Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.

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

Bad men become trees.
The earth forgives them, as do I. They begin
to give. The wicked also dream
of love. They know darkness overhead
means night before and night behind, yet drops
of starlight have shot through this earth’s evening;
overhead, gingkoes have flared
against sun.

— Medha Singh / “Another Life”

The rate of global warming has surged since 2015 and is now nearly double what it was in the 1970s, according to a new study. That’s faster than some other estimates, but the authors say their analysis captures a more accurate picture because it accounts for the effects of natural factors such as the El Niño weather pattern.

— Flora Graham / “Climate change is speeding up” / Nature Briefing

Water becomes water’s shape in the water, inside the machine we become
the image of the machine, the dusk becomes the machine’s dusk,
in piercing we are pierced by the machine, we must use
a defective good to prove we are defective goods

— Zheng Xiaoqiong / “Water Becomes Water”

Time marches on, but literary discourse is eternal. The last week has seen a revival of the “should aspiring fiction writers actually read books?” debate. I won’t bother bothering you with the origins or the arguments. Obviously, good artists study their mediums. They also tend to enjoy the art forms they spend their lives working with. Why would you want to write books if you don’t like books? Or make music if you dislike music? Practice and study are the two ways to improve in any field. Everyone knows this, which is why I kind of love this discourse. It’s so absurd that it loops around from inanity to insanity.

— Lincoln Michel / “What Not Reading Does to Your Writing: More thoughts on ‘TV brain prose’ and why reading is, yes, useful for your writing” / Substack

News, a tragedy—so easily ours—
already breaking as I crack my eggs. Rage and prayers, rage and prayers, a boon
for the tycoon’s fear-campaign, clicks for the zillionaire buying up the moon.
Ad, ad, an AI figment, someone squawking, someone hawking—hours
consumed, of this only life, and who is left in the garden, who is tending the flowers?

— Leila Chatti / “The World Is Too Much With Us”

The wonder and horror for climate is that the great majority of people on Earth support climate action. The obstacles are not technological. They’re political. The fossil-fuel industry and the rich and powerful and governmental figures who either are or serve the fossil-fuel industry are what’s holding us back. So the wonder and horror exist side by side. You can be thrilled by all the things that are happening and horrified by all the things that should be happening but aren’t. Everything we can save is worth saving. Everything we can do is worth doing. We’ve already lost a lot, but we don’t have to lose everything. We don’t have to surrender.

— Rebecca Solnit, to Devin Oktar Yalkin / “Rebecca Solnit Says the Left’s Next Hero Is Already Here” / New York Times

What I’m Listening To:

Industrial waste never goes out of taste
In the Red Desert, the future is real
Fingered in the fog
Let’s pretend there’s an epilogue
Let the world burn
Feel your coin flames go higher
Stock market buy, it’s a black out
Stand by AI, AI, AI

— Kim Gordon / “Black Out”

What I’m Reading:

After missiles damaged oil depots and refineries this week, Iran’s capital Tehran has been blanketed by pollutant-laden ‘black rain’. Experts say that this rain probably contains both soot, which can damage people’s lungs and eyes, and cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and toluene, released by the burning of oil-refining byproducts. The pollutants could be dispersed in the air if there are no new fires, says atmospheric chemist Gabriel da Silva. But Tehran’s position in the Alborz mountain range can lead to temperature inversions, a meteorological phenomenon that traps polluted air masses. Rain could also disperse the chemicals, but that could lead to contamination in soil and waterways, da Silva says.

— Jacob Smith / “The consequences of ‘black rain’ in Tehran” / Nature Briefing

Phantom

The amplitude of echoes
Function like a phantom limb

Glucose seeps into the cells
Smell of white gas and charcoal

A swale once full of shoulder depth snow
Did you know Frazil are ice crystals
Formed in turbulent water, as in swift
Streams or rough seas?

Paradise? This isn’t paradise, son
You’ve cracked a tooth

The world doesn’t need anymore people
No further congestion or metal grates

I’ve apologized for the Spanish Inquisition
You can purchase a guayabera made in China

Why did she pop up in a search for sorghum?
Her voice is a natural vibrato

Now you’ll have to get by on your own.

