In the Colosseum, See the Tragedians; or, Thee Sequel No One Asked For

The tragedians were not yet on the wasteland. The tragedians were still in their ramekins in the hinterlands — which is where they belonged — which is where everyone said they’d stay. 

The ramekins were pleasant. The ramekins had good light in the afternoon. One tragedian had begun conducting his Rimsky-Korsakov a beat too early — just a little, just under his breath, just the wrists — but the other two told him to stop and he stopped. For a while he stopped.

Then, Miami. The bike only goes so far. The record store has everything except what you need, which is the thing you don’t quite have the name for yet, the thing you saw for three seconds on television before your mother changed the channel, the thing with the clothes and the spitting and the feeling of repulsion that is indistinguishable from recognition. Maybe a Butthole Surfers album — maybe Locust Abortion Technician. You are twelve, or thirteen, or already a hundred years old in the way that certain children are. You write the words Sex Pistols on the inside cover of a notebook and feel briefly criminal and alive.

This is before. This is still before.

The mango sits. The fan wobbles. The cassette hisses.

Nobody has been brought up for ordination.

Nobody has answered for the organ.

What about love?

What about love.

Here endeth this misbegotten tale.

What I’m Reading:

“What’s missing in the rest of the world is courage,” she said. “Mayors could say: ‘This is my opportunity [to leave a] legacy,’ but most will not dare.”

— Ajit Niranjan / “How Paris swapped cars for bikes – and transformed its streets” / The Guardian

A Sequel of Sequined Seconals

(The original has such a wild, layered energy — voice-to-text artifacts living alongside Beckett references, suburban Florida humidity, coyotes eating Rimsky-Korsakov — it’s a rare kind of document. Writing into it felt less like imitation and more like tuning to a frequency under the influence of a handful of sequined Seconals) . . . 

She left a cassette in the tape player. Nobody knew whose it was. It had no label. It played thirty seconds of what might have been Rimsky-Korsakov, or might have been a radiator working through something personal, and then a long hiss, and then a man saying, very calmly: I think this is probably the wrong driveway. And then the hiss again for forty-five minutes.

Nobody ejected it.

Somewhere in Romania, a Count nobody had invented yet was preparing remarks. He was polishing his monocle with a handkerchief that smelled of camphor and unfinished business. He had written three librettos and burned them all. The fourth one he planned to offer to a coyote he’d heard about, third-hand, through channels he preferred not to discuss. He was not yet a character in anything. He was still just a man in a room, which is the condition most characters find themselves in before the story catches up to them and makes demands.

Voicemail received: This is a message regarding your organ. Click.

Voicemail received: We are calling about the work. Click.

Voicemail received: Are your avocados— Click.

What I’m Reading:

We are currently experiencing hunger, heat, and refugee flows that are simply outside humanity’s experience—all in a globalized media environment where terror and panic boost advertising dollars and algorithms turn disinformation into currency.

— Stephen Markley / The Deluge

It’s Something About Umbilical Lint in Crepuscular Light

(Here follows the subheading apropos of nothing)

BEFORE THE CEILING FAN (A PREQUEL TO NOTHING IN PARTICULAR)

Before the mango. Before the question of the mango. Before the question of whether anyone was ever going to wash the mango or if the mango was simply destined to sit in the ceramic bowl on the counter acquiring the slow patina of noble neglect — before all of that — there was a morning in a city that smelled of cut grass and diesel and something else, something like the inside of a car that has been sitting in the sun with a fast food bag still in it.

This was before the ceiling fan was forever fucked up. This was when the ceiling fan merely oscillated with quiet menace, a pre-traumatic wobble you could ignore if you kept the television loud enough, which everyone did, which everyone always did.

She had not yet started writing again. She was in the pre-writing period, which felt exactly like the writing period, except nothing got written. She thought about it. She thought about it the way you think about calling someone back — meaning she thought about the fact of it, not the act of it. She was expert at this. She had a gift.

She found scads of umbilical lint by dint of smell; by dent of shells, in crepuscular light, left just a couple of feet below loam — waiting to share World War I ordinance surprise with the post-modern, post-meaning, post-post pustular world.

I believe we’re at war with Eurasia . . . or is it East Asia? What say you, Winston?

(This actually needs a sequel to actuate its fizzy properties. It’s fuzzy jam. It’s scuzzy, tubercular, carbuncle . . . tune in tomorrow and find absolutely nothing that validates your life under the stomp of the jackboot).

What I’m Reading:

That Zuckerberg would be selling generative AI makes perfect sense. It is an isolating technology for an isolated time. His first products drove people apart, even as they promised to connect us. Now chatbots promise a solution. They seem to listen. They respond. The mind wants desperately to connect with a person—and fools itself into seeing one in a machine.

— Damon Beres / “The Age of Anti-Social Media is Here” / The Atlantic

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

A toenail clipping floating in a toilet bowl
like a crescent moon reflected in water,

beauty is quiet and self-conscious.

A character in a novel
sits on the toilet.

Sometimes for forever.

Speaking of which,
where does the shit of a billion people go?

— Hua Xi / “Toilet”

In rejecting the myth of America as ‘a universal nation’, the Trump administration has aggressively destabilised the idea that the US’s own racial and colonial history is – for the most part – internally settled, and beyond Constitutional adjudication. ‘Mass deportation’ in this sense serves a range of purposes beyond its ostensible aims: it cultivates a constituency that elevates ancestral primacy, creates a paramilitary policing layer incentivised to assert despotic authority, and justifies governing via broad emergency decree. The Trump administration envisions not only high numbers of migrant removals, but the authority to revoke citizenship by the sovereign-executive. Deportation, in short, is the watchword for a sweeping ideological attack on the consensus and institutions of postwar liberalism.

— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator

What if the land had its own language?
No alphabet but steady drone
of grasslands, groan of mountains,
drought-fire’s scream—a drawn-out cry . . .

— Alison Hawthorne Deming / “National Forest”

In Miami, denying climate change would be like denying the nose on one’s face. Even so, even knowing what’s coming, the city and surrounding county have struggled to protect themselves—and especially their most vulnerable residents. 

— Vann R. Newkirk II / “What Climate Change Will Do To America By Mid-Century” / The Atlantic

The light that is shining
over there is a traffic sign.
I returned the money I borrowed.
I am getting on very well.
I get up at 7 o’clock.
The sun rises at seven o’clock.
What’s the matter.
The clock has struck 10
He struck me in the face.

— James Tate / “If You See K . . . “

The good news is that the US is a large, diverse, energetic country, filled with people who do not like to be bullied and coerced, who still possess significant degrees of autonomy, and who are beginning to stir and fight back. The culture of fascism and authoritarianism now spewed from government social media, and amplified by paid right-wing influencers and bot farms, reflects neither popular sentiment nor the ordinary conviviality of daily life, particularly in cities.

— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator

. . . How often I prayed
for blood. How I charted the empire 
of endometrium and eggs. How I knew
that trees assembled their shadows 
just so. And how now I am on the other side
of all such worries.

— Didi Jackson / “Spot”

What I’m Listening To:

I feel the sea, dishonest art in me
Blood in my nose sent to say you’re right on time
Venus down in the Zinnia

— Aldous Harding / “Venus down in the Zinnia”

Misbegotten Notes, USA (redux)

Scrolling down a number of superimpositions they multiply—pages of writing, collages, painting, films—audio also multiplied as reading and new noise fades in…

Also try flashlight projection of negatives or slides on wall and film it…

At the edge of decay (details: edge of pigeon…)

Multiple overlayered photos… build photo wall as u speak, cover Wooly shots with an innocent shot of childhood misconceptions

Use the writing done on Crispr Packs

Stripped down song like kg or tw

See photos in 2nd museum visit:

1. Like film “remains” very slow pans over dilapidated scenes, garbage, cultural detritus, read slowly over it

2. Like photos from “road journal” of torn pages revealing very little but enough of life story

3. Like dirt born “2nd History” rephotograph images of hoods and make them extended family, with narration hagiography over pix — and make documents or other artifacts like air mail mailers, maybe passaports etc

