Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

We CAN have joy and OWN our alienation at the same time.

— Jeff Tweedy / World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music

America, like hope’s sharp pencil,
winks brightly beyond a gantlet of elegant shill.

— Lisa Russ Spaar / “Before I Can Exist, I Have To Enter The Gift Shoppe” / The New Yorker

The new data, released at the UN’s Cop29 climate conference in Azerbaijan, indicates that the planet-heating emissions from coal, oil and gas will rise by 0.8% in 2024. In stark contrast, emissions have to fall by 43% by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping to the 1.5C temperature target and limiting “increasingly dramatic” climate impacts on people around the globe.

— Damian Carrington / “‘No sign’ of promised fossil fuel transition as emissions hit new high” / The Guardian

Poems are bullshit unless they are broken 
like a horse, like a dog kicked in the ribs, 
Like your favorite toy that’s missing an arm.

— Kenyatta Rogers / “Ars Poetica”

As a virtual space that perpetually performs the “now-all-at-once,” the Internet has brought with it a new paradigm of human consciousness-one that propels us toward nonlinear narratives and instantiates the paradox of ephemeral permanence. This new consciousness encourages us to align the speed of our thinking and meaning-making with the now-dominant mode through which information transfer occurs . . . We shape these systems, and they shape us in return. Set, repeat . . . This recursive sculpting has been going on long enough that we’re able to chart the many ways it’s changed us as people and as writers. 

— Seth Abramson & Jesse Damiani / “Series Editors’ Introduction” / BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing

Maybe a life doesn’t
matter so much as the feeling it leaves behind, whether
anyone receives the feeling or not. Maybe our goal is to
spend all the light. Since none of us asked to be born.

— Victoria Chang / “Untitled #9, 1995”

… I ADORE the Ramones. If I haven’t heard them for a while, tears of joy shoot out of my eyes like windshield wiper fluid when were re-united.

— Jeff Tweedy / World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music

What I’m Listening To:

Well, I’m against it
I’m against it
I don’t like Jesus freaks
I don’t like circus geeks
I don’t like summer and spring
I don’t like anything

— The Ramones / “I’m Against It”