Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Who could be excited for the apocalypse?

— Emma Pattee / Tilt 

Why do I care so much if time and space disappear when the world has come undone? Will there be borders and countries again in the future? Today, here, right now, the days don’t matter. Or the months. They disappear like sand between my fingers, without a trace.

— Agustina Bazterrica / The Unworthy

There is no such thing as new pain,
only the same pain recycled a hundred ways.

— Mai Der Vang / “Beast You Are Who Calls to the Beast I Am” / Primordial

Mocking a woman for doing her job isn’t honesty. It isn’t candor. It isn’t toughness. It’s smallness. 

It’s the behavior of a man who cannot face a question without trying to diminish the person asking it. And when grown adults laugh at that, it says less about her and far more about what we as a country are becoming . . . Democracy depends on people willing to ask uncomfortable questions. But calling a woman “piggy” isn’t holding the press accountable. It’s the oldest trick in the autocrat’s handbook: Humiliate the critic so you don’t have to answer the criticism.

What troubles me most isn’t just the insult itself. It’s the applause for it – the way some cheer cruelty if it comes wrapped in their team’s colors. The way grown men laugh at a woman being demeaned. 

The way people confuse bullying with strength.

Leadership requires restraint. It requires self-discipline, respect and the ability to face scrutiny without collapsing into name-calling . . . When the president of the United States talks like this, it gives the country permission to talk like this. It corrodes our civic life. It teaches our kids that mockery is a substitute for argument. It encourages the belief that the way to win is to shame someone into silence.

— Ray Watford / “The worst part of Trump’s ‘piggy’ comment wasn’t the insult” / USA Today

The nostalgia that permeates so much of today’s right and no small part of today’s left is no accident. We have lost the faith in the future that once powered our optimism. We fight instead over what we have, or what we had.

— Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson / Abundance

In the 1930s, the best of the Americas converged. Now, the worst, despite efforts by good people on both sides of the border to hold off the eclipse. If the Conquest inaugurated the “slow creation of humanity,” we, America, América, seem to be living through its dismantling.

— Greg Grandin / America, América: A New History of the New World

“Our whole generation is crazy . . . “

— Maureen F. McHugh / “Special Economics” / After the Apocalypse

What I’m Listening To:

Yes, I can tell
That you can’t be what you pretend
The caterpillar hood won’t cover the head of you
Know you should be home in bed

— Syd Barrett / “No Good Trying”

Rant-a Claus (redux)

Gustatory. Gestation. Genuflection. Generative. Gainsay. Can you guess, which, if any, of the terms above doubles as a po’ boy, a grinder, and a nuclear submarine? If you answered: “Birds on ice,” you win nothing but my heart. I’ve come to the point where points are pointless. Where well-thought out thesis statements are too hegemonic, where writing the well-constructed story is too formulaic, and where proper pacing, narrative arc, and “stakes”—stakes! for goodness sakes—stakes! Who talks that way about art? What are the stakes? What’s at stake for this character? When did art become a parimutuel endeavor? This has all become painting by numbers. Who is best at coloring inside the lines. Why is this ok? Why does this make sense? Why the rush to the normative-homogeneous? Why does everything a human do become subsumed to the capital imperative? Where’s the profit to be made? How do we monetize this? How do we get the most eyes on our ads? Let’s use this work of art as a conduit for our festooning advertising around it. Please. Stop.

What I’m Reading:

Yes, I want free shit too, but see, my feet hurt too bad for looting.

— Emma Pattee / Tilt 

What Is Coming

Magpie thoughts:
Thunder asunder —
Divides the heart.

Polly squawking.
I have witnessed this before.
It sounds absurd.

A crow Laocoön —
Warn me not —
Don’t wish to know what this way comes.

Sparrow filch
A higher logic.
Flits away at looming dark.

What I’m Reading:

The pace of recent climate change is stunningly, bewilderingly fast. Most previous ages of the planet lived out healthy geological lifespans and died of natural causes. That is not what is happening now. The world is not supposed to warm this quickly, to change this suddenly. It never has, at least not since humans (or anything like humans) have existed. It feels wrong. It is wrong. This is not loss but violence.

— Kate Marvel / Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet

From The Managment Office (redux)

Dear Residents,

Due to recent kitchen sink backups, this is a gentle reminder of what cannot go down the garbage disposal:

1. coffin grinds
2. rickshaws
3. paste
4. egos
5. ejaculates
6. election ballots
7. breakthroughs
8. fluff
9. suggestions
10. any fool that expands in water
    

Thank you for your cooperation and please contact the Management Office with ointment for any quintuplets.

What I’m Reading:

Millions of traps are set and no one
returns to inspect them.

— Mai Der Vang / “Twelve Million Loops of Wire / Primordial

this memory hole

into you
into the darkness
into this memory hole
where is your year in review
the vestige of the atom loosed
then fretting a sense of alienation
annihilation abomination abnegation
and ferreting the soundtrack of childhood
standing waiting for the avalanche of cruelty
lost my copy of making art during fascism
my butt call to my dead father answered
my doomsday clock runs backward
i can name that tune in 2 notes
mondays are interminable
everyday is monday
the sky a hole
into me

What I’m Reading:

VI

Icicles filled the long window   
With barbaric glass.   
The shadow of the blackbird   
Crossed it, to and fro.   
The mood   
Traced in the shadow   
An indecipherable cause.   

— Wallace Stevens / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

Proper Dream Categories

I felt a crack in my spirit and all the heat seeped out

Your lower case specialness sorted it into the proper dream categories

I crashed my way out of sleep and ate breakfast earlier than usual

I warmed up my rock and rolled it up the mountain

My spirit patched up
(for now)

What I’m Reading:

Typically, I dreamed and at the same time watched the dream.

