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

Note the Evil

I.

It said 6-12 hours. It’s been 8 plus hours and nothing. Nothing. Not hard or soft. Not wet or dry. Nothing. The jazz player hates the blues picker. The punk puckers up for a fight with the funkster. The classical player prods the pop artist with a sharpened cello bow. Bow down. Bow down and bend yourself over. We want to see you prostrate. We’d like to pilfer and perforate your soul. What is that droning I hear. Why is that detuned. Why is that sound treated. Why the warp. Why the skronk. Bring back the white noise. Bring down the sky.

II.

There’s usually a preferred profligacy of pathogens on the screen. Now there is nothing. Note the white screen. Note the night light. Nigh. Note the evil high on that ridge to the west. Note the puppetry of the bored gods. A lower case lot if I ever saw a sorry lot. Restore my fingers. Crumple up that Venn diagram. 

III.

You ain’t seeing what I’m seeing on the horizon of this new year.

I ain’t saying what I’m seeing on the horizon of the new year.

I ain’t writing about what I’m seeing on the horizon of the new year.

I ain’t skewing the horizon line of the new year.

I ain’t setting to skew the horizon line of the new year.

But eventually I’ll tell you, and then I’ll write about it, and then you… you will… you will skew the horizon line of the new year.

Horizons are meant to be horizontal as long as you look at the horizon in a particular way.

I ain’t looking at it in that particular way.

What I’m Reading:

It’s not just about going for the money; it’s about finding use for the money in a world where art, literature, design, and even the material things in life that may bring you joy have been so thoroughly corrupted by concessions that you need to be able to shed your sense of self like skin to find joy in it all.

— Matthew Byrd / “How Pluribus Reimagines 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers for a Generation With Nothing Left to Sell Out” / Reactor

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The hope is our prayers will make Him nicer, but
It don’t look likely, and to make it worse
An Act of God is anything at all
That lets the insurance people off the hook.

— Howard Nemerov / “Acts of God”

Logging and mining are destroying swathes of the Congo rainforest, with the result that African forests went from being a carbon sink to a carbon source in 2010 to 2017

— Alec Luhn / “Africa’s forests are now emitting more CO2 than they absorb” / New Scientist

in 1948 the UN general assembly passes a resolution they say any palestinian refugees who

want to return to their homes should be permitted to do so. they also mention money they

say that compensation must be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for

the loss of or damage to property. my great grandmother zahra owns one hundred dunams

of land in jish in palestine and on it: groves of olive trees. her sons flee but she stays with the

beauty and waits for her sons to come back.

— Hasib Hourani / “1. what warrants a war? (compilation)”

The worst climate disruptions will happen beyond U.S. borders, but they will put pressure on American society nonetheless. Migration to the southern border, perhaps the most powerful current in American politics today, is already being driven partly by ecological collapses in Central American farm economies. International monitors expect these pressures to grow over the next several years. If the country’s policy today is at all indicative, detention camps for immigrants will proliferate, often in climate dead zones, and the southern border will become even more militarized.

This would not be an America where the founding ideals hold much sway. The movement of people might even set states against one another. Tensions in receiving zones will—without strong, growing economies—create more opportunities for demagoguery. In dead zones, the dearth of public services and the fading imprimatur of the state will naturally erode local participatory democracy.

All of this could create even better conditions than those today for the kind of transactional authoritarian government that Trump is trying to establish. Xenophobia and racism are already pillars of this movement, and they would be strengthened by mass migration. State and local leaders affected by disasters might supplicate themselves to the president in order to receive the patronage of disaster aid. A hurricane or megafire during election season might be a convenient excuse for federal intervention.

The emerging Trump doctrine views empathy as a weakness and public welfare as a usurpation of the natural hierarchy. His authoritarianism is perfectly suited to an era of climate strife.

— Vann R. Newkirk II / “What Climate Change Will Do To America By Mid-Century” / The Atlantic

All is omen. The light is marrow of shadow: the insects will die in the dawn
tapers.

— Antonio Gamoneda / “Burn the Losses”

You make us fear each other, fear you, and so we send our own people out, and the world gets poisoned by our hate and our fear.

—Hugh Howey / Dust

Who can survive an apocalypse
And live? I made the roadkill a god
But I’m not allowed to speak for god
So I wait.

— Brian Gyamfi / “The Thing Dead on the Road”

What I’m Listening To:

it’s cold outside and my hands are dry
skin is cracked and i realize
that i hate the sound of guitars
a thousand grudging young millionaires
forcing silence sucking sound
forced into this conversation

— Fugazi / “Target”

beat down blues

the harvest supermoon beat me
down with its reflected incandescence

i gots the blues two weeks shy
of bluest day of the year

the shortest day of the year

i gots heathy feets that take me
nowhere

nowhere is nowhere
good to go

the shortest day of the year is near
if i cant remember where i’ve been can’t
remember where i’m going

the supermoon beat me down
high jacked my sanity

down near the shortest day of the year

What I’m Reading:

Violence is woven too deeply in the history and practice of American culture to be ignored.

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

force sucking a nor’easter

i shiver and plates collide
the dahabeeyah motors drain
oiling — like acid on concrete
i’m staking the last dinner seating

the revulsion total
your vague forearms bustle
the workload of genuis naked and false
an alteration of a month’s persuasion

we sink

simpering like sou’wester
force sucking a nor’easter

What I’m Reading:

Children had been the future, but did we even want the future anymore?

