Then there was Kankakee—that year of enervating visions—and the posse of teenage courtiers whose dizzying luck was doomed by a pair of “ragged claws.” Fragile, as the wounded world, and openly melancholic. Yes, we had cinematic aspirations but the poisons were rapturous, draining our inner eye imagery, leaving only reverberations and badly drawn lines out of critical focal acuity. We only saw defendant palindromes swirling in the airy miasmas—penumbral and schoolmistress gray.
We never saw iridescent finches again. The world resolved as a dartboard roach living in pastina. We embodied the prosaic. The oneiric forever drained away.
We were forever wounded and relegated to lifespans of haunting memories without the ability to express ourselves precisely. We lived forever outside of the letterbox, mired in circles of confusion and extraneous silver halide crystals. Perception became a useless digital cortex.
We are now contortionists lacking flexibility—amoral tank flankers and lyric flunkies. We die with each simple fade to black.
This is a tragic feeling we live with. We expire as hopeless eyepieces suffocating in Vaseline stains.
We cleave the wings of our dreams.
What I’m Reading:
The AI industry’s tactic, as ever, has been to substitute identifying the problem for actually solving it. But at some point, you cannot blog your way out of the apocalypse.
— Matteo Wong / “OPEN AI HAS GONE ROGUE: It’s impossible to know the extent of the AI-hacking crisis” / The Atlantic
this will be a backwards mask this will be self-abasing this will be scrofulous and un-dexterous
so
this will be loutish this will be petty this will be unpleasant
i am feeling unpleasant
this will be something of a cure this will be an ad hoc exorcism this will be generated by piston thumbs
and (this will include a photograph of a hickory tussock moth in larval form)
this will be the denouement this will be the end of this
this will be all of that
What I’m Reading:
I have tried to convey how to free oneself, using color as a force to reach towards the beauty and generosity of the material that allows you unlimited expression.
This country makes you weep Half our forests, rivers and mountains ruined This country makes you angry Howling wolves, wild horses hunted down This country dishonors life and praises Death in battle hymns and flag-draped eulogies
The Artificial State honored no boundaries and conferred no rights. Its emergence was inseparable from the deepening connections of transportation, communication, and trade that became known, in the 1980s, as globalization, and ushered in an era of declining faith in democracy all around the world. The opening of the internet in the 1990s and the start of social media in the early to mid-2000s — Facebook was launched in 2004, Twitter in2006 — for all their much-ballyhooed promise of participatory democracy, had by the 2010s begun to undermine democracy and promote autocracy, abetting a process political scientists call “democratic erosion,” the slow falling away of democratic norms, practices, and expectations.
— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
for the trees are tinder and the earth grays over
above a death mare’s mane blocks the sun searing still in orange glow
how terrible the psychedelic colors at sunset how terrible the smoldering
and still we did not lose our eyes seeing the blaze for wonder
what was and what might be
— Raina J. León / “what we lose in the fire a blown tire makes us see”
Whenever I went to the dump that is Chornobyl, I always dressed like an angry bum from Pol Pot’s guerilla unit . . . It always feels weird to climb over the barbed-wire fence in the winter: the snow crunches under your feet, the bags rustle in your boots, but you listen to those sounds and don’t even care about being ambushed by the police. It’s no wonder. After all, what kind of an idiot would stand in the middle of the Chornobyl forest when the snow is waist-high and it’s twenty below?
— Markiyan Kamysh / Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chernobyl
These streets bury its shame and hoards Its wealth in bank bailouts and stock buybacks While the rest of us live paycheck-to-paycheck In search of the American Dream
— Genny Lim / “Century of Rage”
More than 450,000 people are projected to die from the additional heat brought by the super El Niño by February, according to estimates by climate scientists.
The toll is on top of the early deaths resulting from temperatures already driven up by the climate crisis. It will strike across the globe, from Indonesia to India, and Nigeria to the US. Many further deaths are expected from the droughts, wildfires and flooding that El Niños bring.
— Damian Carrington / “Huge El Niño projected to cause more than 450,000 deaths by February” / The Guardian
On the day when they voted to roll up the map and burn up the calendar, voted to spend all that remains of the earth’s endowment right now on themselves, I thought I should cry, but I’d run out of handkerchiefs, run out of tears.
— Robert Bringhurst / “The Day After Tuesday”
A 2022 report analyzing nearly five hundred large-scale studies undertaken around the world concluded that social media was associated with both rising polarization and a declining trust in democratic government in nations as different as Austria and Rwanda, Sweden and Ukraine. The more established the democracy, the greater the effect. Over much the same stretch of time, people in the most tightly wired parts of the world became lonelier and angrier and at once more susceptible to conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and frauds, and likelier to believe that much of what they had once thought was true and real was false and fake. Nothing was to be relied upon.
Only machines.
— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
What I’m Listening To:
Ride the darkness somewhere new Try to unlearn the things you knew There’s a road out of here Leads to nowhere
Maria says posthaste when she means post-punk. It has something to do with the wiring in her head.
I have a box full of letters, and she has a box full of coca leaves from her trip to Peru. She bought them from a Quechua woman wearing a bowler hat in Cuzco. An alpaca stood a few feet away saddled with a dozen large plastic garbage bags filled with coca leaves. I should know, I saw the vacation photos. Maria chews the leaves with a propulsion that seems superhuman, as if her mandible might detach and break out of its hinges and tear through her face.
She can’t stop chewing the leaves. I make tea out of them. She adds them to dishes which she invariably doesn’t eat because her appetite is suppressed from all the coca leaves she chews.
I’m just a writer that had a pocket full of wrens this morning. They were spry then. Now they’re a clump of feathers — limp bodies — a dead pocket o’ blues, with the divine exception of the aggregate lump of parasites that abandoned the birds when they went cold.
Now, I tell Maria, “with this pocketful of cavorting beasties, I thee wed, and honor and cherish and vow to infest thee with said beasties (of a cavorting nature) and then nurse in sickness after you contract a rare blood-borne illness from said beasties.”
She says this thing between us will never work. “Let’s forget this all altogether and just get down to the sex,” she says.
“Wha—?”
“Put on that Dead Kennedy’s record and let’s get to it,” she says.
“Which one,” I say, “Plastic Surgery Disasters or Fresh Fruit for Rotting— ”
“The one that starts with ‘Kill the Poor!”
What I’m Reading:
Violence a language I was taught in school / spelling tests / & fists
full of diplomas / Hometown billboard says / ICE is always hiring
The whole world can be divided into those who write and those who do not write, wrote Kierkegaard. Not that I’ve been reading Kierkegaard. I found these words copied down in an old school notebook. The notebook I found while cleaning out the storage space I rent in the basement of my apartment building. Not a chore I enjoy: throwing out stuff I haven’t looked at for years to make room for other stuffI know I won’t look at for years. When I dump the old stuff in the trash, I am blessed with a moment’s elation. But as soon as the empty space is full again, I feel a heave of something like nausea.
We’re above an endless plateau of cirrus. Look at that wisp of crescent moon nailed to this impossibly saturated blue sky. The moon out at noon. Proof, and more proof, that I’m being watched.
The wolf ponders the caribou and presidium of both frogs and finches.
All creation conceptually pressed together like dried flukes onto grainy pilgrims carrying the resolve of photochemical interventionists.
Two photorealists connect and diverge as the narrative’s historical, artistic and scientific linearities are placed upon one another with enlightening translucence. But nothing truly connects.
Through the fog and supervolcanic water vapor saturating the stratosphere we see finches, cane toads, and poison dart aristocracies working wing by haunch at their various outposts across the world.
It’s all visible from this height. And this must suffice.
What I’m Reading:
Silence is impossible in this century. Everything howls. It has no way to flourish. The wild animal of ourselves, this learned condition growls relentlessly.
falling rocks / times up / first fall tang on the tongue / our fingers vaseline stained / cant forget the clock canting facewise facefirst / damocles like / on a wretched afternoon late holocene / sure feels late
violence prevention / and such / flailing at air / failing / falling like so many leaves / guns
hegottagun shegottagun theygottagun / what about us who do without
thick impastos of blood / what
sure feels late
is late
What I’m Reading:
The universe might be death. Human life might be tears. If human life be tears, Death might be love.
