INSPIRATION & WORKS CITED
AAASMR No. 2
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. London: Chapman & Hall, 1859. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/98/98-h/98-h.htm
Woolf, Virginia. “The Humane Art,” from The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1942. https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks12/1203811h.html#ch-10 + https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/09/12/virginia-woolf-soul/
“In serious times it is important to be creative, because we need the creativity for concepts, and we need the concepts to see the facts before us.” —Timothy Snyder
AAASMR No. 4
Bartels, Meghan. “Election grief is real. Here’s how to cope.” Scientific American, 11/6/24. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/election-grief-is-real-heres-how-to-cope/
Excerpts from Bartels’ interview with psychotherapist Pauline Boss:
“A higher tolerance for ambiguity is related to lower susceptibility to fascist ideologies.” —Ed.
Pauline Boss: There is, in fact, a tolerance for ambiguity scale. It was born out of a scale now called the authoritarian personality scale. [Editor’s Note: That scale was originally developed in the aftermath of World War II by philosopher Theodor Adorno as a response to Nazism. A higher tolerance for ambiguity is related to lower susceptibility to fascist ideologies.]
Change is necessary. If a system of human beings doesn’t change, they die. And right now I think we’re on the precipice of not wanting to change, and that’s not a good thing. That’s going backward. I think we should work toward bringing about change now at the community level, wherever you have power and agency, whatever level you have it at. Maybe it’s just in your family, maybe it’s just in yourself, or maybe it is in your community or state or nation or globally. But work for change—because change is the one thing that will keep us going.
“AAASMR: No Words” is a field recording of ocean waves that I captured at Carolina Beach, NC, on January 6, 2021, just before I learned that the U.S. Capitol was under attack by an armed mob of Trump supporters.
AAASMR No. 6
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” —Albert Camus
“In serious times it is important to be creative, because we need the creativity for concepts, and we need the concepts to see the facts before us.” —Timothy Snyder
“Fresh lava is totally rebellious.” —Remedios Varo
Krech, Gregg. “The Unfinished Chapter of This Messy World.” Thirty Thousand Days, 2/25/25. https://www.thirtythousanddays.org/2025/02/coping-garden-of-uncertainty/
Reich, Robert. “What You Can Do.” 1/23/25 https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-you-can-do
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Crown: New York, NY, 2017.
Stevens, José. “How to Neutralize Drama.” The Power Path, 3/26/2013. https://thepowerpath.com/articles-by-jose-stevens/new-article-by-jose-stevens-how-to-neutralize-drama/
Varo, Remedios (translated by Margaret Carson). “Dear Mr. Gardner,” from On Homo Rodans and Other Writings. Wakefield Press: Cambridge, MA, 2024.
RECOMMENDED READING (AAASMR No. 6)
✶ Jessica Craven’s Chop Wood, Carry Water newsletter: Easy, effective political actions to take to stave off despair, effect positive change and elect more true public servants. https://chopwoodcarrywaterdailyactions.substack.com/
✶ Gil Durán and George Lakoff’s Framelab: A newsletter about language, politics and your brain. https://www.theframelab.org/
✶ Robert B. Hubbell’s Today’s Edition newsletter: A reflection on today's news through the lens of hope. https://roberthubbell.substack.com/
✶ Jason Kottke’s Kottke.org newsletter. https://kottke.org/newsletter/
✶ Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter: On politics and history, the Arctic, and Appalachian exile. https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/
✶ Timothy Snyder’s “Thinking about...” newsletter: Opening the future by understanding the past. https://snyder.substack.com/
✶ Some actions that are not protesting or voting: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OSWxykA1WHOi0vTPLAJDaCeVhR3uSfh7PhlCj4t4yT0/edit?pli=1&tab=t.0
AAASMR No. 7
Chenoweth, Erica, Pressman, Jeremy, and Hammam, Soha. “Resistance is alive and well in the United States.” Waging Nonviolence, March 19, 2025. https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/03/resistance-alive-well-us/
Giridharadas, Anand. “The opposite of fascism: Living well and fighting back in a time of terrors.” The.Ink, March 19, 2025. https://the.ink/p/the-opposite-of-fascism
Monteiro, Mike. “How to organize your books.” Mike Monteiro’s Good News, March 22, 2025. https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-organize-your-books/
“I am pretty sure that I can sit in any chair in my apartment or at work and reach a book without having to get up. This is the goal. When the government comes to my house to look for banned books I want to make their job incredibly hard. I want it to take weeks. I want them to hang out so long that we end up having dinner together while I tell them about some of my favorite books....”
