Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

There is no point
In doing anything,
There is no resisting
The monstrous god
Who devours
His own children.

— Fernando Pessoa / “Ode I”

Cars are, without exaggeration, one of the most significant and negative environmental, political, social, and cultural forces in the history of humanity … Instead of unbounded freedom and rugged self-reliance the never-ending proliferation of automobiles has delivered a host of costs and burdens. Among them are the demolition of our neighborhoods, towns, and cities to make way for expensive car infrastructure like freeways.

— Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon & Aaron Naparstek / Life After Cars

My disorder stacks to the sky. Those whom I loved were attached to the sky by an elastic. I turned my head … they weren’t there. 

— Jean Cocteau / “The Red Packet”

Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess energy in the Earth system, which is primarily caused by burning fossil fuels, such as oil, coal, and gas. That imbalance hit a record 23 zettajoules last year, more than double the average of the previous two decades.

As a result, the oceans are warming at an accelerating rate. In 2020, the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about five Hiroshima bombs per second. Last year, it was closer to 11 Hiroshima explosions per second. The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, has warned “Earth is being pushed beyond its limits.”

— Jonathan Watts / “On the Longest Day of the Year, Ocean Surface Temperatures Hit a Record High” / Mother Jones

Where there is violence
there is always a trace
of an echo buried
deep
deep
down

— Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme / Until we became fire and fire

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

— Marcel Duchamp / “Marcel Duchamp” / MOMA installation

I could fit all that matters
into one bag.

— Kate Braverman / “Job Interview”

What I’m Listening To:

We don’t know anything
You don’t know anything
I don’t know anything about love
But we are nothing (Whoa-oh-oh)
You are nothing
I am nothing without love

— The Magnetic Fields / “The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure”

(They Hope)

All we do is theatrical resistance —
Without direct action —

Elaborate gestures
Of a futility profound.

A pantomime —
Enervated and impotent —

A room full of brume
In my vise-like brain.

Fight fight confront confront
Resist resist resist —

Resistance is pointless.
(They hope).

What I’m Reading:

My blood has become ink. It was necessary to stop this revulsion at all costs. I am poisoned down to my bones. I sang in the dark and now that song frightens me.

— Jean Cocteau / “The Red Packet”

What I’m Reading:

4 am
We are under siege
I say we and yet oceans divide us
If you don’t leave
they will demolish the house on top of your heads

— Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme / Until we became fire and fire us

overheard in nyc …

… Someone said …

… Geckos of a wet finger … 

… You mean fingers of a wet echo? …

… which is why I get so physical in my practice …

… They cut off his head — they threw it overboard … 

… Only two drops of datura to make you lose your mind forever …

… Who is feeding the pigeons yellow rice? …

… I need to focus on finding an exit from that maze …

… Was the message sent using standard encryption? …

… The future is the same …

… We are in the midst of a mass extinction event driven by humans …

… I wouldn’t say she’s ugly …

… Is that what I look like? …

… I still don’t have a job …

… and he’s saying: I’m not perfect — I’m not no saint — and meanwhile he’s robbing the shit out of you …

… Wait here, you need to stand in that line …

… They got the Legionnaires’ thing up on the east side …

… How am I safe here now? …

What I’m Reading:

Nothing is stranger to humans than their own image.

— Karel Čapek / Rossum’s Universal Robots

The Pomp (redux)

Today I broke my vow of silence when I broke the glass in case of emergency. I croaked in a muttering fashion most embarrassing, “Ra… rah… run. Run! There’s a moth infestation.” We had moths. We were underground in our hermetically sealed glass boxes, and here we were with an infestation of moths. How was this possible? Had we not paid our alms, and made our ablutions in the appropriate manner? Had we not made cretinous burnt offerings—I was always against this affectation—pungent and breath-taking like good little pawns. For our troubles, for our conceits to our deity … we get moths! Was it worth breaking 137 days of silence over? Documents were signed, codicils initialed, an ascetic’s vow taken. The pomp. The sacrifice. Moths! What does this mean?

What I’m Reading:

My enemy keeps
a bowl of anemones
on my bedside table
and this cruelty
has killed my will
to perform even the duties
of an invalid

— Fanny Howe / “My Enemy”

[detonation nation]

a bullet whizzes my ear

the strangest, most riveting fists found purchase at my temple
a familiar scenario

a rough patch—
a dispatch—

aggression unmoored
this land is not mine / not yours
it belongs to all / to none

so take your right cross & elbow shuck
listen as i convert it to poetry
for the empathically challenged
suck on hardscrabble knuckles tattooed

“H A T E”

a brusque burlesque of mutual disdain
convened long before the season
of fake fascist spray-ons

all these deft scraps of ignorance
a cutting shorthand of petty grievances
dyspeptic interlocutions & prickly retractions unretracted
unredacted — i remember last year was so hot

this will be hotter

this year will demarcate — forthwith —
the honeymoon croon from hell

the detonation nation

plug your ears
it’s coming

What I’m Reading:

Our lives are spinning out
from world to world;
the shapes of things
are shifting in the wind.
What do we know
beyond the rapture and the dread?

