thee istsfor manity reader

What I’m Reading:

“I’m more of a Ten Commandments, rule-of-law girl myself. The closest I’ve ever come to anarchy is buying a Sex Pistols record.”

— Sarah Vowell / Assassination Vacation

Sometimes Unfinished Music (redux)

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

The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“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)”