Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The dead are carried away in tote bags.
Because they got carried away, they are borne away.
Only some of those borne away got carried away.
Some of the others borne away were newly born or else had borne
them.
They got borne away from home. Or was it to home.

— Eugene Ostashevsky / “Falling Sonnet XI”

If you had to point to one continuous theme in all of Pynchon’s work, it is a silver Christian fish bumper sticker turned right-side up to look like a rocket. Our science worship has usurped the God worship of previous centuries, but ultimately points to Old Testament outcomes: Apocalypse, holocaust, and the fascistic desire to dominate. The phallic sex-death drive of the 00000 V2 rocket—produced using concentration camp labor—ends the world of Gravity’s Rainbow, but also begins the nightmare with a horror; you will never hear that screaming which comes across the sky, because the impact of a supersonic rocket outpaces the noise of the explosion.

— Devin Thomas O’Shea / “Why Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland—a Disappointment When It Was Published—is the Novel We Need Right Now” / Lithub

You think there is someone there, standing in your skin, but there isn’t. Accept it. If you would like for there to be someone where you are, albeit briefly, you must choose who to be and be that person. 

— Jesse Ball / The Repeat Room

wordless, but not quite silent
unless to say love, unless not to speak
—there is leftover gunpowder in this line
becoming a simplified beginning

— Duo Duo / “If No Echo, No Monologue”

Scientists think sleep is the brain’s rinse cycle, when fluid percolating through the organ flushes out chemical waste that accumulated while we were awake . . . cerebrospinal fluid, the liquid bathing the brain, seeps through the organ via tiny passages alongside blood vessels, sweeping away metabolic refuse and other unwanted molecules. Fluid flow through this so-called glymphatic system ramps up during sleep . . . vigorous glymphatic clearance is beneficial: Circulation falters in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative illnesses.

— Mitch Leslie / “Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself during sleep” / Science

Sometimes, you say, I wear
an abstracted look that drives you
up the wall, as though it signified
distress or disaffection.
Don’t take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it’s time for me to practice
growing old.

— Stanley Kunitz / “Passing Through”

He looked up. His pale hair looked white. He looked fourteen going on some age that never was. He looked as if he’d been sitting there and God had made the trees and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then his own again. Above all else he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one else had heard of yet. Some vast tragedy not of fact or incident or event but of the way the world was.

— Cormac McCarthy / The Crossing

What I’m Listening To:

Gotta keep moving from a life of losing, reading news by the sea
Sentences are ending me
Even from the water, the deepest things are talking
By only going further into it

— Ty Segall / “Buildings”