— Stanley Kunitz / “The Abduction”

congealed bacon

i googled white nationalism—
flashes of congealed bacon

you play the tragic heroine
toothy femme fatale

dont judge my painting
until i finish my ropa vieja

dont cut your hair
before tinting it blue

i fix you a tongue on rye
my marbles gather dust

we wait for slide guitar solos
on an unmoored pontoon bridge

in darkness your voice
has the timbre of rime

the choice you say—love
love

is love

What I’m Reading:

. . . the world is always ending for each of us and if one begins to withdraw from the possibilities of experience, then no one would take any of the risks involved with love.

— Ben Lerner / 10:04

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

When I consider the curious habits of man,
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.

— Ezra Pound / “Meditatio”

A record-breaking heat wave is baking Europe, hot on the heels of unprecedented temperatures in May. “Heatwaves are here to stay, until we turn the tap off to global emissions,” says Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. “They’re more frequent, they’re more intense and they’re lasting longer.” Europe is heating up twice as fast as the global average, and scientists are trying to understand the complex factors that will determine whether this year’s sweltering heat should be considered ‘the new normal’.

— Flora Graham / “Does Europe have a new climate?” / Nature Briefing

Days are dams.
Each week posts
a sign above the water.
This week: Goodbye.
Last week: The Possible.
I close the dam of The Possible,
open the dam of Goodbye.

— Lily Brown / “Venus Transit”

Trust in science has collapsed — right? The evidence says that it’s not necessarily so. From a global perspective, public trust in science and scientists is high. Trust has dropped in certain groups, notably among Republican-leaning people in the United States. And research in the United Kingdom shows that the proportion of people who have “a lot” of trust in science tends to be lower among politically right-leaning groups than those on the left. In many countries, people are also increasingly questioning definitive evidence on divisive issues such as vaccines, partly because scientific information is being drowned out online.

— Flora Graham / “Trust in science: what’s really happening?” / Nature Briefing

Poverty is violence.
We know the look of dead
things behind pinned drapes and how to make
history in one day.

— Silvia Bonilla / “Bone Harp”

Blatant lobbying, not for the sake of our country, but for the fossil fuel industry, in which almost all the ultrarich – including, in all likelihood, the proprietors of these newspapers – are heavily invested. These people are not and never will be your friends.

— George Monbiot / Bluesky post

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

— Wisława Szymborska / “Nothing Twice”

What I’m Listening To: 

If nothing means anything
And I’m just a little big nerd
Floating in the ether (Ether)
Crying in the bathtub
Metaphorically speaking, of course I’m lost, we
We lost our minds, our marbles

— The Bug Club / “A Good Day for Dying”

Your Ruff Collar, My Millstone (redux)

We live under the heat dome.

I see you across the barren parklet.
You are eating bits of soft pink flesh.

My hair wilts.
Your curls frizz.

I lick the hot sauce off my fingers.
You yell that you are an arriviste.

I scream that I was once part of the noblesse oblige and waved banderitas.

You warble an Edith Piaf song.
I huff gas out of a brown paper bag.

You sing two registers too low.
My viscera gurgles. I pee my pants where I stand — mud puddles form around my feet.

Tomorrow you will sign away your inalienable rights for a used 78 rpm record of “Thee Infanticide Blues.”
I will strum The Hits of the Borscht Belt Songbook tonight on my ukulele.

The gloaming hour.

I leave a minute after you do.

You to your elevator shaft.
Me to my abandoned mine.

Dark. Wasteland.

We may meet again next year.

What I’m Reading:

Every nation is scared of the truth of what they have done to others.

— Charles Simic / The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

Travel Advice for Young Chauvinists (redux)

(First, you’ll find intercalated pustules of censer smoke ringed by ferrules of frankincense in your heart. They were placed there by us. Do not panic.)

Travel.

And when lost abroad …

You’ll find mussels in Malmo in an impossibly dry place.

Dresden is everything it’s cracked up to be, you’ll find Friday morning virgins there on Sunday afternoon.

Milan is … well … Milanese—and that is inauspicious—the rain incessant and the shops shuttered.

Don’t waste your time in Barcelona. You’ll find the last remaining speaker of Njerep there, displaced, and waiting for the placement of the final trencadis tile at the pinnacle of the Sagrada Familia.

Avoid the French.

In Lisbon the fog is impossibly thick and it smells of something long forgotten.

Decamp for home from the marshes of London.

Practice the cathecism of free markets, derivatives and tranches.

Breathe deep the smells of amok-capitalism in the morning (essence of napalm available for an additional fee).

AND sing the anthem—early and often.

Oh, the places you’ll go!

What I’m Reading:

Where do you find the parts to make yourself into some other kind of person? Can it be something you read in a book, a gesture you see on the street? Half-smile of a teacher, the walk of a girl on the beach.

— Amy Hempel / “Tumble Home”