— Kassandra Montag / After the Flood

I Painted You

Several days of tempest,
Drifting to the north on unanswered orisons,
The datura oriented at the sun’s appearance.
Partial to impuissant seasons,
Speakers shorten their imprecations —
Ancients their divagations.
There I painted you
As a spot on the dimming sun.

What I’m Reading:

where can we put all this fire?
there is more fire than warmth
there are more walls than doors

will you teach me the language of walls?

— Anna Malihon / “[I’ve wanted to ask for a long time…]”

The Mopes

I.

Something like a true depressive’s day. Cold, cloudy, dark by 4pm. An elaborate torpor that caffeine won’t derail. Eating meals with your fingers. Eating cookies. Wear your pajamas all day. Walk 840 steps by 8:30pm … that’s the equivalent of one circuit around the apartment. Calls not made. Calls not answered. The maples denuded and bending in the wind outside. The mopes. The doom scrolls. The writing relegated to this you see before you. What gives? Shake this. (Shake this not).

II.

Scrounge not. Plod not. Spend the day and night in bed. Lower the blinds. Keep the sun at bay tomorrow. Press play. Press repeat. Turn down the volume. Read a book backward & upside-down. Close said book. Close (unsaid) eyes. Tomorrow. Cleanse. Fold. Manipulate. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow … 

III.

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 December 3, 2025 — the day of the coded codex.

What I’m Reading:

It was worse than having a sinking feeling; I was a sinking feeling, an unplayable adagio for strings; internal distances expanded and collapsed when I breathed. It was like failing to have awoken at the right point in a nightmare; now you had to live in it, make yourself at home.

— Ben Lerner / Leaving the Atocha Station

Multivariables (redux)

She delivered a dead man aboard pretending he was drunk. Otherwise, she delivered groceries ordered through an app. Though it must be said that she sometimes delivered blows to the head. The unsuspecting victims then became the next batch of sailors to be delivered up for impressment. She didn’t do any of the processing herself—she merely dropped off the victims, and on occasion delivered arithmetic books to various regional libraries.

One day she struck an unsuspecting Calculus book (like it was 1812) and sent a number of differential and multivariable maths skittering across the highway. She knew an opportunity when she struck one.

Upon exiting her impressment mobile she herself was struck, in the most integral of manners, by an errant British man-o’-war—three hundred miles off course from a breadfruit processing plant. It goes to show that calculus and impressment aren’t complementary.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled life. . .

Thank you.

What I’m Reading:

CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1965: 20-1

CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1990: 75-1

CEO-to-worker pay ratio today: 280-to-1 

Trickle-down economics was always a sham.

Nothing has ever trickled down.

— Robert Reich / Bluesky post

a violence kinetic

you have never seen me
yet it feels like remembering
maybe this is all there is

i believe so
it feels alarmingly short

i am translating from the spanish now
i am projecting from the post-modern

now you believe i am lying
i am lying

blood here
a violence kinetic

What I’m Reading:

Who needs imagination when the dystopia is right in front of you? 

— Vann R. Newkirk II / “What Climate Change Will Do To America By Mid-Century” / The Atlantic

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Democracy collapses when humiliation becomes the organizing principle of politics, when revenge feels more righteous than inclusion.

— Richard A. Greenwald / “The Politics of Humiliation” / The Baffler

Friction is inevitable in human relationships. It can be uncomfortable, even maddening. Yet friction can be meaningful—as a check on selfish behavior or inflated self-regard; as a spur to look more closely at other people; as a way to better understand the foibles and fears we all share.

Neither Ani nor any other chatbot will ever tell you it’s bored or glance at its phone while you’re talking or tell you to stop being so stupid and self-righteous. They will never ask you to pet-sit or help them move, or demand anything at all from you. They provide some facsimile of companionship while allowing users to avoid uncomfortable interactions or reciprocity. “In the extreme, it can become this hall of mirrors where your worldview is never challenged . . . And so, although chatbots may be built on the familiar architecture of engagement, they enable something new: They allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself.

— Damon Beres / “The Age of Anti-Social Media is Here” / The Atlantic

I don’t want to be a farmer but my mother was right
I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat
Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve
That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes
Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing
Or on as little as one needs to survive
Steadfast as any farmer and fixed as the stars
Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly

— Bernadette Mayer / “Essay”

And all that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you’re left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you’re having are universal or entirely specific to you.

Perhaps it’s at that age, he thinks, that you first have the sense that you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing, because some part of you seems to lag the transformation of your body, and to be surprised by it in the way that an outside observer might be, so that you no longer feel entirely at one with your body as you always had until then, and it starts to make sense to talk about it as if it was something slightly separate from yourself, even while you seem more powerless than ever to deny it whatever it wants. Although actually at first there seems to be no reason to deny it what it wants, whenever it wants it.

— David Szalay / Flesh

A violence exiting is still a violence.
After the genocide, the genocide.

— Fady Joudah / “After The Genocide”

Chatbots are like a wormhole into your own head. They always talk and never disagree. 

— Damon Beres / “The Age of Anti-Social Media is Here” / The Atlantic

The MAGA capture of the GOP signals the weakness of the institutional guardrails required to support democracy. Trump might not be exceptional, but the party’s embrace of illiberalism is. In fact, Trump built a movement through a carnival of humiliation and revenge that captured half the country and one of the two major parties.

— Richard A. Greenwald / “The Politics of Humiliation” / The Baffler

What I’m Listening To:

I must look like a dork
Me, naked with textbook poems, spout fountain against the Nazis
With a weird kind of sex symbol
In speeches that are big dance thumps, if we heard mortar shells
We’d cuss more in our songs
And cut down on guitar solos

— The Minutemen / “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing”