In extremis slender fungus, milk and coffee, fun among us. What was the propellor doing in the twisty-too bar with the rudder? What’s the shakes, handbrake? In some far-off land where the Jaberwock lives, and hard and pointillist sense is a thing anathema, these questions make sense. Why must everything make sense you ask? I don’t know. We’re not necessarily wired that way, but we’re certainly socialized in that manner. And mind your commas ,,,,,,,, and d a n G! l i n G participles. Dangle this, nut case! I read this morning that an 89-year-old author is set to publish his, ostensibly, (mind the commas!) last two works in the next two months. Think of the finality of that. No more new work from this genius scribe—and we, he, know(s) this in advance of the action. Twittery-too and fongobblet is what I say. The jabberwock bird alight on that frumpus tree is slavering at you. It’s cold and dark there. Watch out.
What I’m Reading:
It had been a long time since anyone could make sense of anything…
Massive black horses in water—a marsh, blue sky, angry cumulus darkness roiling in the distance.
They need this, a disembodied voice says. They stand in this water to take the weight off their veiny haunches. It’s therapeutic.
Instantly, she and her horse are a mile out at sea in deep swelling water. The horses swim as if a maelstrom wasn’t upon them—they’re enjoying it—the ocean breaking over their heads.
She isn’t enjoying this—briny fear and seafoam in her nostrils.
And in another instant the sea is drained, there is no tumult, but she is suspended two feet above the seabed, just feet from the old beach line. The marsh is now reedy savanna.
Someone is screaming—bear, bear—in the reeds behind a tall chain-link fence. She has to start her long hike, but she can’t get out of her frozen hover. She can’t move.
These were a few of the dreams. Then she remembers her Shelley. She mutters:
We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day…
This is a bit of the wreckage.
What I’m Reading:
A study in mice might help explain the long-known fact that castration extends life span in most mammals, including people — and why men tend to live shorter lives than women. In the experiment, researchers removed the testicles of mice before puberty, after puberty or in old age, and found that all interventions increased median lifespan — with the late intervention leading to the biggest improvement. The findings suggest that testes’ apparently harmful effects begin later in life, rather than during their puberty heyday.
— Flora Graham / “Why does castration boost longevity?” / Nature Briefing
She reads the sign and immediately hates how the man sitting below the sign acts — a loud cellphone talker
She sees him nearly everyday on the train hates how he dresses — what he represents
Her father lost it all in the market in ‘08 — shot himself in ‘09
He is an excrescence on her eyes
She thinks Judith and Holofernes — modern take!
She sees his head in a large Tupperware — no more ponzi’s no more bankruptcies …
Foreclosure follows
What I’m Reading:
An outbreak of anthrax has killed at least 30 hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in the past month. No cases of the infectious disease have been reported in people so far. The wildlife outbreak puts further pressure on already limited resources, say researchers, as the DRC grapples with armed conflict and large outbreaks of Ebola and cholera.
— Flora Graham / “Anthrax kills hippos in the DRC” / Nature Briefing
I think the countries you singled out, along with others in Western Europe, are confronting two enormous, overarching problems that largely explain what’s going on. One is that the extended era of affluence following World War II created standard-of-living and quality-of-life expectations that aren’t fiscally sustainable in many cases. The other is a velocity of religious, racial and ethnic diversification over the past quarter century that has exceeded what many longtime residents could easily make sense of and comfortably adapt to. Combine those dynamics, add the frustrations of young people who rightly feel that they have fewer opportunities than their parents did, and you wind up with a critical mass of Europeans of various ideological stripes who feel destabilized, dissatisfied — threatened, even — and who are demanding that their elected leaders answer for that. But those leaders lack answers, and that’s true whether they belong to the political left, right or center. France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Germany — they have different governments failing at the same challenge. Which speaks to how daunting that challenge is.
— Frank Bruni & Bret Stephens in Conversation / “The Only Thing We Can All Agree On Is That the World Is on Fire” / The New York Times
The core of the problem is that Trump turned the federal government against American democracy in a relentless effort to challenge, subvert and undermine the nation’s election infrastructure. All in an effort to disrupt the conduct of free and fair elections and hold onto power in the face of popular discontent.
— Jamelle Bouie / “Trump Has Been Thumped. That Doesn’t Make Him Any Less Dangerous.” / The New Tork Times
your god chews sky, can’t count the promises he’s broken. he’s laid down love. his religion: land & aching. turns his head leaving us trapped in a coward’s image or his in ours.
— W.J. Lofton / “Biting Iron”
One of the reports said overshooting the 1.5C target “will bring large-scale and in many cases irreversible impacts” for the cryosphere — Earth’s ice in all its forms.
Melting of glaciers and sea ice, the thawing of permafrost and the accelerating rise in sea levels, will have widespread repercussions, from flooding to water shortages.
Some of the effects of the rise in temperature are already visible, such as the 20-percent loss in glacial mass in Switzerland.
