the mountains sheeted ice and snow silent and taut snow peaks cut the sky the steaming wolves—rush—gain ground taking of life forbidden
image: françois grenier de saint-martin / le combat de jeanne jouve pour sauver ses enfants de la bête du gévaudan / 1840, in public domain
What I’m Reading:
“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson / “Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes”
I sat down brusquely on the dentist’s chair feeling I was about to get routed in some manner. Mint green all about the place. The trickling of water somewhere by my knees.
“Do you want the serial bicuspid?” he said, holding out what seemed to be a verdigris premolar.
“No, I want tooth number 14, for goodness sake,” I said.
“Do you have a nightclub act?” he said, and quickly came at my face with a syringe.
“Listen,” I said pulling at the bib on my chest popping it away from the clip. “I’ll be back. I have to go to the restroom and stare at my genitals in the mirror for 23 seconds. And then I need to hear the cantering of calico ponies before I can submit to crown number 14.”
He said he would accompany me to the restroom and do the extraction while holding up my shirt, but he was by no means going to look at me, or any other part of my anatomy, but my mouth.
“It’s not about that,” I said. “This isn’t a sexual thing. But listen, why don’t you wear your surgical mask over your eyes while you extract my tooth? I’ll guide you by tapping out in Morse code where you are relative to tooth number 14.”
“I don’t know Morse code,” he said. He grabbed a handful of sharp implements from the tray and led me down the hall toward the restroom.
“All the better,” I said. “I don’t know Morse code either, but I’ll moan you through it. Maybe you’ll take out a couple of the wrong teeth, or maybe you’ll accidentally chip a few teeth. I’d like that.”
He stopped short by the fish tank. I could hear the hissing of the aerator. All the tropical fish were gone; only the aquarium snails were visible lined up on the inside glass in a formation that spelled “NO.”
“Do you realize that you’re the only patient that comes in to have his teeth ruined?” He took a handful of small blue rocks from the aquarium floor. “Blueberry bubble gum rocks,” he said, and popped them into his mouth.
“That’s me,” I said. “Eight shows a week, two on the weekends. I like to stand out from the crowd. Why do you think I wear these mesh tank tops given the awful shape I’m in — to show off my deltoids or pectorals?” I slapped at my gelatin chest.
“No. I want everyone to enjoy these rolls of fat.” I reached down and grabbed three spare tires muffined over my belt. “Ridge upon mighty ridge. I want to set my jiggle to glory!”
“You are quite unique in all the most unexpected ways,” he said. “Do you do a nightclub act? Do you know any Englebert?”
“Let’s go, doc! Put that mask over your eyes and let’s extract this sucker.
image: unknown k’iché mayan artist / burial urn / mfa, boston
What I’m Reading:
“I am a hungry heart on skinny legs, standing on the edge of a journey— no maps, no guides, instincts muddled by neglect or abandonment or mistake…”
I see you across the barren parklet. You are eating bits of soft pink flesh.
My hair wilts. Your curls frizz.
I lick the hot sauce off my fingers. You yell that you are an arriviste.
I scream that I was once part of the noblesse oblige and waved banderitas.
You warble an Edith Piaf song. I huff gas out of a brown paper bag.
You sing two registers too low. My viscera gurgles. I pee my pants where I stand — mud puddles form around my feet.
Tomorrow you will sign away your inalienable rights for a used 78 rpm record of “Thee Infanticide Blues.” I will strum The Hits of the Borscht Belt Songbook tonight on my ukulele.
The gloaming hour.
I leave a minute after you do.
You to your elevator shaft. Me to my abandoned mine.
Dark. Wasteland.
We may meet again next year.
What I’m Reading:
“Experience teaches us that governments are only moved to take environmental problems seriously when people vote for environmental political parties.”
— Preface to Final Statement of the First Planetary Meeting of the Global Greens in Rio de Janeiro, 31 May 1992
“History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.”
— Sarah Vowell / Assassination Vacation
“The last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there were trees at the South Pole. All of our fossil-fuel burning is accelerating or rewinding all kinds of natural phenomena, mixing geologic eras and warping the previously well-defined strata of Earth history. We are hurtling into the future at a breakneck pace, only to be outrun by the distortions of nature we have unleashed by rampant extraction and consumption.”
— Tatiana Schlossberg / “She Taught Us to Do Nothing. Now Jenny Odell Wants to Save Time.“ / The New York Times
“You can fall in love in a museum, but only
with the art or its silence…”
— Kevin Young / “Diptych”
“To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is no longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?”
