Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

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

— Beck / “Disappearing Act”

Pocket o’ Blues (redux)

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

— Logan Phillips / “On Materiality”

What I’m Reading:

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.

— Sigrid Nunez / It Will Come Back To You

Nothing Truly Connects

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.

— Amanda Hernández / “Noise”

falling rocks / times up

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.

— Han Yong-un / “The Solitary Night”

What I’m Reading:

Steady, the evening fades
up the street into sunset
over the lake. Winter sits

quiet here, snow piled
by the road, the walks stamped
down or shoveled. The kids

in the time before dinner are
playing, sliding on the old ice.
The dogs are out, walking,

and it’s soon inside again,
with the light gone. Time
to eat, to think of it all.

— Robert Creeley / “Buffalo Evening”

Blockhead

Relevance was not his strong suit. Assonance was a mildly strong point. And dissonance was his power alley. So he detuned his lyre and randomly plucked strings. He tuned his dulcimer to F sharp and struck it with claw hammers which were more appropriate for sheet rock installation. He retrieved his banjo from a dusty corner in the basement and pulled on the strings hard enough to feel them loosen. He opened a can of stale tennis balls and threw them at the banjo head and strings. He then found his ukulele in the closet and tore out the E and C strings and went mad strumming at the speed of Johnny Ramone on the G and A strings. He even shouted, “gabba, gabba, hey” once for nostalgia sake. In the office he took his electric guitar off its stand, plugged it in, and maximized the fuzz box and with drumsticks he did a ratamacue on the fretboard until there was a maelstrom of skronk filling the room. After a minute of this, his heart racing and the incipient pangs of a migraine squeezing the sides of his neocortex, he raised the guitar over his head and smashed his acoustic guitar to splinters in its stand — and then started on the walls. In this manner his 3/2 with 2 car became a massive heap of refuse. He was proud to take out his home before the weather got the best of him. “Hurricane that! Fire that! Flood that! Tornado that! Glacier melt that! Sea level rise that! Earthquake that! Virus that! Gas explosion that! Take that! I’m in control, Mofo!

What I’m Reading:

AI seems likely to enable much better propaganda and surveillance, both major tools in the autocrat’s toolkit.

— Dario Amodei / “Machines of Loving Grace”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Three things: I’ve never been to
a funeral, a man is his own
prophet in the morning, a door

floats above an endless horizon.
But I have walked through hospice halls,
I have stood at the edge of a cliff.

— Brent Ameneyro / “As the Fog Starts Burning Away”

What to do with this information? I confess, I do not know. I confess that when the pareidolia was not frightening it was, often, beautiful, in a darkling kind of way, reconfiguring time and space, cause and effect. This information I know what to do with even less.

— Emily LaBarge / Dog Days

The Yangtze River in China lost its nerve
and wanted vengeance.

Elsewhere a desert caught fire.
We got a plastic green turtle and named it Sir

Desmond Tutu.
A snake entered our house through the drain

and like any good son, I ran
and hid under the bed.

Google became a thing.
Viagra became a thing.

— Gbenga Adesina / “The People’s History of 1998”

The Artificial State is less a state than a dream of being without one, the dream of the severing of humans not only from the natural world but also from one another, every umbilical cord cut. An extreme form of this dream is the actual plan of a very small number of staggeringly powerful twenty-first-century merchant princes, Silicon Valley billionaires who, seeking escape from the prison of their own bodies, intend to have their consciousnesses uploaded onto computers when they die, an idea that, like much of what they want, comes from a story published nearly a century ago in a science fiction magazine for boys. The Artificial State they envision for everyone else, and have begun to build, is a future in which humans are ruled, and many replaced, by machines owned by corporations owned by themselves. This future, too, comes from science fiction. It involves both the desertion of liberal democracy and the destruction of the natural world. The very planet, once a home to be tended, is to become instead a warehouse, its surface covered in data centers powering artificial brains.

— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

I dream myself into
moss wings and legs strong as mora

but in the morning I am clay again,
I am milk and dough and unhealed wound…

— Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné / “Mother Dreamwalker”

The United States has 4,400 directional miles of bike lanes, offering safety for anyone serious enough to risk it. The push for bike lanes began in the 1960s and grew in the ensuing decades. Theoretically, the lanes offer a carbon-neutral alternative to driving a car. If one chooses to bike instead of drive, it’s one fewer toxin-spewing death trap creating pollution and traffic congestion on the motorways. That sounds like a boon for the world, so naturally, the Trump administration wants to do away with it.

Condemning “DEI bike lanes”, the Trump administration has made a point of freezing or canceling related grants, referring to alternative transit options as unworkable in the United States, and suggesting removing the lanes that already exist.

— Dave Schilling / “Why is the Trump administration calling bike lanes ‘DEI’?” / The Guardian

I have never died
and never will.

Every time I split I say goodbye to my eternal self.

— Richard Grossman / “Amoeba”

What I’m Listening To:

When I figure out where I’m goin’
It’ll be too late to change
The course of where I think I’m goin’
Sometimes life can be so strange
All forgotten will be this

— Eels / “All Forgotten”

im a dream creep (redux)

im a dream creep having bug dinner / making errant presentations in the round / converting pathological crab kids in love to arthritic husks / i tease a sickle / a cudgel / all show of course / i aint no aggro-chaperone hypnotist / overnight lows will drop to antiquarian simmer / please wear protective eyewear+sling your colostomy bag over your shoulder for quick escape / im having bullet pie / as everyone these days insists on carrying guns / i insist on forearms / have a quiver full of them / they get me thru the lean times / im a maladjusted tassel in a 1960’s burlesque / please dont touch the asterisks

the sickness doyenne suggests: mindfulness based stress reduction+meditation / bittersweet nightshades / bathing in great excremental deposits / thanks / ill pass / ill start the purgatotrial convolutions instead / the yellow-green resonances like gnashing teeth 

im changing my insoles+increasing my fiber intake / im sorta hooked on imported guano / so maybe the occasional quaff / ill find a tendinitis sweetheart who spits monosyllabic love-tee-dums in basque / become a long-rapier foreman / hedge fund my way thru thee anthropocene / every dream creep for themselves

What I’m Reading:

That New World featured, too, a series of tragedies: an atomic arms race, changes to the earth’s climate, and, everywhere in the industrialized world, pollution, deforestation, and the eradication of wildlife species and habitats. “It is only within the moment of time represented by the twentieth century that one species — man — has acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world,” Rachel Carson wrote in 1962, “and it is only within the past twenty-five years that this power has achieved such magnitude that it endangers the whole earth and its life.”

During the Great Acceleration, at the dawn of the age of data, humanity glimpsed not only the possibility of the resurrection of the human as a machine but the possibility of humanity as a menace to the planet itself.

— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Epistemic Valve-u-later

Insouciant pill pusher — writer of scrips intended to send me to oblivion, to live thee life of the lotus eaters. Dr. Closer — shutter of the epistemic valve — he wants me to live the limpid life of the unsullied brain. Lamb-shackled. 

You translucent Mesmer of enthrallment… limn the cathode nimbus…

Then there was talk between my cousin J. and my friend D., and me about the film I’d recently seen  at a nightclub. J. was talking to a masculine woman, and I wanted to ask him about the lesbians in the film — with whom he was familiar.

J. jumped between me and D. — and J. tried to grab my crotch a number of times. I had to push him away.

You see I almost missed the train, but I managed to wave the engineer down by a series of complicated mirrors mounted on the cars. She stopped and I got in, only to find a bunch of young men from a military academy, which I intuited were students from Greenland — they were crowding the train.

I saw D. and sat next to him, and he told me how stoned he was, and all about the genetically modified strain he’d been smoking.

Then J. found us — D. and I were walking down a side street and we saw the shambles of a recording studio with all manner of murals on the ruined walls.

“Look it’s Muscle Shoals studio. How historic! This is where James Taylor recorded that classic album,” D. said.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” I said. “You might be thinking about Johnnie Taylor. I don’t think James Taylor recorded here.”

J. was throwing rocks at the few remaining walls— pristine white bricks with murals of steam locomotives on them.

“Anyway, we’re not in Alabama,” I said. “We seem to be in Greenland.”

“Ah, fuck, shut up!” J. said. “You’re all incongruity and anachronism spilling into other recurrent dream sequences. Or wait, was this all the same pandemic dream?”

The pungent smell of sulphur overtook us as the crusted ground gave out beneath us.

What I’m Reading:

Liberal democratic states make citizens; the Artificial State makes trolls.

— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State