shallow accidents folly — you evoke that old eggshell expressionism imaginary warpaint on the first indream ashtray — phlegmy black and carbuncular
there follows a montage of young sombreros and the play of wasteland hellscape japes we live hostage — unmoored — upon this drift quit before you hit your stride twenty-four knuckle homonculus aping president gas derangement
fitness passing as finesse your fellowship hairs tangle
What I’m Reading:
Hug me, mother of noise. Find me a hiding place. I am afraid of my voice. I do not like my face.
I have no idea what she says, or what tongue she speaks. She doesn’t speak English or Spanish, and that’s all I can muster. I haven’t the slightest idea of what she is up to, out in this perpetual gloom. But she keeps saying: “I dag ar det tisdag, I dag ar det tisdag, I dag ar det tisdag…”
I must have an odd look on my face because her lower lip quivers and her eyes well up. I don’t know what I can do for her. I offer shelter. She doesn’t understand, just repeats the same thing. I don’t know how to help. I want to help. What is she, ten or eleven years-old? How can she be out here alone?
So I say “yes!” and give her a big old bear hug.
What else is there to do in this hard-dead world? We once contented ourselves with keeping our families safe and near. Those that were content, maybe had a close circle of friends (some circles were larger than others, some were merely small frayed arcs) — maybe we tithed and volunteered to read or feed others more needy — for some this seemed enough.
But we don’t concern ourselves with the wider world anymore. Is there a world anymore? We’re safe here. It’s all waste out there.
She doesn’t battle this bear hug and she stops speaking. I squeeze to give comfort. She evanesces. Atom by atom all that is left is air.
I’m left at the shelter doorway looking like I’m hugging myself — that is, if anyone were there to look. Who would, who could, in this darkness? I’m alone, wondering why I don’t do this more often. Hug myself.
I go back into the shelter and down the stairs to the writing room. I’m down to a ream of paper, a handful of pens, and two candles… but I must compose some lines…
I.
Did I hear it in a dream? Or is it a long-distant memory? I dag är det tisdag…
A drooping of the eyelids in a sleepless Moment As you fight the sweep Of darkness Upon you. Only the whispered Supplication From the darkest corner Of childhood Releases you from penury. Peaceful Sleep never comes.
II.
I condone what you done…
In the wimple sun I slapped away the wattle arm Of the man that bred Me to a hardened son.
I agree with your version Of sublime reparation.
I condone what you done…
III.
Condone / Condemn
I dag är det tisdag…
What I’m Reading:
There’s something sick in the wind, a warm stupor of venom and insects. A curse creeping out of the devastated lands. We can feel the vibration of something destructive coming into being.
It is a time of being sorted by skin and hair, by mother tongue, as being from here or there, as pepper spray fills in the air until the whole city stinks of it, and the men who arrived in rented cars with out-of-state plates, with faces covered, begin their hunt for carpenters, house maids, dish washers, kindergarten kids, for anyone who, to them, looks like they aren’t from here. They’ll pull you through the window of your car. They will not tell you who they are, who is in command.
— Carolyn Forché / “On Living in the Hour of Cities Under Siege”
The stakes are existential. And that is because, rightly understood, our actual human “attention” – the thing the frackers want, in the form of our eyes on their screens – is nothing less than our ability to care, our ability to think, our ability to give our minds, time and senses to ourselves, the world and each other. To commodify that is to commodify our very beings. The problem isn’t “phones”, and it isn’t “social media”. The problem is human fracking, a world-spanning land-grab into human consciousness – which big tech is treating as a vast, unclaimed territory, ripe for sacking and empire.
— Friends of Attention / “How can we defend ourselves from the new plague of ‘human fracking’?” / The Guardian
In the mist I see long lines of people walking death walks to slave ships Black footprints on cathedrals and monuments of the city
— Jason Allen-Paissant / “Black Walking”
“I worry more about everything we absorb without realizing we’re even doing it,” she said. “The way misinformation colonizes us.” . . . Her generation didn’t like their consumer data being collected. But she wasn’t convinced it was the manipulations of companies and interest groups that alarmed them—more the sneaking suspicion that, one of these days, Jeff Bezos might decide to interest himself in their vibrator-buying habits.
