I took umbrage at the penumbra— The darkling darkening of my mood— Was it the reddening super harvest moon? (Its waxing moony-moony face: jejune) Or was it a flaring sunspot’s craquelure of quietude? Or was it the plague? Or the fascist wave? Or the tactless foot? Of the biomass soot? Or the king tide poot? Or was it the phallic gun-shaped state I was in?
What I’m Reading:
A new report suggests that it might be possible to launch a swarm of satellites that reflect sunlight away from the planet to cool the global temperatures in as few as 20-40 years. The timeline of such a ‘planetary sunshade’ would depend on the rate at which heavy-lift rockets that could carry the materials into deep space are developed, the report says. A lot of people think this idea is “just fantasy”, says space-systems engineer Chantal Cappelletti. But the falling cost of space launches has made the prospect of space-based solar geoengineering seem more realistic.
— Jacob Smith / “A plan to shade the Earth from space” / Nature Briefing
Traveling sorts her memories. Driving to Miami sharpens her father’s voice—like acid catalyzing in her ears, boring a ragged chute to her amygdala— simultaneously black-holing her backward and shooting her into an uncertain future full of Get to Know Jesus and Get Your Guns & Ammo Here billboards. She fights. She flees from all her ghosts. She barrels south—under the heat dome.
Tobacco leaves yellow—corn browns & withers in her wake.
What I’m Reading:
It’s too rouge, the ratio unto death, to lure the drones—a dizzy chain of bees— to drown themselves with any luck in one of Sappho’s tantrums on the page.
paths unfurl about me roads squelch innumerable trails pulsate untrammeled transits reticulate outward
yet i list in the doldrums adrift in the eye
every direction untrodden
What I’m Reading:
Last week, I started this exercise routine to calm me, help me control my blood pressure, weight, hope for the future. Today, I’m suing myself for intentional infliction of emotional distress.
— Ace Boggess / “Are You Worried About a Breakdown?”
The image: a chipped tooth, a bloody mouth, a spray of bloody saliva that fans out onto your date’s white dress shirt. The instant that nervous smile withers on her face. That is my image, my few words for the day. Because I write everyday.
•••
II. dazzled bear armistice
an avant-garde plateful / a dazzled bear armistice / computers full of soybean gas screaming soylentgreen is people / a rubber stamped law / vortex concubines exploring the playtime quartos of lime habits as sculptural embargo
stay at home yogis falter / writing becomes authorless if the author is removed as a potential safety issue / welcome to the unique kitchen of cinematic spasms / shut down freedom and replace it with equivalencies of harsh aleatoric frequencies / lap dissolve / we’re expanding your freedoms to include briar fingertips in runny egg yolks / jump cuts / simmer your moral panic on the back burner / splice here / call me / never
•••
III. Nothing Moves, Nothing Glitters
Imagine you’re on the streets of a yellow-down blown downtown. The rat’s nest smell of putrefaction—no one about, but you and the moles. Nothing moves, nothing glitters. There are canyons and spans of unused sound for the taking—for the making. There are mounds of round bodies, gray and oracular, frozen in time. Nothing moves, nothing glitters. There are cracked trees on the outskirts, brittle and bastioned—grasping at air—cragged in time. Monticules of spent cartridges rusted and dull. Nothing moves, nothing glitters. A thickness in the atmosphere—a metallic tang on your tongue. Shards of bones and jawless skulls stretch from here to the pale hills. You stay. You like quiet. Nothing moves, nothing glitters.
What I’m Reading:
Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic filed papers Monday for what could be the biggest initial public offering of stock ever even as its top executive warns that advanced AI could pose an existential threat to humanity.
The filing sets up the San Francisco company for a Wall Street debut next month, potentially eclipsing the SpaceX initial public offering in June that raised a record $86 billion.
— Barbara Ortutay and Bernard Condon / “Anthropic files for potentially the biggest IPO ever even as CEO warns of risk to humanity from AI” / AP News
at the museum of digest feminism Boccaccio quotes have been stricken thru the time to digress was then— sometime in the 14th century wrought in yersinia pestis yellow and arte della lana blue— centuries before its gabardine inception such foul humors seep thru the crack in Boccaccio’s wall the identifying placard in the shape of a carmine-limned lanced buboe “Meanwhile, we’re drinking our four-dollar lattes and improving our bodies. The capitalist world has sold us all on…” so much depends on a red transliteration glazed with testosterone rage beside the white klan hood “Sod it, let’s see what comes out! ¡mierda! postmodern deconstructed construction”
What I’m Reading:
The whole story of it is that I didn’t know the hole was there. I fell in, blinking. The stars made their usual percussion. I discovered Franz in the hole, and to my delight, he was thirsty. He wanted milk. A whole carton of it. Every orifice in my body wanted to give it to him, but I couldn’t. The milk had run away with its glass.
