Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Three things: I’ve never been to
a funeral, a man is his own
prophet in the morning, a door

floats above an endless horizon.
But I have walked through hospice halls,
I have stood at the edge of a cliff.

— Brent Ameneyro / “As the Fog Starts Burning Away”

What to do with this information? I confess, I do not know. I confess that when the pareidolia was not frightening it was, often, beautiful, in a darkling kind of way, reconfiguring time and space, cause and effect. This information I know what to do with even less.

— Emily LaBarge / Dog Days

The Yangtze River in China lost its nerve
and wanted vengeance.

Elsewhere a desert caught fire.
We got a plastic green turtle and named it Sir

Desmond Tutu.
A snake entered our house through the drain

and like any good son, I ran
and hid under the bed.

Google became a thing.
Viagra became a thing.

— Gbenga Adesina / “The People’s History of 1998”

The Artificial State is less a state than a dream of being without one, the dream of the severing of humans not only from the natural world but also from one another, every umbilical cord cut. An extreme form of this dream is the actual plan of a very small number of staggeringly powerful twenty-first-century merchant princes, Silicon Valley billionaires who, seeking escape from the prison of their own bodies, intend to have their consciousnesses uploaded onto computers when they die, an idea that, like much of what they want, comes from a story published nearly a century ago in a science fiction magazine for boys. The Artificial State they envision for everyone else, and have begun to build, is a future in which humans are ruled, and many replaced, by machines owned by corporations owned by themselves. This future, too, comes from science fiction. It involves both the desertion of liberal democracy and the destruction of the natural world. The very planet, once a home to be tended, is to become instead a warehouse, its surface covered in data centers powering artificial brains.

— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

I dream myself into
moss wings and legs strong as mora

but in the morning I am clay again,
I am milk and dough and unhealed wound…

— Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné / “Mother Dreamwalker”

The United States has 4,400 directional miles of bike lanes, offering safety for anyone serious enough to risk it. The push for bike lanes began in the 1960s and grew in the ensuing decades. Theoretically, the lanes offer a carbon-neutral alternative to driving a car. If one chooses to bike instead of drive, it’s one fewer toxin-spewing death trap creating pollution and traffic congestion on the motorways. That sounds like a boon for the world, so naturally, the Trump administration wants to do away with it.

Condemning “DEI bike lanes”, the Trump administration has made a point of freezing or canceling related grants, referring to alternative transit options as unworkable in the United States, and suggesting removing the lanes that already exist.

— Dave Schilling / “Why is the Trump administration calling bike lanes ‘DEI’?” / The Guardian

I have never died
and never will.

Every time I split I say goodbye to my eternal self.

— Richard Grossman / “Amoeba”

What I’m Listening To:

When I figure out where I’m goin’
It’ll be too late to change
The course of where I think I’m goin’
Sometimes life can be so strange
All forgotten will be this

— Eels / “All Forgotten”

im a dream creep (redux)

im a dream creep having bug dinner / making errant presentations in the round / converting pathological crab kids in love to arthritic husks / i tease a sickle / a cudgel / all show of course / i aint no aggro-chaperone hypnotist / overnight lows will drop to antiquarian simmer / please wear protective eyewear+sling your colostomy bag over your shoulder for quick escape / im having bullet pie / as everyone these days insists on carrying guns / i insist on forearms / have a quiver full of them / they get me thru the lean times / im a maladjusted tassel in a 1960’s burlesque / please dont touch the asterisks

the sickness doyenne suggests: mindfulness based stress reduction+meditation / bittersweet nightshades / bathing in great excremental deposits / thanks / ill pass / ill start the purgatotrial convolutions instead / the yellow-green resonances like gnashing teeth 

im changing my insoles+increasing my fiber intake / im sorta hooked on imported guano / so maybe the occasional quaff / ill find a tendinitis sweetheart who spits monosyllabic love-tee-dums in basque / become a long-rapier foreman / hedge fund my way thru thee anthropocene / every dream creep for themselves

What I’m Reading:

That New World featured, too, a series of tragedies: an atomic arms race, changes to the earth’s climate, and, everywhere in the industrialized world, pollution, deforestation, and the eradication of wildlife species and habitats. “It is only within the moment of time represented by the twentieth century that one species — man — has acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world,” Rachel Carson wrote in 1962, “and it is only within the past twenty-five years that this power has achieved such magnitude that it endangers the whole earth and its life.”

During the Great Acceleration, at the dawn of the age of data, humanity glimpsed not only the possibility of the resurrection of the human as a machine but the possibility of humanity as a menace to the planet itself.

— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Epistemic Valve-u-later

Insouciant pill pusher — writer of scrips intended to send me to oblivion, to live thee life of the lotus eaters. Dr. Closer — shutter of the epistemic valve — he wants me to live the limpid life of the unsullied brain. Lamb-shackled. 

You translucent Mesmer of enthrallment… limn the cathode nimbus…

Then there was talk between my cousin J. and my friend D., and me about the film I’d recently seen  at a nightclub. J. was talking to a masculine woman, and I wanted to ask him about the lesbians in the film — with whom he was familiar.

J. jumped between me and D. — and J. tried to grab my crotch a number of times. I had to push him away.

You see I almost missed the train, but I managed to wave the engineer down by a series of complicated mirrors mounted on the cars. She stopped and I got in, only to find a bunch of young men from a military academy, which I intuited were students from Greenland — they were crowding the train.

I saw D. and sat next to him, and he told me how stoned he was, and all about the genetically modified strain he’d been smoking.

Then J. found us — D. and I were walking down a side street and we saw the shambles of a recording studio with all manner of murals on the ruined walls.

“Look it’s Muscle Shoals studio. How historic! This is where James Taylor recorded that classic album,” D. said.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” I said. “You might be thinking about Johnnie Taylor. I don’t think James Taylor recorded here.”

J. was throwing rocks at the few remaining walls— pristine white bricks with murals of steam locomotives on them.

“Anyway, we’re not in Alabama,” I said. “We seem to be in Greenland.”

“Ah, fuck, shut up!” J. said. “You’re all incongruity and anachronism spilling into other recurrent dream sequences. Or wait, was this all the same pandemic dream?”

The pungent smell of sulphur overtook us as the crusted ground gave out beneath us.

What I’m Reading:

Liberal democratic states make citizens; the Artificial State makes trolls.

— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Because the llama faltered

The alpaca tycoon • modulus repaired
Takes onto the hills • savage in sharpness
Critical focal acuity deglazed • warping
On shadows like soft monsters unloosed
In the monochrome desert

Avert your eyes as what you see is illusory
Circles of confusion sloughing silver
Hallides this way and that • unmoored crystals
Like planets in a rhumba line bound
For the event horizon

Bound to your pinned vision
Bound to your matted pelt

What I’m Reading:

We say in the grand scheme of things
as if there were one. We say that’s not how
 
the world works as if the world works.

— Maggie Smith / “In the Grand Scheme of Things”

Alcoholics by Appointment

Tectonic plates nimbly moving between the two of us — threads separated by upsetting intertitles.  I understood wanting — the fist unfoldings like investigating what I wanted from life.

A propensity for unrelated stretches of boredom respectively interspersed with terror and subterfuge — a disenchanted evening of critical extensions of ourselves.  

We’d escaped the stultifying and mundane confines of the American dream. We marveled at the nothingness in every direction. 

Alcoholics by appointment, short on doorways and long on crashes. What are you doing on the floor, you said.

I’m a new admirer of your ruthless cankles, I said. 

You remind me of that pendejo from the capitol flanks, you said.

I really have grown to dislike your flans, I said. They fill me with buttermilk inertia.

Your voice tips up two octaves, little mermaid-style.

I’ve grown to love your threats of leaving me —  the dynamic prompting an existential jump in my gonads. 

Our lives chatter across that echo divide — the poles galvanized — our fists — threats arising in unison strands, like unspooled dice, and popcorn ceilings estranged.  

Your brasses and my ramen noodles forever spiced with the peppery taste of hickory paste on fire. Here, though, the motifs relate loosely on symbolic resonances of iterative knock-knock logic. 

I’ll forge your signature on my birth certificate, despite your roundabout glares and slight variations of tonal displeasure.

We’ve grown accustomed to get what we deserve.

What I’m Reading:

Love that is dead and buried, yesterday
Out of his grave rose up before my face,
No recognition in his look, no trace
Of memory in his eyes dust-dimmed and grey.

— Christina Rossetti / “Love Lies Bleeding”

What are Fish Gills to Fishers of Men?

At a remove, in a gesture, a part of a thing
Representing the whole.
What are ambivalences of texts?
Polyvalencies in readings?
What flows from this desire
To macerate the pulp of life
Into a sodden discourse—
An echolalia?
The fishers of men as hirsute
Suitors unhinging Penelope’s loom—
What is that? An arrow?
I am arrow proof,
Soothsayer approved,
Trodden by legions of anonymous
Men with angular intent.
Note this now—
I pique in wolf-like rages
Deep into the night.
I aim at precision / incision—
Beware.

What I’m Reading:

The church has never been asked to explain anything, our specialty, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralization of the overly curious mind through faith…

— Jose Saramago / Death with Interruptions

determinism2 (squared)

the lifetime of a sprat
especially a gourmet sprat
in the baltic waters off latvia
what to say?
short? spry? sharp?
a fishy kind of happy life?
don’t ask
don’t know
once netted
how tasty

What I’m Reading:

A group of migrants
sewed their mouths shut

at the border because their voices
fell through a hole
in the sky.

— Brent Ameneyro / “As the Fog Starts Burning Away”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

It turns out you can kill the earth,
Crack it open like an egg.
It turns out you can murder the sea,
Poison your own children
Without even thinking about it.

— Michael Sims / “Who Will Tell Them?”

Tens of millions of people in Indonesia are now suffering in swathes of thick smoke caused by “slash and burn” agriculture and exacerbated by the hot conditions. In India, ground-level ozone from vehicle fumes and industry has emerged as the key summer threat, while outside its megacities there have been protests in areas affected by toxic coal dust. Across the northern hemisphere this summer, wildfires driven by the climate crisis have spread poor air across continents – already, 1.5 million people globally die every year from the impacts of wildfire smoke.

— Fiona Harvey / “Air pollution affects us all, but it’s not inescapable – there is a way we can breathe easier” / Down to Earth

We waved them off long ago. So why
Do they who are no longer here
Still wave to us? The time to sow
Approaches, and the land awaits seeds
As the wind waits for weeds . . .

— Dimitri Psurtsev / “[We waved them off long ago. So why]”

Half the continent was sand at this point. Deserts all over the world, growing, moving. Nothing you could do about it. But okay, sure, send the intern out to push the sand around. She pushed one way, the sand pushed another, and that is perhaps not so different from most jobs since the beginning of the world.

— Deb Olin Unferth / Earth 7

My God, what is that shrieking? The man doesn’t work here,
he says. Reconcile yourself to wait in the darkness.
What did I think spiritual desert meant? Surely not that

lump of nothing I was an hour ago on the couch, wielding
the remote, spooning mango sorbet out of a container.
It should feel, I explain to the self-checkout screen

(how did I get here?), punching in my customer number,
more important.

— Donna Masini / “Midnight in the Pain-Relief Aisle of CVS Thinking About “The Cloud of Unknowing”

You may not have felt it, but the earth beneath our feet is getting twitchier, and global heating is to blame. As temperatures surge and climate breakdown accelerates, interactions between climate and geology are becoming ever more apparent – as marked by the recent horrific events in Nepal and Tibet. We still have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the idea that a changing climate can impact what scientists call the geosphere, but the evidence has long been incontestable.

— Bill McGuire / “THE NEPAL AND TIBET FLOOD IS A WARNING: Melting snow and ice will bring more disasters around the world” / Cool Earth, on Substack

Here, we’re bodily in pause mode,
sluggish Louisiana mud.

The wage floor’s—$7.25
folks grind all day, yet barely thrive.

We’re even told Russia’s to blame
if you can believe that (we don’t).

— Rodrigo Toscano / “Poets of Shenzhen”

What I’m Listening To:

I can’t keep googling
To prove that’s not going to happen
Who tore my skin and planted these seeds
I pick and pull but all I see are weeds, weeds, weeds
I’m a liar

— Mhaol / “Scam Manifesto”

Asperity & Impermancence

Excited sheep burning at the horizon line.

We lord over the flame thrower, and we’re looking forward to seeing you!

All wetness faraway. 

A fine life lies ahead of you — so sign up for those knife throwing and axe building courses — the apocalypse will soon be post-.

Mere chagrin for thee Ashes. After a sunrise filled with explosions, expansions, asbestos pullovers, and human cookeries (where custom allows). 

We’re in the thick of the crypto cash-flow. At the precipice of being quashed by rogue AI agency. What ambitious proto-programmers are we.

We’re on the countdown clock to post-post oblivion, so rack (those faraway eyes) out of focus, yawn, and take a nap.

Contrition is an unknown meme in the home of the brave — asperity and impermanence is upon us.

Our knives are dulled. Our chosen hucksters and clowns lead us to perdition. Fear rules the day. We’re easy pickings for synthetic intelligence.

We have created and welcomed our executioner. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer, more deserving, animal (as we).

In retrospect, the sheep were lucky.

What I’m Reading:

Cyclists in Boston, Massachusetts reported 2,136 vehicles parked in bike lanes during August alone.

The figure comes from Bike Bureau, a free app that lets riders document a blocked lane by pointing a phone camera at the vehicle. It captures the photo, reads the license plate and files the location in about three seconds, blurring faces and the plates of non-offending cars before anything uploads.

The count started at 54 reports on August 2 and reached 2,136 by the 31st, covering Boston and neighboring Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline. Bike Bureau published the month as an animated map, with every reported vehicle appearing where it was logged until the map all but disappears under parked cars.

— BikePush / Facebook post

A Savage Republic

A negative feedback loop. Petroglyphs and door flips. Petrichor — a savage feedback loop — a savage republic. Put out the fire.

Frying in its own fat. Permafrost melting. The warming leading to fire. Fire and friars with intention — without compunction — never knowing regret. 

All portent from here. The dark briars thick with illness.

Without agency — a magnificent disaster — falling and implicated. Smothering never staying. Praying without saying a thing. Prattling.

Sneak a chunk up your pant leg — white hot and abrupt. A life of impunity ends abruptly on a moonless dirt road. This country is vast and vacuous.

What I’m Reading:

I set out in the blue American
night, this stupid sparkler
raised in my fist. Electroshocked
dandelion. Smoke columns
over the sock factory giving the moon
that Inness blur. No we’re not
falling. Things are just floating back
where they belong.

— Ocean Vuong / “Independence Day”