Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

We were nostalgic for foolishness, because it meant wisdom might matter. We were nostalgic for fakery, because it meant realness might matter. We were nostalgic for trompe l’oeil, for fool’s gold, for crocodile tears, for Mercator globes, for mimeographs, for velveteen, for signifiers unmoored from signifieds.

— Donna Stonecipher / “The Ruins of Nostalgia”

If I fall silent and words ripen
it’s the voice of an olive tree in its quiet seed.

— Ronaldo Kattan / “Two-Blooded”

My intent, like his, was to take a singular interest in all I encountered. To turn my attentions away from the noxious chatter of Washington, the tribal feuding on television and computer screens, and care only for the particularities I found along the way. To shrink my horizons to that of a walking man and to root my views of the world in what I encountered step by step. To honor and respect what I saw.

— Neil King Jr. / American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Rememberance

Half-naked in her ankle-length dressing-gown,
my mother is battling with mosquitoes —

or not so much battling with as bowing to —
the phalanxes of bloodthirsty mosquitoes

that whine their high-pitched whines in her hair
and will not let her sleep. Not a chance.

— Selma Hill / “Zvuv”

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.

— Elizabeth Kolbert / The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

The math

is grammar school: X thousand workers,
Y hundred jobs. The shoe factory closed last year.
Nobody’s starving, but the church is in fear
it’ll lose some paying customers.

— Thomas Lux / “Somebody’s Aunt Out Swabbing Her Birdbath”

Stopped in cars, we are waiting to accelerate
along different trajectories. I catch the rising
pitch of a train—today one hundred nine people
died in a stampede converging at a bridge;
radioactive water trickles underground
toward the Pacific Ocean; nickel and copper
particulates contaminate the Brocade River.
Will this planet sustain ten billion people?

— Arthur Sze / “Doppler Effect”

What I’m Listening To:

Hail, hail, the Eyeball Kid
Well, the first time I saw him was a Saigon jail
Cost me $27 dollars just to go his bail I said, “Your name will be in lights, and that’s no doubt
But you just got to have a manager, that’s what it’s all about”

— Tom Waits / “Eyeball Kid”