“There should also be some solace in knowing that when everything goes to shit, we have a room full of books, and those books can be picked up at any time, and an idea that was written down in the past can be released back into the present and help to influence a future.” —Mike Monteiro
Tolin, Lisa. “Banned Books List 2025.” PEN America, 2/4/2025. https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/
AAASMR No. 8
Johnson, Michelle Cassandra and Amy Burtaine. The Wisdom of the Hive: What Honeybees Can Teach Us about Collective Wellbeing. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2025. https://www.michellecjohnson.com/wisdom-of-the-hive
“... Our entire life on earth is one of endings and beginnings, and I believe our constant entrance into different portals of experience is meant to change us in some way. At this time now—when so much is being stirred into the cauldron of our adventure on earth, in this time that some call apocalyptic—we are living in a portal, traveling between death and creation, sometimes many times in one day. There is chaos, destruction, death, darkness, uncertainty, and beauty as we cross the threshold into the unknown—into a space of trying to decipher what the future will look, feel, taste, smell, and be like. Many people talk about an apocalypse as a time of endings, but the root of the word, apokalýptein, means “to uncover” in Greek. This uncovering allows us to see more clearly, the veil lifted to reveal the dynamic tensions that plague and fracture us. This is a time of uncovering and a time of revelation. This is a time of deep discomfort with what is being shown to us. ... While this is a time of revealing and unveiling, a time of change and travel through many portals, this is also a time to gather wisdom and connect with our higher intelligence and the intelligence of nature—including the honeybee—to support us as we journey into and through the many portals of experience.” —Michelle Cassandra Johnson, pp. 203-204
Scranton, Roy. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 2015. https://royscranton.net/books/learning-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/
“...Over time, a single dance grows more and more popular, until a majority of bees are doing it. The swarm has made its decision and takes flight. ... Politics, whether for bees or for humans, is the energetic distribution of bodies in systems. This is where the ideas of the vote, the town hall meeting, and the public debate get their power: humans come together to resonate at one frequency or another. Arrangements of bodies in systems don’t arise from ideal notions of how governance should work, but rather emerge out of the vibrating bodies themselves, the systems they inhabit, and the interactions between the two. The key is energy: energy production and social energetics.” —Roy Scranton, pp. 55-56
Seeley, Thomas D. Honeybee Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147215/honeybee-democracy
AAASMR No. 9
Carvin, Andy. “The ‘Standing Man’ of Turkey: Act of Quiet Protest Goes Viral.” NPR, June 18, 2013. https://news.prairiepublic.org/2013-06-18/the-standing-man-of-turkey-act-of-quiet-protest-goes-viral
Elder, Miriam. “Doll ‘protestors’ present small problem for Russian police.” The Guardian, January 26, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/26/doll-protesters-problem-russian-police
Evans, Ellen and Jon Moses. “Interview with David Graeber.” The White Review, December 2011. https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-david-graeber/
“The reason anarchists like direct action is because it means refusing to recognise the legitimacy of structures of power. Or even the necessity of them. Nothing annoys forces of authority more than trying to bow out of the disciplinary game entirely and saying that we could just do things on our own. Direct action is a matter of acting as if you were already free.” —David Graeber
Mitchell, John Cameron. “Today’s Young People Need to Learn How to Be Punk.” The New York Times, May 11, 2025. Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/11/opinion/gen-z-punk.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JE8.RTl1.dHW_5VDwmyuf&smid=url-share
“I’ve come to believe that D.I.Y. collective action — specifically, the punk variety — might be our only way through the darkness....”
“Your homework is to stop canceling each other, find out about punk, and get laid while you’re at it.... Punk isn’t a hairstyle; it’s getting your friends together to make useful stories outside approved systems. And it’s still happening right now, all over the world....”