— Georges Perec / “Approaches to What?”
“All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
— George Orwell / “Why I Write”
“Looking back on previous human calamities, all of which will be dwarfed by this, you find yourself repeatedly asking “why didn’t they … ?” The answer is power: the power of a few to countermand the interests of humanity. The struggle to avert systemic failure is the struggle between democracy and plutocracy. It always has been, but the stakes are now higher than ever.”
— Georges Monbiot / “With our food systems on the verge of collapse, it’s the plutocrats v life on Earth” / The Guardian
“He didn’t mean any harm, just as Father never meant any harm. But harm is rarely about intention.”
— Victoria Chang / Dear Memory
What I’m Listening To:
“Free advice is adjusted to market price One dollar symbolic”
Image: detail of tikal tapestry / unknown mayan artist / mfa, boston
upon a human effigy jar (haiku)
human effigy bare maize cob—bones without flesh jar of life + death
image: human head effigy jar / unknown mayan artist / mfa boston
What I’m Reading:
“Indigenous thinkers not only acknowledge contingency and humans’ lack of control in the world; they also see it as empowering and humbling, not something frightening.”
— Daniel Wildcat / Haskell Indian Nations University
Sometimes I am asked to clarify my position and I say I’m equidistant to roil and root.
Sometimes I am asked to qualify what I mean and I say this hand is love and this hand is hate.
Sometimes I wonder what all of this means and I say to myself: I didn’t ask to be put on this ride but I’m going to have to ride it out.
Sometimes I rail and Sometimes I sleep through it all
Sometimes I think in English and Sometimes I think in Spanish
and …
In this way I moved ever so much closer to where I thought I needed to be. What I needed to do to regain some balance in my life.
I turned on my tuneage.
I listened to John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Music Series Volumes 1-3, all three records put me in the mood to do something drastic.
Especially after reading about the making of the records — now that I was weighed down with the knowledge that the heartbeats I kept hearing throughout the latter two records were the heartbeats of their dead baby.
By the time I came to the song “John & Yoko” on Unfinished Music 3, with the repeated and incessant cries of “John,” “Yoko,” and the heaving palpitations of the dead baby’s heart I started throwing books in the fireplace. I couldn’t take it.
I left the apartment and went to O’Hara’s — the Irish pub down the street on the corner of South Miami Ave and 26th Street — it was half empty and dark just the way I enjoyed it. I chose the end most stool by the rarely used back entrance, certain that I’d get some writing done.
No one would want to sit near a television with a screen saver on it, all the action was near the front where the University of Miami football game was blaring.
I ordered the Reuben Egg Rolls — not exactly the first dish one thinks of when one is thinking about Irish pub food.
That is how I got to this very point.
What I’m Reading:
“Maybe ‘the point’ isn’t to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment”
— Jenny Odell / Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
“Surrounded by people it is very easy to feel alone. Surrounded by penguins, less so.”
— Nell Stevens / Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World
“I felt this pain early. My brain chemistry was especially susceptible to this change, particularly vulnerable to the architecture of our phones, our apps, and our feeds. I spent thousands of hours caught within the smartphone-enabled dopamine trap attached to my body. I could feel my daily ability to focus narrowed, excised, dissolved, and diminished as this extraction of my attention became more efficient.”
— Tobias Rose-Stockwell / “Reconstructing Our Attention in the Era of Infinite Digital Rabbit Holes”
“The #ClimateCrisis is not a warning. It’s happening. I urge world leaders to ACT now.”
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus / Director-General of the World Health Organization
“This is just the beginning … Current policies globally have us hitting 2.7 degrees (Celsius) warming by 2100. That’s truly terrifying … As scientists agreed last year: There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all. Deep, rapid and sustained cuts in carbon emissions to net zero can halt the warming, but humanity will have to adapt to even more severe heatwaves in the future.”
— Simon Lewis / Chair of global change science at the University College London
“It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.”
— Cormac McCarthy / All the Pretty Horses
“Here follows the phone number of a dead person. Here follows a game based on perfect information. Five minutes have passed since I wrote this line. I mistook my baby’s cry for the radiator hiss.”
— Dan Chiasson / “Here Follows an Account of the Nature of Birds”
“I live on a yellow submarine not quite as glamorous as it sounds”
— Maija Haavisto / “Ship / Plum”
What I’m Listening To:
“Little people like your offspring Boiled alive for some Gods stocking Buddha’s watching, Buddha’s waiting”
— The Human League / “Being Boiled (Fast Version)”
thee istsfor manity reader 