“… if the story is starting to feel very forced, or if you become excited about an alternate possibility for your story, feel free to abandon or modify one of these constraints”
the wild is where we belong
“I find myself writing about family and the little betrayals that can occur between parents and children, brothers and sisters. The family is such fertile terrain for fiction, because there’s shared history there, such intimacy and love, and yet our families are forced on us. No one knows quite how to push our buttons like our family members, and small gestures can take on huge resonances.”
enough of that
“Often my entry into a story is a pair of characters…”
buried alive
“FORMATTING: All manuscripts for this class should include your name …”
full of rats
What I’m Reading:
“By the mid-1960s, we would discover Gysin’s ‘cut-ups,’ a creative methodology enabling a far more accurate reflection of so-called consensus reality than any linear structure could impose. In turn, this retroactively liberated me from feeling obliged to formulate any formal sense or shape out of the mess my fractured memories delivered.”
dont appease / go back — all the background to destroy — liberate urself
cut-up / marinate ur mind stew in random abandon
What I’m Reading:
“’Genesis … your task from now on is to tell me . . . HOW DO WE SHORT-CIRCUIT CONTROL?’”…
“… Once you decide to devote yourself to this cut-up technique, it joyfully contaminates every aspect of your life. A kind of truth virus. And, for me, it remains the only reliable filter through which to observe this earth and the overriding culture with any hope of accuracy.”
— William S. Burroughs + Genesis P-Orridge / Nonbinary: A Memoir
“‘For years, you read all the articles,’ Wehage told me recently, over the phone. ‘You look at pictures of the pollution, you think about the greed that fuels it, and you feel upset. But then, when you’re there, you understand that it’s so much worse than anything you could read.’”
— Chris Wehage, to Jia Tolentino / “What to Do with Climate Emotions” / The New Yorker
“I write as though you could understand And I could say it One must always pretend something Among the dying”
— W.S. Merwin / “For A Coming Extinction”
“The human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end. Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today. It is hard work for us to remember that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like we are forever: burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coalmine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our collective fantasies of perpetual growth, constant innovation, and endless energy, just as the reality of individual mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.”
— Roy Scranton / How to Die in the Anthropocene
“Even if they survived — even if they could be perpetuated indefinitely in laboratories and zoos — their extinction would already be in progress. Like a neurodegenerative disease, extinction was a slow hollowing, not a sharp cut. The death of the last holdout was in some sense a mere formality.”
— Ned Beauman / Venomous Lumpsuckers
“I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I’ve known in life I don’t know what I’d do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare. Kafka on wheels.”
— Cormac McCarthy / The Sunset Limited
“in some cheap room they will find me there and never know my name my meaning nor the treasure of my escape.”
— Charles Bukowski / “old man, dead in a room”
“The luxury I had of pondering my emotions at length was evidence of how much closer I was to the problem than to the solution: climate change’s worst effects will always fall on the poor and disenfranchised, both locally and globally, and in this context it was hard to believe that the project of teaching the world’s most fortunate people how to feel was more than another form of self-absorption.”
— Jia Tolentino / “What to Do with Climate Emotions” / The New Yorker
What I’m Listening To:
“Onward Buffalo Alone Onward, no herd, I heard You killed them”
image: detail from jenny holzer’s the living series / clark art institute
unlocking the vault—
where i dont upbraid myself continuously—where john currin paintings dont come to life—where id like to be in some remote place like yellowknife—but as the earth is burning there—and there remains no place to go—that isnt burning—and there remain too many places to go to upbraid my fellow man—because life is one endless upbraiding—i unbraid myself some more—upbraid my boulder—upbraid existence—upbraid the cure— because they remind me of camus—with that song—i even upbraid myself—again—i dont upbraid my curry chicken—because its ethiopian—or should i say eritrean—but as im not certain i upbraid that as well—im upcycling my upbraiding—im braying in my seat right now—as i mute my video and sound on zoom—which i often upbraid—which brings me joy—oh joy—
What I’m Reading:
“you pray and pray your barrio’s economic / situation will improve. / you’re answered by machines that offer you numerical options.”
— Raquel Salas Rivera / “and because you were born here”
wayward talk of chile and ecuador, the prime stops on the silk road, techniques of the boustrophedon, raging poppy fields + too much hash…
the one-upmanship: sharp…
a peripatetic call and response about the tang + other merits of uzbeki beer + uruguayan women, the obscurity of radiohead + the future is m(h)aol + have u listened to attachment styles?…
the timbre maudlin the umka a perfect puff…
declamations of wanderlust in the south, remaking the ruins of venezuela in the image of argentina, death by clear cutting rainforest, petrodollars are the ruination…
somehow the talk turns to czars…
the plov congeals in its oil…
meandering laments of the rarity of this ritual, forecasts + promises to do this more, something in the voices belies that certainty…
the crash of a kazan clanging a death roll in the kitchen…
peregrinations of assiduous maths—parsing a $109 bill 3 ways to the tenth of a cent, then a drunken 3 card pile up on a plastic credit rectangle…
yes, let’s, more often…
a terminal point chicken is beheaded in the alley…
What I’m Reading:
“The United States has already endured 15 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters this year, underscoring the dangers of and need for humanity to combat the fossil fuel-driven planetary emergency.”
— Jessica Corbett / “A Record 15 Billion-Dollar Disasters Have Hit US So Far This Year: NOAA” / Common Dreams
thee istsfor manity reader 