What I’m Reading:

Peace is      
outworn;
it’s chaos that feeds the algorithm, no likes for the actual, the tangible.

— Leila Chatti / “The World Is Too Much With Us”

Aeonian or Aeolian? (redux)

She mistook her aeonian harp for her aeolian harp. She mistook her bemusement for amusement. Her confoundment for profoundment and her conclusion for inclusion. Nothing seemed to be what it needed to be and her mind kept elapsing and prolapsing into a crater like protrusion into the black hole nimbus that was her brain. From now on nothing would be what it should or sound like its meaning; rather things would be tinged in a greenish patina and sound like retinal shrieks of retinues and concubine purrs. Nothing like what she was accustomed to. She would have to reeducate herself in the ways of wares and the forms of norms. Much would be ochre now, because there was no sense in being saffron about it. At least that’s what the older boys meant, or what she thought they meant, when they claimed she was immature. Now was the time for ripening. The moment was upon her. Now is the only thing that’s real. And Cramps be damned!

What I’m Reading:

I’m writing love on a serviette
as mourners gather on a mound
for the disgraced dead, still
in grave-clothes underfoot—
suddenly, slow pianos sing
in air, the shifting earth
moving its cadavers to an ache
in the ocean.

— Medha Singh / “Another Life”

smelting your dreams

in the dream there was the tropical curvature
of the benevolent sunshine earth

the racked focus out of the blistering ice
to an armature 200 feet up in the air

there, a bay
beyond that, forsaken whelks
& pernurious periwinkles paragliding
into the breeze-sibilant palm fronds
quaking & shaking their nuts-coco
in profligate ways

in the dream there’s a big reunion
& no one comes

there’s a moment of telescoping horrors
hours of dark grays, smoke, black

the hypnopompic nightmarish
crepuscular — the tang of oil in the air
thick black raindrops

avuncular sam is at work again
smelting your dreams —
castrating —
then rendering human fat

the machine that never sleeps
coming to a dream near you

What I’m Reading:

It’s raining hard today.
The day is more like night,
the spring is more like fall,
and in the yard a driving wind lays waste
to the little tree that, seeming not to, stands
steady and firm

— Umberto Saba / “The Little Tree”

The Mandy Brush (redux)

He bent down to rinse the toothpaste out of his mouth and his left side cramped up. The cramp was the most severe pain he’d felt in his life. The sensation seemed like a vise tightening on his left rib cage and reticulating down to his hip.

He fell and the toothbrush lodged in his throat. And what happened next he thought ungodly — the Barry Manilow song “Mandy” began to loop in his head: “Oh, Mandy, You came and you gave without taking, and I need you today, oh Mandy…”

What the fuck have I done, god? Please don’t let me die with this goddamned song in my head…

“…but I sent you away, oh Mandy
well you kissed me and stopped me from shaking…”

Then he remembered his Nietzche: god is dead… god remains dead… and we have killed him…”

“…but I sent you away, oh Mandy
you kissed me and stopped me from shaking
and I need you…”

This is awful, he rasped with his agonal breath.

What I’m Reading:

Iran’s people were facing a horrible shortage of water before the war began. If we are destroying desalination plants and setting fire to Teheran we are committing unfathomable crimes.

— Timothy Snyder / Bluesky post

What I’m Reading:

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Okay I won’t use the word Jewish
And I won’t use the word Zionist
And I won’t use the word genocide
And I won’t use the word apartheid
And I won’t use the word settler
And I won’t use the word colony
And I won’t use the word killed
And I won’t use the word watermelon
And I won’t use the word Palestine
And I won’t use the word resistance

— Omar Sakr / “Algo in the genocide”

A war happening in secret means the secret / is happening means the bag of rice / falls from an American chopper / in a storm of sand. / The bag rips apart. / The grains disperse to the floor.

— Mei Der Vang / “One Nation under Shadow Warfare” / Primordial 

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.