“So, how can all of us access the punk? Get in the room with other people (more D.I.Y. and I.R.L.). Embrace the analog, which can’t be surveilled by artificial intelligence. Reach out to unexpected, even problematic...allies, with different but compatible definitions of justice. Luckily, kindness looks the same to most of us. And as you start making that useful thing, you might lock eyes with the person working at your side, and maybe this time you won’t flinch. The walls of identity crumble in the face of our greatest human strength: empathy.” —John Cameron Mitchell
Sun, Rivera. “How Creative Protests Stole the Show in 2022.” Waging Nonviolence, January 17, 2023. https://wagingnonviolence.org/cnv/2023/01/how-creative-protests-stole-the-show-in-2022/
Syke, Jonathon. “How to wheatpaste: A field guide to making your posters stick.” WheatpastePosters.com, January 22, 2024. https://wheatpasteposters.com/blog/how-to-wheatpaste/
Tripney, Natasha. “The sound of silence: The student protests sweeping Serbia.” Café Europa, January 2, 2025. https://natashatripney.substack.com/p/the-sound-of-silence-the-student
“The feeling that nothing you do will change anything has a cumulative deadening effect on people, a state of inertia sets in. This has been palpable in Serbia in the past, but it feels like a kind of psychological rewiring is going on, a rewriting of the narrative. The students have given people permission to hope again.” —Natasha Tripney
“Velvet Revolution: Jingled keys.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., May 23, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Revolution#Jingled_keys
AAASMR No. 10
Ionesco, Eugene. Rhinoceros, and other plays. New York: Grove Press, 1960. https://archive.org/details/rhinoceros0000ione_d4y1/mode/2up
“The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon.” —Eugene Ionesco
Huberman, Andrew. “Cycling Breathing for Beginners: Guided Breathwork by Andrew Huberman.” February 25, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2rg7c0EQoE
Leggett, Hadley. “Breathing anxiety away.” Stanford Medicine Magazine, Issue 2, June 2, 2023. https://stanmed.stanford.edu/cyclic-sighing-stress-relief/
Oliver, Myrna. “Eugene Ionesco; Godfather of Theater of Absurd.” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 1994. https://archive.is/2022.03.18-232517/https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-03-29-mn-39630-story.html
“Tall poppy syndrome.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., June 18, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
AAASMR No. 11
Sutherland, Joan. “Koans for Troubled Times.” Lion’s Roar, April 6, 2018 (reprint). Originally published in Buddhadharma. https://www.lionsroar.com/koans-for-troubled-times/
AAASMR: Dark adaptation
Angela Winter
High above Earth
I wait for you
Circling round
this world of blue
This is no dream
this is no lie
Spiraling out
Adapting our eyes
Are we alone—
an island in space?
How does it feel
with no footing or place?
Beyond all that’s certain,
the freedom to fly
as flowers appear
in our eyes
This is all me
This is all you
When you can do nothing,
what can you do?
Beyond all that’s certain,
the freedom to fall
through the heart of the world
into nothing at all
AAASMR No. 12
Alexander, Caroline. The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “What Trump and Hegseth Really Fear.” Lucid, June 8, 2025. https://lucid.substack.com/p/what-trump-and-hegseth-really-fear
Chang, Justin. “’My Undesirable Friends: Part 1’ is a Staggering Portrait of Russian Journalists in Dissent.” The New Yorker, August 14, 2025. https://archive.is/2025.08.23-234845/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-current-cinema/my-undesirable-friends-part-i-is-a-staggering-portrait-of-russian-journalists-in-dissent
“When will these dark times pass?” someone asks, at one point. “How much longer do we have to endure this?” Loktev’s accomplishment in this extraordinarily human cinematic document is to simply keep filming—to cling fast to her camera, and to keep it focused on the remarkable sight of young people showing exemplary courage. In doing so, she keeps faith with the words of another speaker, pledging solidarity with dissidents everywhere: “Evil is not eternal, and truth will surely win.” —Justin Chang
Job 38: 29-30 (KJV)
Lansing, Alfred. Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1959.
Solnit, Rebecca. “Notes on the Varieties of Resistance.” Meditations in an Emergency, June 4, 2025.
