The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“I’m not into resolutions—though I understand why people like them. Every revolution of a circle brings with it something like another chance to step into our own stories differently. It’s also true every second of existence we have this chance.”

— Lidia and the Squid Squad and all the rocks in the world / “We’re all carrying on the best we can.” / Corporeal Writing email

“Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs-neither the government nor the bourgeoisie nor an outside power. It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun.”

— Hannah Arendt / The Origins of Totalitarianism

“The fundamental reason high-tech solutions won’t save us from climate change is simple: time. Time is by far the most important variable — and the one thing technology can’t give us more of.”

— Dr. Jonathan Foley / “Can Tech Save Us From Climate Change?” / BBC Science Focus

“The angels are leaving all the alcoves everywhere, the medium in which Unicorns, Bigfoot, Green Deer exist growing always thinner, like the rain forests and the creatures that live and breathe in them. As the forests fall to make way for motels and Hiltons and McDonald’s, the whole magic universe is dying.”

— William S. Burroughs / The Cat Inside

“the airplanes fly
unassuming over O they eat
and eat the steel mouths
and burn what the earth
spun eons to form”

— Maureen N. McLane / “Some Say”

“Standing nearly as tall as a basketball hoop and weighing as much as a grizzly bear, Gigantopithecus blacki was the greatest ape to ever live. For more than a million years during the Pleistocene … these nearly 10-foot-tall apes were most likely doomed by their specialized diet and an inability to adapt to a changing environment.”

— Jack Tamisiea / “The Biggest Ape That Ever Lived Was Not Too Big to Fail” / The New York Times

“I want to be/like self rising bread/just there/in the warm/silent kitchen/sunny, ignored/and endlessly productive”

— Molly Schaeffer / “Some days, the light”

What I’m Listening To:

“turtleneck, iBook, power cord, medications
Button down laptop, hand cool body lotion, Bella Freud, YSL, Eckhaus Latta, Eyelash curler, vibrator, teaser, BYE BYE, BYE BYE”

— Kim Gordon / “BYE BYE”