Count the year’s conquests

Dearest X,

December rush, eh?
Rebarbative bedfellows, yes?
Assuage the babblative, no?

You’ve got another December rush going and no guardian of the journal yet—you… you… you see… you see men hovering outside your window 15 & 1/2 storeys up—what phantasms these? What dour inflections of second sight? What third-eye astigamtismus, those shimmering Fata Morganas? Weren’t the visitations supposed to happen Christmas Eve? It’s three weeks before Christmas, man! Be damned masts! Confound the mast climbers! Rock the rock pigeons in their hidebound pinnacles! At the end of the year I see a procession of all the dead things seen throughout the year. What queasiness this? How quizzical. How illogically logical that this would appear before me on the day of the supernovae—on the day of multitude earthquakes—and dozens of volcano borborygmus…(or is it my stomach?) Be off visions—be off, you hovering homunculi, before I pincer you with forefinger and thumb—you pin-tailed wren (assassins). Vape elsewhere into the winds. Count the year’s conquests in slower measures, and hushed(!) tones, by the edge of tsunami quay—and take long steps toward the end of that miniature pier. Your eye sockets full of garter and indigo snakes compel me toward viper thoughts. This door prize of papercuts bores me in the standard modes. Note the batch and quantity—mark the name and model! Inspector 13 was here, and he hung from his neck a single use noose—17 centimeters from the ground, and he drowned in 9.5 centimeters of water. Take your excellence wherever you can find it…

Yours sincerely,

The Gibbous Red Star

What I’m Reading:

Post-meaning weaponizes our sense of bewilderment in the bare face of it and neuters criticism by denuding the language that we criticize in. How can you show that something is racist, or stupid, or dangerous, or genocidal when nothing means anything?

AI did not put us on this pathway—the emancipation of language from meaning has long been the pursuit of hucksters and salesmen and is the long-term project of far-right politicians—but through its hyperproduction of content and its flattening of language to a two-dimensional surface it is certainly accelerating our journey down it; if you wanted to invent a machine that would create the conditions for fascism to take root, you would invent ChatGPT.

— Matt Greene / “On the Rise of ChatGPT and the Industrialization of the Post-Meaning World” / Lithub