— Lydia Millet / “Tourist” / Atavists
I’d like to see the ocean lap against a glacier before the end. I’d like to see the northern
lights. I’d like to watch effigies of foul men burn in the desert. I’d like to be there, reel there, at the end. — Amy M. Alvarez / “Burn Out”
… only those safe from fascism and its practices are likely to think that there might be a benefit in exchanging ideas with fascists. What for such a privileged group is a matter of a potentially productive difference in opinion is, for many of us, a matter of basic survival. The essential quality of fascism (and its attendant racism) is that it kills people and destroys their lives—and it does so because it openly aims so.
— Aleksandar Hemon / “Fascism is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight” / lithub.com
This is what should be said to the coming cities: you’ll need gas masks, goggles, armbands, milk for your eyes, the name of someone who will search if you disappear. When the time comes, take in anyone who needs to hide, bring pots of food to front lines everywhere, hot soup and cocoa, a roast potato to warm the hands. When the time comes, listen to the whistles, the car horns, the cries in the air.
— Carolyn Foché / “On Living in the Hour of Cities Under Siege”
What I’m Listening To:
When they came for the immigrants I got in their face When they came for the refugees I got in their face When they came for the five-year-olds I got in their face When they came to my neighbourhood I just got in their face They use tear gas and pepper spray Against our whistles and our phones But in this city of heroes We will protect our home
You fall in love with somebody when you’re twenty-six, and you see them in all kinds of different lights and according to their potential, but after years and years of marriage and shared parenting and all the other shared decisions you have to make just to get through the days, you accumulate a lot of data about that person that after a while just seems… more or less accurate. If you continue to have illusions, that’s your fault. So if you stay married it’s because you’ve accepted that this is what they’re like, and what your life with them is like, and you stop expecting them to do or give you things you know perfectly well they’re unlikely to do or give you. It’s like being a Knicks fan.
Swallow simple propaganda pills to assuage your inner worry warts and swagger the nation — bound and gagged.
I felt the blister in your bluster — a boil lanced and gushed.
I heard the snivel in your snideness — the timbre of malice in that tone.
I smelled the fear in your denouncements — pitiable gutter-mouthed guttersnipe in your dénouement rags.
A visual pestilence follows where you point your finger — a rasp and a gasp and the nation is ours — procedural domes fracked. Teapot petulance our nation’s saving grace.
You sextant to diminishing returns on a foundering dory — flummoxed by flounder thoughts on a mid-winter Friday.
Your fundamental decorum foundationally fucked where like-minded manhoods finger themselves rotten.
You slurp your kitten soup with femur spoons — you delegate ghoul, you!
Thanks for the carbuncle memories and sophist suppurations. W’shall never forget thee.
What I’m Reading:
The truth is a sphere. We never see it whole, in its entirety. It slips down our throats, through our thoughts . . . The truth is changeable, it contracts, implodes, it’s powerful like a bullet. And it can be lethal . . . The truth, a sphere that also contains within it a lie that spins at a different rhythm, like a cog that seems broken, unnecessary, but is vital to the mechanism’s functioning. The challenge is finding the lie within the sphere.
This is a life on this side of the globe — existence in a parallel hemisphere.
Here the auroras don’t shimmer so brightly — we don’t see them at all.
Here the men in long coats use truncheons and gas — cudgel as pacification.
Here our custom is the manifest destiny of consumption — we shit where we eat.
Here we’re mesmerized by bright shiny objects — we are eagles with bowerbird brains.
Here we were flawed from inception and bent to the will of capital — we repeat our behaviors and expect a different result. Insane in the membrane.
This is repetition compulsion American style — truer than the red, white and blue, ooo, ooo, ooo!
How goes it with you?
What I’m Reading:
It has often been said, in the twenty-first century and in earlier centuries, too, that Americans lack a shared past and that, built on a cracked foundation, the Republic is crumbling. Part of this argument has to do with ancestry: Americans are descended from conquerors and from the conquered, from people held as slaves and from the people who held them, from the Union and from the Confederacy, from Protestants and from Jews, from Muslims and from Catholics, and from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. Sometimes, in American history—in nearly all national histories—one person’s villain is another’s hero. But part of this argument has to do with ideology: the United States is founded on a set of ideas, but Americans have become so divided that they no longer agree, if they ever did, about what those ideas are, or were.
