The Darbuk-Shyok-Daulat Beg Old road in Ladakh has 37 bridges over snow-fed rivers in spate during summer melt. It leads to Karakoram Pass where, on 15 June two-thousand-and-twenty, Chinese warriors ambushed Indian warriors with rocks, staves & nail-studded clubs, tossing dead & dying over cliffs into the Galwan River.
It’s the stuff of hoary epic: In the frigid barrens of the Karakoram, two ancient civilizations go mano a mano contesting the Aksai Chin, an alkaline desert that abuts Xinjiang province, where Mother Earth demos her end.
I’m brought to consider the perennial terror that poetry, besotted with love & death, milks from the human condition in sulfurous spate; how bloody life imitates hoary art over and over and over.
(Ajai Shukla, “How China and India Came to Lethal Blows,” NYTimes, 6-19-20)
(c) 2020 JMN
Alert the Media
A TikTok celebrity hailing from Gen Z complains of being confused with millenials.
“Just because you’re so old you can’t remember the difference, doesn’t mean it’s OK to lump us altogether,” she said.
(Poppy Noor, “So Gen Z-ers hate millennials now? A handy guide to the generation wars,” theguardian.com, 6-22-20)
Wait. Did I say alert the media? These ARE the media!
The least not-OK thing about this forgettable puff of tiktokery in The Guardian is the shit-eating photograph used to illustrate it.
In the same issue, however, the newspaper redeems itself from Poppy’s folly with this photograph illustrating the prettiest word of the day: “noctilucent.”
And with this photograph illustrating the prettiest whimsy of the day: a concert for plants in Barcelona.
(c) 2020 JMN