Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Thinks The world is fucking ending, swiftly followed by God, stop being a twat.

— Julia Armfield / Private Rites

But there is nothing up here. There is nothing more in the sea. We’ve taken it all. 

— Ethan Rutherford / North Sun or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther

Flint is what it is.
Knowingly to force the poor to purchase and use toxic water
isn’t a form of chemical warfare, isn’t a form of genocide?

— Lawrence Joseph / “Is What It Is”

Yet executing ten-year-olds seemed beyond the pale. Even Funston did not endorse killing children. Balangiga changed that: one can make the case that this is the pivotal moment, not only in the war itself but in the American way of making war. Jake Smith’s statement echoed Phil Sheridan’s call for total annihilation of the enemy in the Civil and Indian wars. The easy success of the Splendid War transformed America into a martial society, and Smith’s template appears over the next two centuries in conflicts in which an entrenched enemy, of a different race, turns to guerrilla tactics; it informs “police actions” in the many “Banana Republics,” Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib. The Philippine War was the first time Sheridan’s dictates spread beyond America, during our premier attempt to “civilize the world.” There is no great difference between Smith’s command to Waller and Captain Ernest Medina’s nearly identical March 16, 1968, briefing before the My Lai Massacre. “Our job is to go in rapidly, and to neutralize everything,” he allegedly told Charlie Company. “To kill everything.” After Balangiga, the American public accepted the fatal logic of “pacification”: it becomes a “necessity” lodged inside American memory that refuses to disappear.

— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire

I stole the yellow bird
That lives in the devil’s sex

— Joyce Mansour / “I stole the yellow bird …”

. . . This vast city
open to invaders & vagrants for centuries
now small for two.
A few things became clear to me then.
The body itself has no use for hope.
It hardens in grief to live beyond hope.
And the only real use of narrative is to cheat
that ancient urge inside us, pale animal
with its face resembling the inside of our death
masks, its long unheeded, persistent murmur
clearing into a deafening verdict: Leave.

— Rohan Chhetri / “New Delhi in Winter”

There is little the imagination can do with an ending that is already assured.

— Julia Armfield / Private Rites

What I’m Listening To:

It’s a horrorland
Destruction
Don’t give up
On being sweet
Joy, we’ll build
A cute harmless world
Don’t want one from you, cult
Don’t want one from you, cult

— Dry Cleaning / “Joy”