https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/notes-on-the-varieties-of-resistance/
Winter, Angela. “Auspices X :: Bluebirds return.” Auspices, March 15, 2020. https://mailchi.mp/b20a5bbe0813/bluebirds-return?e=1a76bf3600
AAASMR No. 14
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” —Richard Powers
Burns, Ken and David Leonhardt. “Ken Burns: For America’s Next Story, Look Back to the Revolution.” The New York Times, September 29, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/opinion/american-story-ken-burns-revolution.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zk8.QHSl.asJcyUkRZBbf&smid=url-share [gift article]
Gordon, Jeffrey. “Song of Myself: The Paradox of the Project.” Tin House, August 28, 2013. https://tinhouse.com/song-of-myself-the-paradox-of-the-project/
Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself, 51.” Final "Death-Bed" edition, 1892. Originally published in Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, David McKay, 1891-1892. https://poets.org/poem/song-myself-51 + https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version
AAASMR No. 15
ORB WEAVERS
Angela Winter
a snow of golden leaves
luminous honeybees gathering pollen
from yawning pink mouths
of camellias, glossy and evergreen
black butterfly aloft in the westerly wind,
shadowing moss, fading grasses,
and a tiny moth, ash-grey wings fluttering
goldfinches in their dun winter coats
perched atop seed-heads of swamp sunflowers
merrily ripping petals as they feed
sending blazes of gold swirling
into drifts of dead oak beneath
and everywhere, spiders
outside my window—
an orb weaver suspended on silken thread
bat-like
waiting
we are in the time of spiders
we are in the time of release
we are in the breath between
what was
and what is forming
the spider spirals and spins
following a helixing algorithm
weaving a net for the evening’s hunt
growing larger by day
last night, the light of the full moon
slipped the blackout curtains’ edge
I went to the window, half asleep, blinking,
moonlight on my face, the spider, her web of trophies
gazing at the moon,
I remembered the first photos of Earth
shot by astonished astronauts who saw
how we’re all here floating
on this tiny sphere in space
suspended
waiting
we are in the time of spiders
in the time of release
in the breath between what was
and what is forming
remember,
we can shape it
may we shape it
as wisely as possible
spiraling and spinning
following our helixing algorithms
orb weavers, all
AAASMR No. 17
“Glorias comprises minute samples of pieces by composers who were exiled from Franco's Spain after the Spanish Civil War and field recordings of the Spanish countryside. It is an attempt to reconcile the exile and the homeland, and a tribute to the International Brigades, volunteers from around the world who travelled to Spain to fight fascism, many of whom never returned.” —Al Wootton
“this record is about all of us waiting for the end.
all current forms of governance are failed.
this record is about all of us waiting for the beginning,
and is informed by the following demands=
empty the prisons
take power from the police and give it to the neighbourhoods that they terrorise.
end the forever wars and all other forms of imperialism.
tax the rich until they're impoverished.
much love to all the other lost and lovely ones,
these are death-times and our side has to win.
we'll see you on the road once the numbers fall.”
—Godspeed You! Black Emperor
AAASMR No. 18
“Radigue’s body of work is a long, slow love letter to the sounds of planes and ice-cream machines and burning cop cars and all the products of an industrial world that must, eventually, always, fade out.” —Sasha Frere-Jones, https://4columns.org/frere-jones-sasha/alien-roots-eliane-radigue
Hjersted, Tim. “Why Nonviolent Resistance Doesn't Require Your Opponent to Have a Conscience.” 1/27/26. https://timhjersted.substack.com/p/why-nonviolent-resistance-doesnt
and then turn around and accuse you of attacking them.
>> Every case of police brutality against a negro >>
follows the same pattern.
>> They attack you,
bust you all outside your mouth, >>
and then take you to court and charge you with assault.
What kind of democracy is that?
>> What kind of uh freedom is that?
What kind of social or political system is it when a black man has no voice in court?
has no nothing on his side other than what the white man >> chooses to give him.
My brothers and sisters, we have to put a stop to this.
>> And it will never be stopped
until we stop it ourselves.’ —Malcolm X
Klein, https://klein1997.bandcamp.com/track/spiritual-warfare
Sinker, Dan. “On Joy and Resistance.” 2/22/26. https://dansinker.com/posts/2026-02-22-act-of-resistence/
Winchester, Rook T. “This Is How Fascism Loses in America.” Closer to the Edge, 2/18/26. https://www.closertotheedge.net/p/this-is-how-fascism-loses-in-america
AAASMR No. 19
Engler, Mark and Paul Engler. “The key to defeating Trump? Mass non-cooperation.” The Guardian, 2/15/26. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/15/defeat-trump-mass-non-cooperation
Nonviolence International and the Rutgers International Institute for Peace. The Digital Library of Nonviolent Resistance. https://nonviolence.rutgers.edu/s/digital
Snyder, Timothy. “Watching the Olympics in Ukraine.” Thinking about..., 2/21/26. https://snyder.substack.com/p/watching-the-olympics-in-ukraine
Winchester, Rook T. “The Dildo Distribution Delegation.” Closer to the Edge, 1/25/26. https://www.closertotheedge.net/p/the-dildo-distribution-delegation
Winchester, Rook T. “The FBI Has Questions About the Dildos.” Closer to the Edge, 3/23/26. https://www.closertotheedge.net/p/the-fbi-has-questions-about-the-dildos
Winchester, Rook T. “This Is How Fascism Loses in America.” Closer to the Edge, 2/18/26. https://www.closertotheedge.net/p/this-is-how-fascism-loses-in-america