— Jill Lepore / These Truths: A History of the United States
wayward talk of chile and ecuador, the prime stops on the silk road, techniques of the boustrophedon, raging poppy fields + too much hash…
the one-upmanship: sharp…
how we’ve lived through seven of the top twelve historic snowstorms in boston over the last 22 years…
a peripatetic call and response about the tang + other merits of uzbeki beer + uruguayan women, the obscurity of radiohead + the future is m(h)aol + have u listened to attachment styles?…
the timbre maudlin, the umka a perfect puff…
declamations of wanderlust in the south, remaking the ruins of venezuela in the image of argentina, death by clear cutting rainforest, petrodollars are the ruination…
somehow the talk turns to czars…
the plov congeals in its oil…
meandering laments of the rarity of this ritual, forecasts + promises to do this more often, something in their voices belies that certainty…
the crash of a kazan clanging a death roll in the kitchen…
peregrinations of assiduous maths—parsing a $109 bill 3 ways to the tenth of a cent, then a drunken 3 card pile up on a plastic credit card rectangle…
yes, let’s, more often…
a terminal point chicken is beheaded in the alley…
image: the boston globe
What I’m Reading:
In the 1960s, it was possible to attend a four-year college debt-free but impossible to purchase a flat-screen television. By the 2020s, the reality was close to the reverse.
Bikeless days are a bummer. They do happen. Rain drowns the city, or snow dumps down. You have appointments to keep, and you have to show up looking more presentable than you would after an eighty-block bike ride. Maybe your bicycle is in the shop. Maybe your bicycle has been stolen. When you’re used to traveling by bike, the condition of bikelessness is disorienting and debilitating.
— Jody Rosen / Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle
Everything is fine: a means to endure news cycles, historic cycles, menstrual
cycles. This is walking home after work, crawling into bed naked. Night, quiet with
snow. I am an empty bank account. I am a pylon glowing in the dark. I am a primal scream. I am not here.
— Amy M. Alvarez / “Burn Out”
The fossil fuel industry is essentially running the United States government from the inside. It’s a desperate industry. They know that clean renewable energy is cheaper. They know that they only compete by virtue of massive subsidies from being allowed to pollute for free, which nobody should be allowed to do. And they prop all of that up with enormous amounts of political corruption and leverage and a huge climate denial fraud campaign.
— Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, to Akshat Rathi, Oscar Boyd, and Jennifer A Dlouhy / “Sheldon Whitehouse on How to Confront ‘Fossil Fuel Monsters’ in the US” / Bloomberg News
She sings “America the Beautiful.” She sings: From sea to every goddamn American sea. I walk away but her song follows me, carried on by some aura I can’t outrun.
— Natalie Scenters-Zapico / “Aura”
Last year has been confirmed as the third-warmest year on record by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and US research organization Berkeley Earth — despite the return of cooling La Niña weather phenomenon. “The warming spike observed from 2023-2025 has been extreme, and suggests an acceleration in the rate of the Earth’s warming,” said Berkeley Earth in its report. Burning fossil fuels remains the main cause, but the situation is probably being made worse by hot seas and changes in cloud patterns caused by warming, and (ironically) the cleaning up of sun-shading air pollution.
— Jacob Smith / “ 2025 shows Earth is getting hotter, faster” / Nature Briefing
On the road home the tide is rising.
Riding the road-tide is dangerous
but it’s not safe to stand still.
Hang on the verge & you drown.
— Marie Ponsot / “ Rain All Night, Paris”
But research increasingly suggests that reading may be more powerful than we realize. In fact, doing so regularly has been linked to lower stress, stronger memory, protection against cognitive decline and dementia, and even a longer life.
— Daryl Austin / “Reading books can help you live longer—here’s how” / National Geographic
A California of snow and the surprise Of illness. I throned myself in the white Noise of its silence and watched as the world Fell away. All the silver flickerings of possibility Going out like the sound of horse hooves Clicking into the distance. It is almost the end Of the world.
— Cynthia Cruz / “January”
What I’m Listening To:
Hate speech Climate change They/them Tile drainage Trauma Privilege Uterus
thee istsfor manity reader 