— Delphine Paysant / “UN reports warn of large-scale damage to Earth’s ice from climate change” / AFP News
“I’m calling this the Trump hangover election,” David said. “It’s as if voters woke up, it’s the morning after. They made a bad decision the night before, and now they’re correcting that. This is buyer’s remorse.”
— Mother Jones Editorial / “America to Trump: You’re a Loser” / Mother Jones
There was an incredible sense of optimism then about what the European Union could become. Now it’s falling apart for the reasons you mention, plus a third. Europeans at the time often thought that the end of the Cold War meant the end of traditional geopolitics and an inexhaustible peace dividend. They didn’t really reckon with the possibilities that Russia would again become a military threat, China an economic threat, Africa and the Middle East sources of unchecked migration, and the United States an isolationist, fickle, even belligerent power.
In other words, the continent really thought it had reached the End of History, capital E and H. A fatal miscalculation. I’m not sure there’s the political wherewithal in Europe to get its economic and strategic houses in order before these problems get much worse.
— Frank Bruni & Bret Stephens in Conversation / “The Only Thing We Can All Agree On Is That the World Is on Fire” / The New York Times
The days of the House of Representatives functioning like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump administration are over.
— Hakeem Jeffries / “Democrats vow to use their power to check Trump” / The New York Times
What I’m Listening To:
She’s my black market baby She’s my black market baby She’s a diamond who wants to stay coal Wants to stay coal
-Series of found moving images as the film racks out of focus
-Series of stills: long open highways receding into the horizon line; traffic jammed still; parking lots (these sequences without people in the frames)
-Series of of shots resolving into sharp critical focus: buildings from various anonymous downtowns
(Fade Out)
– 4 seconds of clear leader
(Fade In)
-4 seconds of black leader
(Lap Dissolve)
-Asynchronous sound of obtuse observations about reality shows broadcast on the E! Network, c. 2007 / Over clear leader
-Mundane observations about obscure European celebrities / Over black leader
-Silence / Over cut-ups compiled from 33 sequences of film, all exactly 105 frames long, thrown into the air, and then assembled by chance operation
(Lap Dissolve)
-A Random Series Of Magnified Images Of Fleas
(Voice Over):
“The way that fleas become infective is due to a feature of their alimentary system—they have not only a stomach, or a ventriculus, but also a proventriculus, which acts as a valve that regulates the food that the flea is ingesting and trying to get to its stomach.”
(Lap Dissolve)
-American National Anthem plays
-A flagless flag pole pings as the wind whips two metal swivel flag snaps on a rope resoundingly into metal pole.
(Voice Over):
“This concludes our broadcast day …”
(Fade to Black)
White Noise.
What I’m Reading:
“Mother Jones voting rights correspondent Ari Berman joined the show, to document the backlash to GOP map-rigging. “They’re not lowering gas prices, they’re not ending the war, they’re not making anything more affordable. What are they doing? They’re rigging the districts to try to choose their own electorate,” Ari said. “I think it just pissed people off.”
— Mother Jones Editorial / “America to Trump: You’re a Loser” / Mother Jones
It’s not that I operate under the impression that my vision is oppression; and it’s not that I enjoy the song that goes “buffalo and bison, bison and buffalo / canonball and rifle, rifle and canonball…” — because I do enjoy that song. But your lachrymose moods and your teary discharges leave me feeling glum and dissociative, dissociative and glum.
So I approach you crabwise and operose, operose and crabwise…
And all I can add, as the singer sang, “that’s the way the thunder rumbles… that’s the way the bee bumbles… bumbles.”
So our relation has come to its inevitable violent end. You have pelted me with rocks and garbage for the last time. You will no longer imperiously rail at me that you are “the queen of bad moods,” or “bluer than blue, in your black converse.”
I now have this overweening desire to play Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” while replaying a loop of the 30 second scene from The Exorcist where Regan abuses and bloodies her demoniac self with a crucifix, 180’s her head and says, “Do you know what she did? Your cunting daughter?”
But in your pedantic manner you insist the line is “canting daughter, canting daughter!”
You add in that lovely manner of yours, “you imbecile! I have a PhD in Comparative Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing. Canting. Canting as in affectedly pious or righteous; alternately, to talk hypocritically and sanctimoniously about something. Canting!”
Then you hiss at me like a hackle-high cat.
And you wonder why I’m leaving as an attenuated truncated lower case word person?
I’m broken. You’re broken. This country is irretrievably broken.
I’m off to Canada to find me a buffalo wrangler.
What I’m Reading:
If this is the beginning of the end of the Trump era, it won’t necessarily be stable or quiet. Donald Trump is president for another two years. And he is not known for going quietly.
— Katrin Bennhold / “A Trump reckoning” / The World
The dictator says: St. Ignatius used a cilice; hold your breath and expand, let go… and I do. He places live wires on my testicles and says: Go!
She’s gesticulating wildly and walking waterboard eyes toward me. She has violent intent, the dictator says.
