Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

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 Yorker Daily  

 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

— Mosquitos / “Sometimes She’s Blue”

concern 124 (v.2)

your office
is blood office

my name is 78
theres too much pressure

last week was as dated
as the previous week
i added a letter
i added an addled letter

i couldnt use greek
cause the hurricanes
r using the alphabet
again

must i provide you with updated blood
temporary crown 

blood
as well as a reading heart
and
check my dent
thee latest blood there

yes
please
i dont have one
thee man doesnt have one
insurance doesnt have one
and i aint got no job
unemployed blood

its got to stop

per instructions of your letter is
cover
you have difficulties
kindly let us know
blood

its got to stop it’s got to stop

the past
upon suggestion
is highly inaccurate

i wish to be actively engaged
so challenged
communication
is nearly insuperable

gladly take my blood
as it is now
b it workable
or not

thank you

this year keeps being misinformed
i was misidentified as another
with the same name

its got to stop its got to stop its got to stop

What I’m Reading:

They tell me God exists.
I’m not so sure.
They tell me I exist.
I have my doubts.

— Gregory Fraser / “Miscarriage”

Canyons of Mistrust

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.

— Henry David Thoreau / “Smoke”

i’ll kiss the goose girl

the southern town confounds her in new ways—

dozens of driverless vehicles driving no one
feral peacocks pecking the fallow ground
autonomous delivery bots clustered
in auto-da-fé cul-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

will wonders ever cease?

i’ll kiss the goose girl instead

What I’m Reading:

… the enormous Florida night,

   metallic with cicadas, musical

      and dangerous as the human heart.

— Lynda Hull / “The Insect Life of Florida”

Sacrafect Bioluminescence

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.

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

deus ex duo (redux)

i. deus ex machina

the deus ex machina falls through the trapdoor into the charnel house

the deus dramatic effect lost and centrifugal with a caravaggio thud

see deus roll among the sweet vinegar panhandlers

watch deus finish the hand cream to douse the smell of blood

deus in a goddard film works the chiaoscuro / a tenebrism / petrichor

deus in bombogenesis full of piss and vinegar spews

deus scumbles the rain-doused pines works the blur

deus in a peppery flourish works against the wet season cold

deus caught in the armature of the machina / ex-officio works union scale

deus doused in dim-light garlic butter reduction topped with sea salt

deus!
dreary dubious dulcet dungeonal!

deus escaped mental patient waxing ontological on black stone paths

deus relents / off stage / orders the curtain fall

deus in the jug and the red of the grapes

ii. deus ex machina pt. 2

deus in the wings, taking hits off the fog machine, directs with shakespearean aplomb

deus as the hole in the sole of your quotidian shoes in the gutter beat

deus as the syncopation of your soul in 5/4 time—a blue beat among blue notes

deus as the sun ra arkestra in hyperdrive singing “nuclear war,” it’s a motherfucker, don’t you know

deus as the writing blister on your finger— the sweetest pain you know

deus as stan brakhage bubblegum—you chew chew chew ‘til your teeth go numb

deus as the usher who stepped away from lincoln’s box at ford’s theater

deus as the antediluvian methane seeping out of thawing permafrost

deus as another opportunity missed—exchanging sharp words with the stage manager

deus as your ill-lighted and out of focus photograph

deus snickering at his blackout jape—power cable in hand next to the light board

deus closing up shop and hanging his sign—away on holiday

What I’m Reading:

Geologists say that in ten years, Florida’s coastlines will be underwater.
Oceanfront properties will drown in the wake of global warming,
and still, mansions sprout up, fungus clustered on the dunes.

— Arielle Hebert / “Erosion”

A Physics

She opened the pigpens—
A physics of badlands
Resembled the scrubby hills
Of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
A parliament of swine chuff—
Popped and faded paroxysms,
sonnets of oilfield imbalances,
Oilskin flints, & parley figs.
She sang to the pigs:
An imperfect parricide breeds
This parody of oligarchy.
Swim, pigs, swim!

