Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

I think, first of all, we have a crisis of thinking or imagining when it comes to the future. Everyone talks about it. Everyone says that we need to start thinking about the future, and so on. But it never happens in the context of desire. The future is a necessity – something you’re being pushed into. Who wants that? 

— Maria Stepanova / “Eros replaced with Thanatos” / Equator

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I start pulling my guts out,
those red silk cords
spiraling skyward,
and I’m climbing them
past the moon and the sun,
past darkness
into white.

— Ai / “Nothing But Color”

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You wake up and brace yourself for the barrage of toxic gibberish that constitutes the modern public sphere. Your e-mail is overrun with spam, scams, and smut. There are voice mails from no one about nothing. A glance at the news reveals that the President is continuing to spew lies and obscenities; that a trillionaire is peddling white-supremacist propaganda on a social-media platform he owns; that a chart-topping musical artist is praising Hitler, or apologizing for praising Hitler, or praising Hitler once again. Publications from the Times on down employ clickbait headlines that treat you like a starving rat in a Pavlovian experiment. A.I. systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant ten-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does. When pressed, the chatbots admit that they cannot “naturally understand human morality, dignity, culture, or meaning.” It all adds up to a continuous discursive tinnitus—a buzz of random, fake, stupid, sinister chatter that nobody wants and nobody can stop.

— Alex Ross / “Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age” / The New Yorker

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We
came with photos and adrenaline, taped up boxes and giant
suitcases. America, to me, in 1979 was a pyrotechnic album
of bursting events, and relatives known only by nicknames
opened their mouths the way cats do to sense kin.

— José Felipe Alvergue / “trust”

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“If artificial intelligence and automation begin to replace human labour at scale, the key economic question won’t be the speed at which jobs vanish — it will be who pays the bill,” argues complexity scientist Ljubica Nedelkoska. She suggests that governments must start looking beyond income tax and levy a surcharge on tech-driven windfalls instead. Or people could hold a direct stake in AI-generated profits through a sovereign wealth fund, rather than those gains accruing entirely to private shareholders.

— Flora Graham / “Tax robots, not people” / Nature Brief

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A long time ago
I went on a journey,
Right to the corner
Of the Eastern Ocean.
The road there
Was long and winding,
And stormy waves
Barred my path.

— Tao Yuanming / “[A long time ago]”

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You can only kill disappointment with a new try. 

— Kim Stanley Robinson / Shaman

What I’m Listening To:

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is, brother, you have to wait

— The Beatles / “Revolution”

Fox in a Cul-de-Sac

Fade in:

Fusty living room. Crepuscular light. 

Loud swelling radio chatter, multiple frequencies: reports of war, a horse race, cricket scores, market updates, easy listening music, someone reciting maths. 

A woman affecting classical statue poses. A man sitting on an easy chair reading a newspaper.

W: What did the news have to say today, dear?

M: There were poems received from cyberspace. They popped up for two seconds and were cantilevered out of sight to another spot for later reckoning.

W: What? What are you on about, dear?

M: The poems came at the seating of the regent… underneath her rococo underpants… there was gaseous effluvia…

W: Are you ok, dear? Are you not feeling yourself?

M: Oh, the court was stoic while the noxious twankery spread through the room. But who was keeping count, the farceurs? They were arrivistes!

W: My goodness you’re running a fever.

M: Leave me be! Where was the Count? Oh yeah, mounted on the lady in waiting.

W: My god! What are you on about?

M: Oh, yes! Wading in the darkness behind the draperies! How to gruntle her highness — with her head in a sling — when like a fox in a cul de sac she’s hounded — penned in like a boar between arches — to the end of the line she dons her monocle without that paterfamilias aplomb! She croons! She croons a Bing Crosby scat-a-tat bo-see-do.

W: Nevil! Sit down! Put that back—

M: Oh, do make some sense?! You flatten my patience with that utter garble of yarbol warbles. Please, please, please let me get what I want—

W: What on earth do you want? Sit down, and put that back in your drawers!

M: Some sense from you! A semblance of balance — a discernible emprise! Don’t be a silly wicket, spewing snubberdigibblets of nonsense and frou frou foo!

W: Nevil! Pants back on!

M: Don’t be a slugabed, you say! Oh, don’t be a sluggard… Or! You’re a braggart all drugged up with words… well, I’m free to walk about without pants, without fear of brigandage and without your loquacious bagpipes of babble!

W: Stop.

M: Won’t stop.

W: No, stop.

M: I won’t.

W: Well. Don’t.

Fade out.

What I’m Reading:

My hair loses its atoms.

My body glows

in the dark.

Planets are smashed

into oblivion,

stripped of their power

to name things.

— Joshua Jennifer Espinoza / “This Is What Makes Us Worlds”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The whole world was turning towards death.

— Anna Kavan / Ice

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I moved through rooms without arriving.
I lived like a light you forget to turn off.

The cream soured.
And I was elsewhere
long before I knew it

— Eva Candelaria Sosa / “Afterwards”

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The world’s oceans are under “severe and accelerating” pressure from human activities, with the rate of sea-level rise double that of a decade ago, according to a damning assessment from the United Nations.

The “intensifying” stressors, which include pollution and large-scale industrial fishing, are cumulative, said the report, resulting in widespread biodiversity loss and putting ocean systems under “severe strain”.

— Karen McVeigh / “‘Severe’ stress on oceans as rate of sea level rise doubles in 10 years, UN warns” / The Guardian

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To be saved by ideas: a fantasy I harbored.
In those days, there was always something
from which I needed saving. The past, its
expansive grammar, the way my grief was
a kind of deranged hope. I wanted a different
country, an old language to burst forth like
a hidden river.

— Billy-Ray Belcourt / “Bildungssonnet”

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Permafrost, or frozen soil, covers some 15 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere, and thanks to human-driven climate change, it is fueling a vicious warming feedback loop. As rising global temperatures melt the frozen soil, it releases stored carbon into the atmosphere, enhancing warming. Scientists have debated for years how fast this could happen and how much carbon the world’s permafrost might expel, but according to a new study, the situation might be far worse than past estimates suggest. . . In the new study, researchers estimate that that tipping point could happen by 2100—earlier than previous models suggest.

— Jackie Flynn Mogensen / “Earth’s permafrost could soon release hidden ‘deep carbon,’ supercharging warming” / Scientific American

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. . . I’ll never get out of this world alive.
That was Hank Williams⁠—a bunch of molecules.
I hold my tongue, look across the moon and blink.
You never wrote so you didn’t know
a little colored ball of wool was my heart.

— Larry Fagin / “Self-pity (East River)”

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I was oppressed by the sense of universal strangeness, by the chill of approaching catastrophe, the menace of ruins suspended above; and also by the enormity of what had been done, the weight of collective guilt. A frightful crime had been committed, against nature, against the universe, against life. By rejecting life, man had destroyed the immemorial order, destroyed the world; now everything was about to crash down in ruins.

— Anna Kavan / Ice

What I’m Listening To: 

Sometimes I think my skull’s just chicken wire

Carrying a thought like contraband

I land like an alien

But Shelley says, still, you’ve got to live with people

— Shearwater / “Slugs in the Marigolds”

Lithiumga(u)ze (redux)

What is this? I’m dizzy and there seems to be a slight scrim like muslingauze between me and everything else. Look at the sun—it’s like the fog of lithium … a weariness settles over me… my outlook is decidedly more pessimistic and I need to catch up on my sleep in order to remain anywhere near some sort of balance.

She says:
who i b today?
who i b?

The spin keeps rolling in.
Yes, frightful really, the oceans and deserts appearing in the same place.

What I’m Reading:

The ultimate achievement of mankind would be, not just self-destruction, but the destruction of all life; the transformation of the living world into a dead planet. 

— Anna Kavan / Ice

Burning Landscapes

The shallow coast has migrated to higher elevations
We live in the time of burning landscapes
Rainforests to savannas in two easy days
The grand ice shelves in five easy pieces
We’re on finite time and nothing unspools
Like priorities heavily influenced by neglect
You speak in deeper tones when you’re shallow
It’s a conscious choice to avoid detection
Like providing soft beds for corpses

What I’m Reading:

Everyone is dead, has been dead
for a long time, we are merely their
words trying to find a place to hide.

— Greg Kuzma / “Everyone”