Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

His monsters and mistresses take on the shape of your face, the movement of your hands, your body a shadow beneath this hallucination of America, slowly dying

— Monica Ong / “Yellow Insomnia”

For Vaughan each crashed car set off a tremor of excitement, in the complex geometries of a dented fender, in the unexpected variations of crushed radiator grilles, in the grotesque overhang of an instrument panel forced on to a driver’s crotch as if in some calibrated act of machine fellatio.

The intimate time and space of a single human being had been fossilized for ever in this web of chromium knives and frosted glass.

— J. G. Ballard / Crash

War-doing is a cycle
of trial and error.

Death-giving is permission
to trial and error.

— Mai Der Vang / “Procedures in Hunt of Wreckage” / Yellow Rain

I won’t bother correcting Trump’s numbers. Instead, I have a question. Who said Gazans are worried about dying? There are many people around the world who worry about dying, including some Americans who don’t have health insurance or who live in areas that are at risk of wildfires. But our worry is not about dying. Palestinians are worried about being killed by Israeli soldiers, settlers, bombs, and bullets. How do you stop people from being killed? Not by removing the people who have been shot and bombed—but by stopping the people who are doing the shooting and bombing. 

— Mosab Abu Toha / “Gaza Must Be Rebuilt by Palestinians, for Palestinians” / The New Yorker

Where the sword decides and  
Foucault lectures to the ghosts of crows 
about sex and the biopolitic. 
And what of colonialism? they squawk,  
Y que del negro atado?  

— Mónica Alexandra Jiménez / “Theft”

“Why did God set it up like this?” Rachel asked. “With them as masters and us as slaves?”

“There is no God, child. There’s religion but there’s no God of theirs. Their religion tells that we will get our reward in the end.

However, it apparently doesn’t say anything about their punishment. But when we’re around them, we believe in God. Oh, Lawdy Lawd, we’s be believin’. Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.”

— Percival Everett / James

But the proposed reversal would be truly and deeply disgraceful—not just climate denial but basic-science denial. In the ongoing debate about whether our current dystopia is Orwellian or Huxleyan, this is true “1984” stuff, the periodic table equivalent of “War is peace” and “Freedom is slavery.”

— Bill McKibben / “Trump’s E.P.A. Seeks to Deny Science That Americans Discovered” / The New Yorker

What I’m Listening To:

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves
We died in your hills, we died in your deserts
We died in your valleys and died on your plains
We died ‘neath your trees and we died in your bushes
Both sides of the river, we died just the same
…
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except “deportees”

— Woody Guthrie / “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”