thee istsfor manity reader

The Best Stuff I Read Last Week

“The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”

— Mierle Laderman Ukeles / Manifesto for Maintenance Art

“Everything I need to know grows wings / and lands on my skin. / A thousand tiny plovers / cover the skies, and shine / like moonlight on us both…”

— Farnaz Fatemi / “Heretic”

“Out of sight, I’m merely an annoyance,
one slim, obstinate wrinkle in night’s
deepening trance.”

— Rita Dove / “Postlude”

“We lie on the beach. Gray waves 
advance, retreat. The blue wind, salt scrub, 
scours my skin. Sharks troll for toddlers. 
Patrol planes hum below the cloudy scrim.”

— Pia Täavila-Borsheim / “My Friend, Her Grandson”

“I don’t know the names of the women in my family / past my great grandmother. How will I call upon them / when it’s time? Will I call them Mary or Venus / or Yemaya?”

— Diannely Antigua / “We Never Stop Talking About Our Mothers”

“I promise touch. I promise my voice. I promise a willingness to dream.
I promise your face hewn into lost history

— Tala Khanmalek / “Louise”

“Solitary bloom / of wild rocambole / day of departure nears.”

— Yuko Fujikawa / “Solitary bloom”

What I’m Listening To:

“El mundo de las luciérnagas
ha invadido mis recuerdos
Y un corazón diminuto
va brotándome en los dedos”

(“The world of fireflies
Has invaded my memories
And a tiny heart
Is sprouting in my fingers”)

— Tarta Relena & Manuel Oltra / “Las Alamedas”

Crown No. 14 (redux)

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.

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…”

— Deborah A. Miranda / “Torch”

Your Ruff Collar, My Millstone (redux)

We live under the heat dome.

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

The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“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”

— Gastr Del Sol / “Each Dream is an Example”