Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living. Guns us down. In another split second millennia will pass and the beings on earth have become exoskeletal-cybernetic-machine-deathless-postbeings who’ve harnessed the energy of some hapless star and are guzzling it dry.

— Samantha Harvey / Orbital

empacho: you ate cactus until you burst open like a rotten fruit

tacos de cabeza: quandaries posed under the spell of an orange moon

un susto: your future ghost twitches in an empty room

— Erika L. Sánchez / “Translation”

… we’re out of margin. We’re now watching the climate crisis play out in real time, week by week, day by day.

— Bill McKibben / “Water Though Not Everywhere” / Substack 

Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease 
    to be. And
Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours.
It is just that so often they live till their hair is white.
They make excellent corpses, among the expensive 
    flowers …. 

— Gwendolyn Brooks / “Beverley Hills, Chicago”

Sea surface temperatures in the path of Helene were as warm as 89 degrees Fahrenheit — 2 to 4 degrees above normal … These record water temperatures have been made significantly more likely by human-caused climate change, according to Climate Central. The North Atlantic Ocean as a whole has seen record warm temperatures in 2024, storing 90% of the excess heat from climate change produced by greenhouse gas pollution.

— Alex Sundby, Tom Hanson, Brian Dakss, David Yeomans / “Helene death toll tops 100 as Southeast digs out from storm’s devastation” / CBS News 

That is why uprooted fields meandered in the midst of roads
             clay shot up in corollas
             the nodes of telegraph wires showed traces of the trees
             there in the distance moonless skies

— Julien Blaine / “Eighteenth”

We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.

— Samantha Harvey / Orbital

What I’m Listening To:

You’re gonna laugh
You’re gonna sing
And you’re gonna bring the world down round your ears
While the temperature grows ugly

— The Smile / “The Slip”