Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

. . . The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake.

— Maggie Smith / “Good Bones”

So now we find ourselves at an Orwellian moment, almost a Seussian one. Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy, so that we can do more of something—drilling for oil and gas—that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second most populous city.

— Bill McKibben / “Donald Trump Invents an Energy Emergency” / The New Yorker

I write for the future

because my present is
demolished.
I fly to the future

to retrieve my
demolished present
as a legible past.

— Fady Joudah / “[…]” / […]: Poems

I still lived alone in those days. The man who’d helped me make the baby had left to find his way into the television. Specks of skins of selves he’d been in other years still lay around me on the air; and, as such, I’d breathe him in. I pulled his long hair from the sink pipes. 

— Blake Butler / Scorch Atlas

I remembered my father before he disappeared. The more years passed, the more my memories of him faded. They lost their colour and texture. Their gap like a missing tooth. You kept running your tongue over what wasn’t there anymore.

— Babak Lakghomi / South

As we approach the ultimate bad sequel, a second Trump Administration, post-apocalyptic dramas marked by pandemics (“The Last of Us,” “Station Eleven”), environmental catastrophe (“Snowpiercer,” “The End”), and the erosion of reproductive rights (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Furiosa”) have continued to proliferate. Many of them draw on decades-old source material that has taken on new relevance. When such works are successful, they are often described as “prescient” or “prophetic,” as though their creators saw the future and described it in art; when they are heavy-handed or make you want to look away, you might call them “too real.” But a better indication of a dystopia’s success may be that its world is at once alien and unsettlingly plausible.

— Daniel A. Gross / “Are We Living in a Dystopia?” / The New Yorker

. . . Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

— Maggie Smith / “Good Bones”

What I’m Listening To:

Switch over, switch off
Switch over, switch off
Switch off, switch off, switch off,
switch off

— Horsegirl / “Switch Over”