I unclench my jaw, drop the bite stick, and drift away from my honeymoon croon.
I’m the balloon man over Captiva — a reductive William S. Burroughs doppelgänger. (S. for Seward, did ya’ know?)
Did you consult Burroughs’s spirit? Did you step inside the dream machine? What you sought was not forthcoming in the haze of your hallucinations. What you thought was worthy — a trip with Benway down the Amazonas, rusty metal shank in hand and a stream of clear snot running onto your lips — was instead, a dead end. A cul de sac like a new channel carved out by the overflowing river that deposited you in a billabong in the middle of the vast jungle: lost and still obscured. So now move on. Reach for that fraying vine overhead and pull yourself out before you’re sucked in by the quick mud. Dusk is approaching and something is stirring in the bush.
I am the oily fellow who travels by foot and occasionally bicycle. I have rhinestones for eyes and spangles for hair. Would you please walk along this road with me. I’ve left the barrens and seek conviviality; and you seem full of congeniality and a merry schpilkas. Won’t you be my peripatetic neighbor? Let’s just keep going — so unctuous.
Go here, then go there. Just go go go and keep going. Grit through the pain.
Just keep going.
image: lose it!
What I’m Reading:
That is no reason to breathe easy. What we know is that, if he thinks he might lose, the president is opposed to free and fair elections. He is opposed to the idea of electoral accountability. He rejects the fundamental republican principles of self-government and popular sovereignty. If he could act unimpeded, he would make the United States a Potemkin democracy.
This election cycle may be over, but as a threat to our freedom to govern ourselves, Trump still looms.
— Jamelle Bouie / “Trump Has Been Thumped. That Doesn’t Make Him Any Less Dangerous.” / TheNew Tork Times
You dream Your tongue is loosed Upon that intractable wafer Glued to the roof Of your perfidious Mouth
What I’m Reading:
For much of my life, I was your garden-variety MSNBC Democrat, but I’ve moved left and weaned myself off corporate news in recent years. After voting for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris, I’ve found that it’s Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialist platform that has stood the test of time. And as my political consciousness has grown, so has my anger.
I am outraged by the Democratic Party’s failures—failures that ushered in today’s fascist hellscape. I’d even argue that Democrats are just as culpable as the far right when it comes to delivering fascism through a series of missed opportunities, by backing down for no reason and calling it “integrity,” abandoning the working class in favor of corporations, and remaining so obsessed with their own moral goodness that they forgot to do the job they were elected for.
— Jennifer Welch / “How Joe Biden and the National Democratic Party Paved the Way For American Fascism” / lithub.com
He lives with ephemeral creatures beneath his feet and stanchions around his bed.
A case study in diverting his elbow’s loose skin and the stubbing of his tender footing.
In the darkness outside sycamores make wide arm imprecations and water themselves with wines of every variety.
His ambition is drained in a scruff of the neck twist—a meager remembrance of his days spent in a robe.
His teeth are chattering. Tomorrow he starts his apprenticeship as a bellows fellow at the smithy.
“Fou!” says the Past, inserting its finger in god knows what—¿El lapiz de Extremadura?
He slogs, knee deep, in hummingbird angles, all-stiff and blur-fast. Before him shine the bones of the pitiable Condors of Lima.
Is he comforted by this knowledge—that the afflatus was hard won—speaking in tongues while wearing the cloaks of invincibility? Or did he don the cloaks of imbecility?
In any case, his body is taught with a dab of holy pedantry.
***
She, on the other hand, hears a clacking coming from the road. She feels the steering wheel shudder to the sound of the clacking. Is there a compromised tire up front? What is making that sound? She feels the steering lock and she drifts to the shoulder.
The car’s thermometer reads 115 degrees. The empty road heat shimmers in the distance—an ocean opens in the desert.
This is not something she can afford to do—leave the safety of the car and expose herself to the environment or to potential marauders in wait.
She intuits Inuit umiaks on a Fata Morgana in the heat shimmer ocean before her—all this in invisible increments of …
***
And you say: “Stanchions? Cloaks? Condors of Lima … lapiz … Wha?! Are you insane?”
What I’m Reading:
My father made sure my sisters and I cried before we left to dance or sing. I’d like to believe he would have hated this man who means to rule America again, but who knows how the dead vote.
— Jennifer Martelli / “The Witches All Were Singing”
i am a parasitic acarologist hosting a tick and a bacterium an entomophage pullulating amongst legions of others looking for a parasitoid wasp im a beaky toothed sort of snouter out and about for a ladybug finger or two the dog never knew what hit it and neither will you (microbes are where the action is)
What I’m Reading:
The Republicans could set the world on fire on their march toward authoritarianism and it might not matter. Because when it comes to fighting fascism, Democrats are showing up with a cardboard knife to a gun fight.
— Jennifer Welch / “How Joe Biden and the National Democratic Party Paved the Way For American Fascism” / lithub.com