It has become difficult to write dystopias, fantasy, or any form of literature without sounding naive
— Debbie Urbanski / “Feed”
The worst outcome of this would be the coming to power of an extreme, right-wing, conspiratorial, anti-immigrant, anti-European, anti-NATO, anti-the-alliance-of-democracy government. We already have something like that in the U.S. That’s a depressing thought.
— Adam Gopnik / “Adam Gopnik on the Protests in France” / The New YorkerDaily
Before you died I dreamed of cocktail parties in your Harlem apartment where you’d bring all our dead kin back to life, for me! I was old enough to drink with you, to wear a cocktail dress. Like the best movies, the dream was black and white, except for my grandmother’s lipstick, which was red.
— Elizabeth Alexander / “After”
The Armenian capital Yerevan is chock-a-block right now with officials, scientists and environmentalists from all over the world gathering for Cop17. Everyone is here to try to rescue a historic deal to end the destruction of nature.
The pressure is on. Targets set for 2030 are woefully off track, and the nearly 200 countries present need to agree on a plan to speed things up. All this is happening at a time when national budgets are tight and leaders are distracted by conflict, protests and the global energy crisis.
— Rebecca Ratcliffe / “At Cop17, the pressure is on to rescue a deal that could end the destruction of nature” / Down to Earth
One of these mornings we’ll get up and the weather will be much different and much worse. We will be momentarily
annoyed. We will not for one moment be alarmed. We understand how the universe works because we think it’s complicated.
— John Godfrey / “On the Elements”
In a small preliminary study, women who received 15 micrograms of the psychedelic drug LSD focused for longer periods and responded faster to a stimulus than did those who were given a placebo. This effect was not observed for male participants.
— Gemma Conroy / “Microdosing LSD shows some cognitive benefits — but only for women” / Nature
“Value, remember,” she continued, “is created in that liminal space between text and reader—the end value being proportional to the amount of readers. By which I mean: the more readers, the more value. I’m not only talking financial value here, though finances are naturally contained in this definition. Let’s include cultural value as well. Historical value. Human value.” She tossed my manuscript into the bin beneath her desk. “I mean, I do like it. I like what you wrote. You’re asking such interesting questions, like: Do we have a responsibility to feel discomfort when the world is ending? But there’s a better way to engage with a question like that, a way that doesn’t require us to be so fucking gloomy.”
— Debbie Urbanski / “The Open Marketplace of the End Times”
What I’m Listening To:
With too many thoughts She learned to play her tambourine Really mean
The superintendent of state struggling to meet winter, raising a circle out of oblongs, was struck to the head with future dread. Bread returned to its silent pile, but rarely with as much gravitas as in Dusks of the Illiberal Liberal Empire. This film is disintegrating in its own ancient nitrate content — patiently losing narrative from its spliced frames.
Imagine a leader at an icy seaside brothel testing flumes and ratcheting loose crampons — independent clauses flying this way and that. Imagine his speech — his friable ideas — crumbling in the wake of his hubris.
Insert cracking rivers, dust-storming praries, swamping of coasts here.
His country grieving, begging to check his speeches and seeking penance for his cowardice. Nary a redemptive arc in sight. Insight to nothing. Cataclysmic auguries in situ — the site of postwar torn sock battles, ripped silences and diminished mental acuities. I’ll cite this alone:
We are allergic to palliatives, and the downward spiral that ensues, emblazoned with a flurry of exclamatory sins — this is the bleakest of moments before the fall.
What I’m Reading:
By night star-veiling, and by day Darkening the light and blotting out the sun; Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth, And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
dozens of driverless vehicles driving no one feral peacocks pecking the fallow ground autonomous delivery bots clustered in auto-da-fécul-de-sacs king tides slurping away the coastline the porous limestone giving way underfoot former immigrants dissing new immigrants
immigrants that fled authoritarian bullyboys propping up a fascist wattle-raisin
Because I didn’t want to go, I made my partner cry. I feel poorly today, both physically and now because I made him cry.
I have a predisposition for alienation — and a tendency to make more of sirens than I should. I never just picture a heart attack, car accident victim, or appendicitis; no, I picture terrorist bombings, the start of uncontrolled pandemics, anthrax poisonings, the first wave of nuclear fallout victims, and such.
And such is the way of my addled mind. I am a sick woman. I don’t think anyone would disagree — except the Sacrafect of Mantia who believes that sunfish can tell time better than clocks.
The Sacrafect has been trying to inject bioluminescence into sunfish so he’d be able to tell time at night.
He’s failed miserably.
image: propublica
What I’m Reading:
At its core, end times fascism is a crisis of rampant impunity born of concentrated power and wealth. Far too much money, information technology, and weaponry have been allowed to concentrate into the hands of the few, and that unchecked power has deranged our elites, goading them to take risks that put our societies and countless species in existential peril.
— Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor / End Times Fascism: And The Fight For The Living World
