Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

According to Flannery O’Connor, people without hope don’t write novels.

People without hope don’t write novels. I am writing a novel. Therefore I must have hope.

Does that work?

— Sigurd Nunez / The Vulnerables

A few things became clear to me then.
The body itself has no use for hope.
It hardens in grief to live beyond hope.
And the only real use of narrative is to cheat
that ancient urge inside us, pale animal
with its face resembling the inside of our death
masks, its long unheeded, persistent murmur
clearing into a deafening verdict: Leave.

— Rohan Chhetri / “New Delhi in Winter”

You’re flawed, and the world you see corresponds to these flaws. Weaknesses define you, drive new and original strategies to cover them, and they make you who you are. You don’t exist without them. Correcting the errors — seeing perfectly and objectively — is neither desirable nor possible.

— Martin MacInnes / In Ascension

… Was this what Rome felt like

toward the end? When the colosseums filled with gladiators
stirred the masses into a frenzy. How the people hungered for

food & freedom, but instead lost themselves in the carnal play
of sacrifice—reliable warriors, safer to believe in than

Caesar.

— Yesenia Montilla / “As Capitalism Gasps for Breath I Watch the Knicks Game”

We contend with the myriad distractions flowing through the pocket-size screens we carry with us everywhere. By various estimates, a typical smartphone owner checks a device 150 times per day— every six minutes— and touches, swipes, or taps it more than 2,500 times . . . Polyconsciousness is what one researcher termed the resulting state of mind that divides attention between the physical world and the one our devices connect us to, undermining here-and-now interactions with actual people and things around us.

— Rob Walker / The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday

I pull a screw through my earlobe
and collect two drops of blood in the ditch
with all the grenade shells. Grenade, its shape
so much like the fruit they named it after,
pomegranate, from Latin pomum granatum
(apple with many seeds), something
I can harvest and pick from a tree—
a comfortable taste in my mouth, and yes,
fruit of the dead, or of fertility, depending
on whose sustenance to listen to.

—Aria Aber / “I Wake Up Curled Up in a C.D. Wright Poem” / Hard Damage

Living through the onset of rapid global warming involves learning to roll with the punches. Increasingly, those are quite real and painful—this year saw, again, an accelerating toll of flood and drought. But, even for climate scientists sequestered in the lab, life increasingly seems like a series of bewildering blows.

— Bill McKibben / “Hotter and Hotter” / The New Yorker

What I’m Listening To:

Our band could be your life
Real names’d be proof
Me and Mike Watt, we played for years
Punk rock changed our lives

— The Minutemen / “History Lesson, Pt. 2”