary spikes in the surface of the earth. I felt my environment as process. I blamed this book. I started it up again about two weeks ago. It’s a beautiful synthesis of thought; philosophical in the sense that this book is a unique engagement with the world that is often contagious, often revealing. Manuel De Landa presents the last thousand years through three lenses: biological history, geological history, and linguistic history. I found the first two the most interesting. The interplay of gene flows, biomass, disease, and the changing infrastructural landscape of civilization is fun to watch. These are complex processes, and this book makes you feel as if you can suss out the true influences in major movement. To me, this is the most honest, wide-eyed & ecologically sensitive concept of history that I’ve read. Humans aren’t the heroes: self-organizing flows of energy are. We are just mineralizations, temporary coagulations. From one clot to another: read this.