“I want for us to want to patch every heart and pave every road and destroy every system that has ever left us broken.”
— Jordan Jace / “I want”
“Democracy’s survival depends on what happens inside our skulls, where anything is possible. The destruction of a shared reality does more damage than economic decline or impeachable acts.”
— George Packer / Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
“‘No one look / And a canny fucking fill / Don’t lie to me!’ she sings in one moment. It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s not supposed to: Harding wants you to find your own logic. “I just want everyone to feel like a philosopher. You put on a record, and that record belongs to you,” she said in a recent Pitchfork interview.”
— Sophie Kemp / Aldous Harding’s Warm Chris album review, Pitchfork.com
“If we all paid attention to what is happening to the planet in the Anthropocene, we’d be running around with our heads on fire. Instead, we churn on in our lives, ordering stuff for next-day delivery when we could shop locally, driving to the grocery store only half a mile away instead of biking, and flipping the radio dial when another instance of extreme weather strikes, because we just can’t bear what another fire or hurricane portends. All the while, we’re nagged by conscience, which slowly drags our spirits down.”
— Lauren Groff / “Beach Bummer”
“Nostalgia is a pathological sickness. Photographed I am as quiet as an apple approaching the mouth. In the Pavilion of Din, my skull stays a silence.”
— Michael Dumanis / “Flag Day”
“We are not wired to make decisions about barely perceptible threats that gradually accelerate over time. We’re not so different from the proverbial frog that boils to death in a pot of slowly warming water.”
— Jeff Goddell / The Water Will Come
“Something has gone wrong with the last best hope of earth. Americans know it—the whole world knows it. Something has gone wrong out there too . . . No one is going to save us. We are our last best hope.”
— George Packer / Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
What I’m Listening To:
“Of all the ways to eat a cake This one surely takes the knife”
Allow the terror in— Consider it, live with it, Let it seep deep into your body And into your mind.
Then, and only then, Are you prepared to act.
What I’m Reading:
“And it’s too late to stop climate change from coming; it is already here, and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no matter what we do. But it’s not too late to avert the worst, and there is still time to change ourselves so that we are far less brutal to one another when those disasters strike.”
— Naomi Klein / This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Pasted and made agent, once again, I earned the title of Chancroid of Elfador.
I understood public relations and quickly assembled a fleet to sail to Festicularis. Never had so many sumptuous furs been made execrable by hovering over them and evacuating our bowels upon them.
The Chancellor of Quas made an appearance by summons of habeas crapus. In our midst he exhibited a prowess for combat with crabs and lice, in a manner so expert, that we allowed him to search and clean our bodies.
This was a satisfied accomplishment — maybe even an occasion for pity. We were all destined for history in the outcast country. We would certainly overtake the heathen and Papist alike.
We had the flinders of the saints.
We had them by the short hairs.
What I’m Reading:
“There passed a weary time. Each throat Was parched, and glazed each eye. A weary time! a weary time!”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge / “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
A dusty path toward deliverance after a club on the head, a dark hour, a black age—
Quashed then regained. Diverted, re-charted, and reoriented
The crags and canyons—vertiginous—skirted. The roiling water. Up ahead the fog-smoke.
We live beneath the heat dome once a year—but the duration metastasizes—
At the terminal hour we’ll live beneath the heat dome year-round as feedback loops unspool their violence
In ineluctable gyres—followed by the exhalation of a bated agonal breath.
Image: Roelant Savery c. 1620’s, in public domain / Wikipedia
What I’m Reading:
“my disapproving mother tells me nobody wants to read poems… …no one has ever heard of such a thing as a wealthy poet… …I decide to write the poem to be poor and obscure
Catafalque tunes in mahogany time. Nothing sounds as it should. Dripping in the recessive notes of a palanquin juddering in a surreal signature. Come to think off it, father’s signature flew off the back of my report card before I handed it back to the teacher. So I quickly scrawled something in his flourish—and like the former president who liked to show off his signature as if he was showcasing his first turd (ha, look mommy a turd! ain’t I special!) I turned it in with some flair. This is when the bier construction started in the teacher’s workroom—to the whir of the circular saw. I knew I was in for it. I called for some Sun Ra in 5/8 time and was quickly given pointers on how to snap my fingers in the coolest, most detached, cool cat aplomb. Someone scatted a 12 bar blues about lying in state in a failed state. Some “banana republic” rejoinders were heard from the detention hall inmates, and we went out with a Te Deum in the key of Dada. Followed by a full minute of mushroom cloud hiss.
What I’m Reading:
“What if the guns turn into pencils in the hands of the soldiers and they underline the places on the map as sites they must see before they die?”