The Silence of the Lawns (new book)

This has been a year of accidents. Some of them tiny like bumping my head or feeling weirdly dizzy. Some of them weird

and sometimes dispiriting like the furnace not working, twice, the gas not being switched back on, three times, weird breakages. Of my toe in the bath for instance.

And some downright intense or even malicious seeming. Like every day there’s been a weird accident since my surgery.

They’re not bad per se. They’re not something one needs to despair about. But they could be.

The latest is, I just got bourgeois-evicted from my home (they’re selling it), because of my opposition to gasoline powered gardening equipment. I’ll never be able to prove it, of course, they have left no trace I can take action against, like the invisible footprints of Sabrina in Milton’s poem, only Sabrina was revolution and this is the modern bondage of carbon.

It’s been a seven-year struggle against the Menil Collection and I lost.

Except I’m writing a book about it. A really good one.

Maybe they forgot I can write. Maybe they didn’t quite think through the fact that there’s a lolol world class environmental philosopher living in one of their houses.

I kept telling them it would be fantastic PR, go wild like Rice, model good behavior, be part of how the art museum and the garden are becoming the same thing, worldwide.

It’s great actually. I am free from complicity in the American lawn, a slavery artifact that is deadly to flowers and Black people.

The American lawn, that gives workers cancer and uses 40% (?) of America’s water and deploys a nephew of Agent Orange.

The lawn fueled my earliest forays into big picture environmentalist thought. Now I’m ready to write the book that was always coming.

It’s called The Silence of the Lawns.