Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

I LOST MY LEFT ARM today. It came off clean at the shoulder. Janice 2 picked it up and brought it back to the hotel. I would have thought it would affect my balance more than it has. It is like getting a haircut. The air moving differently around the remaining parts of me. Also by turns a sense of newness and lessness—free me, undead me, don’t look at me.

— Anne de Marcken / It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

One wants to shout to Hammerstein and his cohorts, Go ahead, take over the government! Arrest Hitler and his henchmen, rule for a few years, and then try again. It won’t be as bad as what happens next. But, of course, they cannot hear us. They couldn’t have heard us then.

— Adam Gopnik / “The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers” / The New Yorker

What I was
is vanished.

I came back home
but I came back
gone.

— Cynthia Cruz / “Dark Register”

He said, “You’ve experienced a significant loss.” He said, “It isn’t just your arm.” He said,

“You’re grieving your life.” Since he broke off his penis he’s Mr. Wisdom. When he left, I closed the curtains again.

— Anne de Marcken / It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

The US moves to a different form of imperialism, which we can think about as neoliberal hegemony.

Still plenty of military adventures, so all through the period 1970 and on up. We’ve been at war basically since I would say 1776, roughly without interruption. . . but now the US began more dominantly using financial institutions to achieve similar ends. The IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, NAFTA, many other multi- and bilateral trade arrangements to force open financial markets around the world and continue to exercise US dominance.

— Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone / Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Dissent and Resistance

We see through a glass darkly, as patterns of authoritarian ambition seem to flash before our eyes: the demagogue made strong not by conviction but by being numb to normal human encouragements and admonitions; the aging center left; the media lords who want something like what the demagogue wants but in the end are controlled by him; the political maneuverers who think they can outwit the demagogue; the resistance and sudden surrender. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies in bright midafternoon light, where politicians fall back on familiarities and make faint offers to authoritarians and say a firm and final no—and then wake up a few days later and say, Well, maybe this time, it might all work out, and look at the other side! Precise circumstances never repeat, yet shapes and patterns so often recur. In history, it’s true, the same thing never happens twice. But the same things do.

— Adam Gopnik / “The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers” / The New Yorker

I was thinking about golems. I was thinking that I am like a golem. I feel more like earth now than like an animal. Mud and sticks and rags that look and act something like a live thing. And I thought: But really I’m more like an owl pellet. A boney, furry, coughed-up turd that walks and talks.

— Anne de Marcken / It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

What I’m Listening To:

They are children playing with guns
They are children playing with countries
Mining harbors, creating contras
The games they play
The lives they take

— The Minutemen / “Untitled Song for Latin America”