Then there was my uncle Mao. His own generational AI—his Little Red Bookworm in the rainstorm and no one left wanting his worn pouffy sieges. But that’s exactly what my underage blackguard aunt wore on her spectacles so it seemed as if half the day was a courtroom of wisecracks—retainers jutting out of her headgear. Not a good look in anyone’s book or on anyone’s Delphic oracle aunty.
My, my…how sense is relative.
image: detail from kay nielsen’s “the three princesses of the blue mountain,” 1914 / mfa boston
What I’m Reading:
“i have diver’s lungs from holding my breath for so long. i promise you i am not trying to break a record sometimes i just forget to exhale.”
— Yesenia Montilla / “a brief meditation on breath”
“We didn’t want to be comfortable. We didn’t feel comfortable. We felt uneasy with the society that we were part of, and we didn’t get any pleasure from the sonic information we were receiving from other people, so we decided to look at that particular issue and change it.”
She made an unusual, exciting discovery—rosary narrations with warbling wooers at the center of earplug spaces—messages in the marmalades, esoteric concatenations, erotic liberations, scratched phonographs.
Her observational arched eyebrow and nuanced approach to clam ranching led to further explorations with molting morphs, sunken oars, and sedative promiscuities.
Her life was now plunger ready. She continued drafting, something was bound to make sense to her piquant sensibility someday.
And that day was October 4th, 2023—the day of the coded codex.
What I’m Reading:
“Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.”
“I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”
— George Orwell / Homage to Catalonia
“Apathy and delirium sun themselves on the porch. All the old dragons loll along the beach.”
— James Broughtin / “Tristan at the Seashore”
“Groups of animal species are vanishing at a rate 35 times higher than average due to human activity, according to researchers, who say it is further evidence that a sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is under way and accelerating.”
— Patrick Greenfield / “Mutilating the tree of life: Wildlife loss accelerating, scientists warn” / The Guardian
“we’re going to need new tactics strategies for endurance don’t ruminate on sinkholes water supplies toxins massive unknowable truly undivinable fractures in the brittle tectonic masses”
— Caryl Pagel / “Saturday”
“Across the whole of the Americas, the introduction of infectious diseases from Europe resulted in a 90 percent fall in the population, from about 60.5 million in 1500 to 6 million a century later.”
— Jonathan Kennedy / Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues
“we cannot explain the world, named the same as marrow beaten to glue bones circling the belly of the Earth our voices shattering the glass windows of unrelenting, heated houses: mother describes the world: a tumour. yes.”
— Canisia Lubrin / “The World After Rain”
“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting”
— George Orwell / Homage to Catalonia
What I’m Listening To:
“Most of me is out of sight Hollow honeycomb I’m tired when the day breaks I’m tired when the day ends”
“Filling with rain in the streets, this September night’s lifting me up in an old-time elevator. Night’s ending, time’s tearing. And the cross streets fuse together in twisted images.”
look in the mirror misdemeanors and woodpiles perfect enema-rickshaw beginner landslides on and off at the most inopportune hot chomp brag lone cocoa beat transcendence a bunker of rogue startles mild clairvoyance and approbation a vignette sorbet a rim idiom
i was an egotist in a spangled tabernacle the most lost of causes
we are still here unsupervised and undeserving
What I’m Reading:
“The sky shatters like a blue shell; Veins from the back of the right hand pull free, And float in the air, a tree of dead blood;”
Then there was Kankakee—that year of enervating visions—and the posse of teenage courtiers whose dizzying luck was doomed by a pair of “ragged claws.” Fragile, as the wounded world, and openly melancholic. Yes, we had cinematic aspirations but the poisons were rapturous, draining our inner eye imagery, leaving only reverberations and badly drawn lines out of critical focal acuity. We only saw defendant palindromes swirling in the airy miasmas—penumbral and schoolmistress gray.
We never saw iridescent finches again. The world resolved as a dartboard roach living in pastina. We embodied the prosaic. The oneiric forever drained away.
We were forever wounded and relegated to lifespans of haunting memories without the ability to express ourselves precisely. We lived forever outside of the letterbox, mired in circles of confusion and extraneous silver halide crystals. Perception became a useless digital cortex.
We are now contortionists lacking flexibility—amoral tank flankers and lyric flunkies. We die with each simple fade to black.
This is a tragic feeling we live with. We expire as hopeless eyepieces suffocating in Vaseline stains.
We cleave the wings of our dreams.
What I’m Reading:
“I think the name you get given at birth should be seen as a temporary tag, and it goes with the families and the social groups and the expectations of what we’re supposed to belong to; if that tag doesn’t fit what you imagine you wish to become, it should be discarded.”
thee istsfor manity reader 