Scores of Forest Service plans could be upended after Boundary Waters mining vote • Wisconsin Examiner Congress’ move to allow mining in a national forest near a the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness may have broad ramifications

Scores of Forest Service plans could be upended after Boundary Waters mining vote via @stateline.org wisconsinexaminer.com/2026/04/21/r...

In Memory of Ernst Toller The shining neutral summer has no voice To judge America, or ask how a man dies; And the friends who are sad and the enemies who rejoice Are chased by their shadows lightly away from the grave Of one who was egotistical and brave, Lest they should learn without suffering how to forgive. What was it, Ernst, that your shadow unwittingly said? O did the child see something horrid in the woodshed Long ago? Or had the Europe which took refuge in your head Already been too injured to get well? O for how long, like the swallows in that other cell, Had the bright little longings been flying in to tell About the big friendly death outside, Where people do not occupy or hide; No towns like Munich; no need to write? Dear Ernst, lie shadowless at last among The other war-horses who existed till they’d done Something that was an example to the young. We are lived by powers we pretend to understand: They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand. It is their tomorrow hangs over the earth of the living And all that we wish for our friends; but existing is believing We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving.

Auden's "In Memory of Ernst Toller" been jangling in my head lately

"but existing is believing / We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving."

yes, absolutely. elsethread @weramamuna.bsky.social linked a good essay that draws those connections more explicitly:

www.patreon.com/posts/150679...

I haven’t; thanks for the recs!

technically it's also the grounding myth of Star Wars--rediscovering the force*--w the key distinction that in the books I listed magic isn't easily moral & rarely or only ambivalently serves ppl (in JS&MN Strange tries to bend magic to warmaking & it's a bad call)

*lol, force. hello Simone Weil

oh yes, thank you! -- just skimmed this and she's name-checking Le Guin/White/Malory/Tennyson as well as Mirrlees & Clarke, extremely here for it (I'm a romanticist by training so I know whose fault a good 85% of this tradition is, lol)

like I love Little, Big but its entire deal is injecting a vaguely English-flavored tradition of kabbalistic magic into upstate NY because the place lacks a ""native"" tradition Crowley can draw on (because America)

yep, don't think it's a coincidence that of the books I'm thinking abt wrt this, one's Napoleonic, one's set in an industrializing c18 England, and one's navigating the fact that America killed off many many of the ppl whose deep connection to the land might furnish "magic" as metaphor or reality

it's in my very small "must re-read once every 5-10 years" pile! just marvelous. her longish poem "Paris: A Poem" is also great, if a bit incomprehensible & insular in the usual modernist way

thank you!!

got a hunch that this, like magic's retreat, is a c20 myth, a postwar attempt to render the shape of meaning in an era defined by incomprehensible globalism & technologies of mass death (ie meaning, like magic, is beautiful & fleeting & fundamentally not human, tho it can include humans)

like in all 3, magic returning is partly a metaphor for accepting the weird, fundamentally non-ethical but beautiful mystery of earthly life (Piranesi sorta does this too, & Beagle's Last Unicorn: the unicorns return to *our* world, which still sorta sucks). it's epiphanic but not teleological

would love to read criticism abt the minor strain of fantasy where magic returns to the world--Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist, Crowley's Little, Big, Clarke's JSaMN--esp bc they're *not* inversions of the nostalgic "magic-leaves" story, nor utopian/millennial; they end w a very ambiguous transcendence

Plastic, Prism, Void by Violet Allen — Debut trans romantasy — LittlePuss Press A time-skipping quick-quipping trans romantasy supernova! "An utterly essential, astounding new voice." —Charlie Jane Anders

I promised a second thread on Plastic, Prism, Void & here it is! This time I want to talk about it as writing, not as typesetting. And I want to talk about it as writing about love, specifically about trying to be loved as a trans woman.

(remembering to put the pre-order link at the top this time!)

It was not ideal! thankfully nothing happened but the mild disruption of our Adult Braces book club meeting

there was a moment last night when the weatherppl said “we told u to go into the basement bc tornado but now you need to leave bc flood” 💀

yep. the water was so high you couldn’t even see where the weir was.

if five years ago you’d told me that Wisconsin’s version of climate change was going to be multiple historic floods in 6 months—

middle-aged trans man sits by flooded river

stairs descending into flooded river

husband took a pic tonight that’s probably the coolest I will ever look, thanks horrible 2026 Milwaukee floods I guess? also pictured: stairs to nowhere

also cannot control yet another round of Milwaukee flooding, which is happening outside as I try to draft. this metaphor needs workshopping

yes!! such a good Art Thoughts novel. I feel like you can really see the influence of him having read Every Single Zola in re: his descriptions of NYC too; every landscape is resonant, a miniature story

Cover of Alice Stoer's Again, Harder: two furry girls about to fuck on a red background, one seems to be a wolf and the other a bunny so I assume things are messy. This one's about trans women in the midwest (!) and I am very excited for it

Cover of James Merrill's Divine Comedies: Poems. This book is a gift from a dear friend I saw at AWP whose parents knew Merrill! Merrill's one of my favorite poets, an elegant formalist whose confessions are made with tongue always firmly in cheek

this week has been garbage even beyond our govt threatening another genocide, so it's a gift from the universe that all the books I preordered are starting to come in / I'm diving into my AWP pile. thank fucking god. I don't believe art will save us but it's what's keeping me functional rn

Ron Johnson warns Trump's threatened actions could trigger 'end times' Sen. Ron Johnson said he was "hoping and prayng" Trump's threats to targert civilian target were just "bluster."

RoJo preemptively thoughts-and-prayersing a war crime he could prevent is almost too on the nose

www.jsonline.com/story/news/p...

I feel like Kaminsky got cancelled awhile ago & I can't quite remember why, but "we lived happily during the war" beats louder in my head every week, esp "we opposed them but not / enough"

every week "we lived happily during the war" becomes more ghoulishly apt

thinking of the universities we bombed in Palestine & the ones we're bombing in Iran, & the ones we're defunding & censoring in the US, & how much self-proclaimed defenders of the 'western tradition' hate all tradition including their own; the only history they recognize is a mirror Reagan-era deep

see this in the literal academy too, where it's a fashionable (derogatory) overcorrection for a perceived 20 yrs of historical miserymongering + a desire to defend history as "inspirational" w a malnourished sense of how inspiration actually works

I wish more of the cultural gatekeepers interested in ye zeitgeist's (mostly bad!) flavors of masculinity would engage w transmasc fiction, not as a fun lil sideshow but as an exploration of the same ground that often looks beyond reifying (while pretending to overcome) the same old turgid stoicism