— Ernest Hemingway / By-Line: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades

. . . But from the inside
this life feels enormous, unlimited

by the self—by selfness—
vaster even than the sparkling

dark it can’t be seen from.

— Maggie Smith / “This human life”

I mean, normal is a type of madness, isn’t it? I think it’s just that the only madness society allows is called normal.

— Sayaka Murata / Life Ceremony

When I step naked into my shower,
I find, staring down at me,
its eight dark eyes peering over
the silver lip of the sprayer, a tarantula
the size of a bar of soap.

— AE Hines / “Peace Treaty”

What are we left with at the end?
A murdered dictionary and field
After silent field of unmarked graves.

— Omar Sakr / “Algo in the genocide”

What I’m Listening To:

I’m gonna write what I know
Kick around on the big brown
So the lies I tell
Send me up, and I can’t get down
I’m wearing big grass to town
I rip myself on
I rip myself off

— Aldous Harding / “One Stop”

What I’m Reading:

In the beginning, things appear. Writing is a defiant gesture we’ve long since gotten used to: where there was nothing, somebody put something, and now everybody sees it.

— Álvaro Enrigue / Now I Surrender

The Simplex Perplex Complex

S. spends his last day on earth in this manner…

I’m curious. How did you get here? According to my records you have a Pontiac station wagon with exterior wood panels on the doors, and yet you say God is in your kitchen filching the gas and feeding the mice. That’s not a very Pontiac sort of attitude. You seem more like a Plymouth Duster dude to me. What gives?

Um, how can I say this… I eat junk mail for second breakfast after feasting on broken communion wafers for first.

First?

First breakfast, that is, you should try it—fortified with savior nuggets at the processing plant. Intrinsic. Expensive. Totally formulated with cosmo dust.

A flash and a gash and the trash is ours …

Have you listened to Able Noise, circa 2024, and felt like eviscerating yourself?

Why no? Is it tasty and chock full of aleatoric detritus? Are there tempo changes? Dizzying repetitions rendering one nauseated?

You nauseous?

I mean nautical.

Another flash. The smell of tar presses down on them. They’re unable to take full breaths. They spasm.

A disembodied voice thunders:

WHICH ONE OF YOU DESECRATED THE LEMONADE?

Silence lingers like a damp cramp bandage. The station wagon hums beyond their eyes, hardwood panels warping under theological stress. S. coughs up a receipt. The other one folds into an elbow, murmuring rebate codes in tongues — Old Testament and spam-filtered tongues.

The air throbs with mildew and 8-bit choirs. In the rafters, God’s mouse army patterns the dust into ellipses. Meaning is declared optional.

I just wanted directions to the interstate, S. says, his jaw locked like a psalm. The disembodied voice hisses static, maybe laughter, maybe a dial-up modem dying heroically.

Proceed east until the infomercials thin, it says. Then climb the guardrail and wait for daylight to apologize.

In the corner, a half-eaten communion wafer clicks like a metronome. S. remembers something about Able Noise and nausea and decides to rename his body The Plymouth of Untranslatable Sounds.

S. drives off, or so he thinks, except the road is now an unspooling VHS of his past tense. The sky buzzes like an unplugged amp. Exit signs offer absolution in exchange for mileage.

The Pontiac’s wood panels pulse—sap bleeding backward through grain, memory reversing into arbor. God, or a gas leak impersonating Him, leans from the ashtray to whisper an ambient farewell.

You’ve been misfiled, He says, voice paper-thin. Take comfort. The archive deletes itself nightly.

S. nods, the Duster persona finally shedding like onion skin, and he steers straight into the static, where the mice, bloated with gasoline grace, conduct their tiny masses then disappear.

S. is done. He is now past tense. Past sense. Gone.

What I’m Reading:

I’ve wanted to ask for a long time: what it is like for you on

     that side of war?

it seems it’s so warm there that the snow turns to milk

and a boy with a violin stands there all year in a t-shirt

and doves fly higher than the rainbow

— Anna Malihon / “[I’ve wanted to ask for a long time…]”