4. Make storyboards with pastel, cut-outs, pix, et al and animate it

5. Layer like contaminated “xy” & “stars” (no) and rephoto them as the final work

6. Repaint band aid packets for injuries suffered in childhood and equate them with the things I broke…

7. paint / sketch a real daddy doll with cut out clothes… or find a big unicorn rainbow second hand

8. Stones from different places visited and the ptsd inducing situations they mark

9. Copy and enlarge the word wall over and over until avatar of the turtle type of enlarged detritus and make wall of it

10. Tear pages out of book and paint something on it pertaining to you at Tim’s animal farm imbroglio

11. In-camera edited film: little bits and tips of crayons

12. Harumph!

What I’m Reading:

. . . sometimes 
we need a break from dread. We need to know that the car 
did not crash, the child did not die. We need to briefly forget 
that we live in a world where a car is gaining speed, and 

no one seems to be at the wheel . . .

— Suzanne Cleary / “Mercury”

Hooked

Don’t roil the water
Wait for the paint to dry
Sssh! the children will hear

What are you burning—
Commingling with the ashes
of the dead?

Did you know the matter—
Particulate—we breathe
Is someone’s uncle
Or sister floating in air
At 450 ppm?

Recycling—
You say bilious
In cross-bone stance—
Dead planet nimbus

Blinding

Chunter of the dead—
Rasps & tongues

A passing thought
I hooked
& threw back

What I’m Reading:

IF YOU’RE NOT AFRAID OF FAILING AS A WRITER, it means you haven’t risked enough. Or you might be a sociopath. There are some good writers who are sociopaths.

— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing 

It snowed here in Boston yesterday…
I say winter is over.
If the electric bike is out
From its winter hibernation…
That means winter is over.

What I’m Reading:

Spending the night in the mountains with minimal creature comforts has its benefits — it gets me closer to nature and gives me plenty of time to sit with my discomfort when loneliness or fear sets in.

— Jim Blount / “Sleeping with the Foxes” / The Bikepackers Guide

Cloud Enjambments (redux)

I’m the worst when it comes to fixing
Leaks, see for yourself.
I’ve seen maps with circular
Walls. I love color jet packs. But you’ll need paper
For a lively discussion with a white stripe
Down the middle of perception. Pointillist
Dots and washes create white swirls
Of cloud enjambments.
So why look at the moon?

What I’m Reading:

What makes some people heroes is what makes us criminals. It is almost simplistic to say that we are guilty by birth. Our existence is purely mechanistic; we are reminded, through policy and procedure, that we are unfortunately born to die.

— Mohammed El-Kurd / Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal

Sumerian Script

I scarify my soul in the humorless moon of a long night in a clean well lighted place — which is a bullet ridden cafe in Ouagadougou — during a monsoon month of dust and quiet whippoorwills.

I prune leafy trees leafless, hot with fleas, and fleecing your sister’s sake.

You said, “I got mine and you’ll be fine.”

I said, “summer is your sister’s fate, her shizophrenic haze, is the strength of the weakness in her occipital lobe.”

You said my comedy was sublimely written — like it was written in Sumerian script for a Mandarin world.

There was one full minute of elation, followed by a lifetime of deflation.

What I’m Reading:

Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them. 

— Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor / “The rise of end times fascism” / The Guardian

Shadows — Birthing Death

All jacked up, full
Of caffeine in a tailwind,
Some climbing to do still —

Look at the plumes!
Are those dust devils?

A few spotty flakes.
It’s ash,
It’s people.

Fire zipped down the dark sky —
Flattened the school.
Now shards of students and books

Rain down from the tumescent
Night of flickering shadows —
Birthing death.

What makes a nation great?
What makes a nation miserable?

What I’m Reading:

The night air seemed to vibrate with worlds just outside of comprehension. A future hovered, soaked through with memory, between the buildings and beyond. Her future, ready to be met.

— Susanna Kwan / Awake in the Floating City