The gate was open.

I watched myself as if from a car at a drive-in movie.

— C. S. Giscombe / “Second Dream”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

This terrorizing and demonizing pretends to be in service of recreating a white America that never existed. The US when white supremacists like Trump were young was whiter, but this was never a white country. In 1776, the 13 colonies that became the United States included a significant percentage of Black and Indigenous people (some southern states were a third or more Black). When the US annexed Texas in 1844 and then in 1848 took Mexico’s whole northern half, a Spanish-speaking population was already settled across parts of what’s now the south-west and California. The first African Muslim in what is now the United States came in a Spanish expedition almost a century before the Mayflower brought its fanatical Puritans to the shores of Massachusetts in 1620.

— Rebecca Solnit / “Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed“ / The Guardian

it is a serious thing

just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.

— Mary Oliver / “Invitation”

Whew.

Damn. This America.

This raucous, malfunctioning, precocious, thuggish, absurdly tender, enviable, poisonous, utterly mercurial snitch of a nation. This bumptious, blustering, broken experiment. This circle of arms, haven for guns and greed, this cult of celebrity, this shelter and sanctuary, this bait for demons and demagogues. This place we call-home.

Like it or not, we’re surrounded by our country. It hasn’t been easy to watch its many wounds rise to the surface for anyone to see.

— Patricia Smith / “Series Editor’s Preface” / True Mistakes

A hot pocket in every Chernobyl, a pig
in every inbox. I’m announcing early that I’m running
for the top spot. I’m building a beautiful mall.

— Harryette Mullen / “Spam for President”

Every industrial, high-GDP country in the last decades of the last century took steps to restructure their economies in response to inflation, unemployment, rising energy prices, and global competition. Yet no other wealthy nation did so as gleefully as did the United States. It’s leaders facilicated deindustrialization and the outsourcing of decent-paying jobs; deregulated finance and other industries; pushed for the elimination of small farms and the massive upscaling of agribusiness; gave up their ability to discipline and tax corporations; and revised laws to allow first Walmart’s and then Amazon’s destruction of Main Street. No other comparable nation, not even Thatcher’s, presided over such an enormous redistribution of wealth upward, creating a superclass of billionaires immune to democratic control. None so happily let its political class and institutions fall captive to money, while at the same time gutting the institutions—welfare, unions, housing, farm communities, hospitals, mental health care, the media—that might have softened the blow. 

— Greg Grandin / America, América: A New History of the New World

Climate change is making plastic pollution worse, says a new study: heat and extreme weather accelerate the breakdown of plastic into tiny particles, while storms and floods stir up old garbage from landfills and melting releases microplastics from ice. As the resulting material mixes with our air, water and soil, toxic hitchhikers such as pesticides are carried with it. Meanwhile, the ceaseless production of new plastic generates billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions — creating a vicious cycle. The solution: make less new plastic, get a grip on waste and clean up what’s already out there. “The biggest achievement and greatest hope for success would be to establish an international, legally binding global plastics treaty…”

— Flora Graham / “Climate change and plastic is a vicious cycle” / Nature Briefing

The persecution of huge numbers of brown people and even the mass deportations will not create the white country of far-right fantasy. Los Angeles, for example is an almost 50% Latino city, and despite the ICE and border patrol outrages, arrests, imprisonments and deportations, it remains so. The city’s very name is Spanish, a reminder of who was here first. All the hatred, all the persecution, seems like the panic of racists pretending they can stop the future of this country no longer being majority white through sheer cruelty.

— Rebecca Solnit / “Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed“ / The Guardian

What I’m Listening To:

Why does the past hurt me so?
(Why does the past hurt me so?)
The world is laughing at me
I am such a disaster
(Every day, I’m a shell)
A shell fallen down and dead
Curled, like a heavy downy baby goose

— Dry Cleaning / “Let Me Grow and You’ll See the Fruit”

Ether

Leftist scruff —
a stranger —
two recently-arrived spiders
delivered before
a communist icon.
The craquelure profound.

Small audiences are a bore.

Ether revisits ruefulness,
a trick or two up its cleave.

What is that terrible whining noise?
What is that warpaint tripe?

Pull the jib sheet in.
Do you hear those atrocity whistles?

New condition — beige —
it matches your brown study.

What I’m Reading:

56,000 wealthy individuals have more than roughly 4 billion people.

Read that back.

— Robert Reich / Bluesky post

palliatives

I.

struggling to make payment • make equipment • make sense • make cents • eat wire • raise a cavil • return library books • go to my silent place • but rarely do i crocodile these topics with as much gravitas possible • write Every-Nurse Dusts • sit • write thee non-linear film script • film (patiently) the accumulating dread • the melting cap • the rising seas • the filth • the moldering • the fear on passersby faces • the lack of a redemptive arc •

II.

she waits at a seaside brothel • he beggars penance • causal • transactional • who cautions cowardice • we do • we are • enter the steersman without rudder • exit the horse without bridle • this is a test of the emergency broadcast system • this is not • the augurs of mid-december weigh us down • we are sinking • she of torn socks • he of abundant penury • we stare in thrall as palliatives fail • all reluctance and vulnerability • laden with the accretion of bleak moments • oh look • a flurry of posts • a slurry of social brain rot • oh look•

What I’m Reading:

On July 3, before victory, Governor William O. Bradley of Kentucky worried that the war would turn Americans into an aggressive and war-waging people.” He predicted that “the acquisition of one piece of territory begets a desire for another, and in the end an effort to take by force that which justly belongs to others will lead to the loss of all we have.” 

— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire