The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“I stole the yellow bird
That lives in the devil’s sex
He will teach me how to seduce”

— Joyce Mansour / “I stole the yellow bird …”

“on Sunday after church I took a walk
so I could discuss your nipples
with the friendly woodpecker
who visits the birch tree”

— Wayne Koestenbaum / “David’s Nipples”

“It’s called Cyclone Mocha, but it might as well be called Cyclone Exxon or Cyclone Chevron—they were among the companies that ignored the clear evidence of pending climate crisis and kept pushing their product till the Bay of Bengal was a hot tub. And it’s oil companies that are currently mounting a drive in California to overturn a law that would simply prevent them from drilling directly next to schools, hospitals, and homes. Rage is not an answer, but it is the thing that comes before an answer.”

— Bill McKibben / “Thoughts, Prayers, Rage, Resistance”

“Consider:
the verbal dearth
that is always a main ripple of extinction.”

— RK Fauth / “Playing with Bees”

“I’m feeling excited about writing, but it’s only because I’m not doing it. When I’m doing it, I feel miserable. When I’m not doing it, I can’t wait to do it again. It’s so frustrating to write, and I get so depressed when I’m writing. Right now, I’m not writing and I feel great about writing.”

— Anelise Chen / The Creative Independent interview

“Tender Is the Flesh is a meditation on what capitalism is – it teaches us to naturalise cruelty … Capitalism is a system into which we are all born, we have it inside of us, and patriarchy is part of that system. I tried to work with this idea that we eat each other in a symbolic way. With women it’s so obvious, because you can talk about human trafficking, war and the way women are made invisible in different spheres. Here in Argentina, they kill women every day. Capitalism and cannibalism are almost the same, you know?”

— Agustina Bazterrica / “Bookmarks” / The Guardian

“… the world is violent. Why should fiction pretend it’s not?”

— Ottessa Moshfegh / “Bookmarks” / The Guardian

What I’m Listening To:

“I’m getting sick and tired
Of feeling like I do”

— The Mighty Lemon Drops / “My Biggest Thrill”