What I’m Reading:

It might seem weird, but I always feel most comfortable spending the night in abandoned buildings. Be it a cold high-rise in Prypyat or an apartment without furniture in Chornobyl-2. I always feel calm in buildings where the roofing tar is covered with moss; where a ferocious May shower turns the roof into a swamp teeming with mosquitoes and tadpoles; where trees grow. 

— Markiyan Kamysh / Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadentband the Depraved of Chernobyl

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift!

— Robin Wall Kimmerer / Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

I don’t know where they come from.
I can summon them
(sometimes I can)
into my mind,
into my fingers,
I don’t know why. Or I’ll suddenly hear them
walking, sometimes
waking—
they don’t often come when I need them.
When I need them most terribly,
never.

— Franz Wright / “Words”

You donate money to charity, and they spend it all trying to get you to donate more.

— David Sedaris / The Land and Its People: Essays

The rage that shatters the soul into bodies,
the body, into dissimilar organs,
and the organ into eight-note thoughts
the rage of the poor
carries a core fire against two craters.

— César Vallejo / “[The rage that shatters a man into children,]”

Al adept at exploiting not just financial, legal, or communications systems but also human psychology, our weaknesses and biases, is on the way. Researchers at Meta created a program called CICERO. It became an expert at playing the complex board game Diplomacy, a game in which planning long, complex strategies built around deception and backstabbing is integral. It shows how Als could help us plan and collaborate, but also hints at how they could develop psychological tricks to gain trust and influence, reading and manipulating our emotions and behaviors with a frightening level of depth, a skill useful in, say, winning at Diplomacy or electioneering and building a political movement.

The space for possible attacks against key state functions grows even as the same premise that makes AI so powerful and exciting-its ability to learn and adapt-empowers bad actors.

— Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskan / The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

Write a 12-line rhythmically charged poem in which you slant rhyme
(at least twice) the name of the last official indicted from the Tr*mp
administration. Reference the most recent climate change related
disaster. Address by first name one of the 27 migrants who have died
in ICE custody since the beginning of 2026. End with the instructions
given to you by a parent or guardian on what you should do when
waking from a nightmare.

— Susan Briante / “Further Exercises”

Never has humanity possessed so much wealth, knowledge and technological capability. Yet for billions of human beings, progress remains out of reach. They see prosperity around them, but not for themselves in their own lives. They are told that globalization expands horizons, but they only experience exclusion. They are promised that technology will unlock new possibilities, yet many fear it will take away their livelihoods. Meanwhile, billions of people still live today without the essentials embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals that should be guaranteed for everyone: food, clean water, education, decent work, health care, dignity. 

— António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations / “Final Address to the United Nations, September 22, 2026”

What I’m Listening To:

The city at night, the rebel sound
You’re a bullshit farmer on fertile ground
Growing bad crop on a field of sorrow
If the opposite was cool, you’d be different tomorrow

— Pardoner / “Au Contraire”

Title Goes Here

This is the body of the entry: This is the complication. This is the climax. This is the gist of what I wish to convey. This is the denouement. This is what you get.

What I’m Reading:

What slips from me is what
slips from me. Slippage
is the hinge on which my life

hinges.

— Jane Huffman / “Beauty is made my fear”

This. Is. Digitized.

This is a digitized morning page. This is a digitized mourning phase. This is digitized mental squall. This is digitized coming to terms. This is digitized hullabaloo. This is digitized push and pull through the eye of a needle in haystack out on the fringes of the wasteland. This is digitized someone else’s neuroses filtered through semi-quavered skronk tectonics. This is digitized skronk tectonics, this. This is digitized digital manipulations via pistoning thumbs—tap tap tap tap poo. Ok, this is digitized poo. Ok, this is the pops. This is digitized digital masturbatory aleatory foo. This is digitized living in the still relatively new-new century. This is digitized raw manifold with a peculiar filter applied. This is digitized. This is Friday. This Friday. This.

What I’m Reading:

I am looking, it seems, for aesthetic correspondences to a sense of both desolation and supplication, though it is not clear to whom my entreaties are directed or even what they are. Deliver me from anything and everything, I will take whatever you can give: a request that leaves me as powerless as I feel.

— Emily Labarge / Dog Days