The uterine is blasphemous! His desultory words matched his affect —
Didn’t you have a mother? Don’t you have a significant other?
Have you been to the Levant? Do your needles pass an elephant?
You must know of what I speak — Riblets, man! Riblets!
The tzela. The tzela, man! His spittle spray profuse.
He had my father’s eyes — That madness innate.
Semiotic spew — Signs arranging and rearranging In obscure topographies. He wrote his own hagiography. A drug-addled Rasputin shooting Lasers from his third eye. Healing hands like cudgels Ready to inflict . . . What?
Confusion, delusion, repulsion, Disrepute.
Go now, you unmoored ghost. Back into the recesses of a lunar mind. Back into forgotten memory . . .
until the next visitation.
What I’m Reading:
I don’t want to have to go to work for someone else. I don’t want to have to participate in an economic system that leads to, you know, bombing a school of kids on the other side of the planet.
— Bike Farmer / “What Am I Even Doing Here, Instead of Working?” / Instead of Working
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
thee istsfor manity reader 