Sometimes I have the ocean roaring in my ears, in my head, not the intermittent breaks and ebbs of waves on the shore — but only the crashes: crashes, crashes, crashes — on an endless loop for minutes, hours sometimes. A stream of white noise. Vision strained, as if I were only seeing clearly through the spaces in a chain link fence. But much of this is going on without my awareness — and only when it becomes suddenly silent and my vision resolves, refocuses completely, do I become aware of what just happened. Where did those minutes or hours go? What was I doing? Was I here all along in my room, in my car, in my office, this museum — or did I go somewhere else and do other things: unconscionable things, while I was out on the waves?
Then:
Together we will read and disinfect literature and curate arguments about the purity of intention. We will wreck work that is not up to our values of purity. We will be attentive to the hobgoblins of human imperfection we must strive toward purity. Always. We will burn the offending works and strive to drive out the poison mentality. We are the tornados of righteousness. Honor always, gentlemen. Honor always wins. Honor trumps love and understanding. We are the quicksand that will swallow them up and suffocate them. The human mind is a wound that needs triage. We are the arbiters by virtue of human declension. We are the chosen. Let us pray upon this and devise a way to suppress the fallible. We are the weapon. We are the smiting hand of the all-mighty.
Then:
Silence.
What I’m Reading:
I find myself standing each new day shoulder to shoulder with a sadness that permeates the walls turns a key in my head and plays havoc with the beat of time
… later I get flashes of grandpa with his old runners all rolled up into one giant sticky mess—balled and held together with tape…
He’d talk about the high school girls he’d “teach” Bible Study to.
They: all spouting the traumatized truths of teen-age diarists with red or pink manicured nails chipping or chewed off at the ends.
He entoning: “these sorbriquets of the new generation means what to me?” He’d say in frustration, sounding the bad imitation of counterculture nomenclature, “none of those young blondes or brunettes would get it.”
An inch long ferrule of ash growing from the nub of his Kent 100 planted in the crevice of his forefinger.
“What in tarnation?” he’d say. “They’d look at me with dilated eyes ready for something once the drugs took effect.”
Grandpa says he went to college to become a critical thinker, but he ended up doing things he didn’t think he’d do.
I, personally, don’t know what to do, playing with the jalousie window handle—spinning it this way and that—slats open, slats close, slats open, slats, close, slats open … you get the drift, and think the girls got the best of him.
Then I think: thanks for shopping at low hanging scrotum mart, and what am I supposed to do but open the front door, sheepish-like, and offer grandma a coke and a smile, ready for her comeback from gallstones and such … come again now, ya’ hear.
I hear things. I see. I hear, and don’t report a thing.
There are airs and wispy memories of foul and forced love—that isn’t love—all over this house. Which is now my house too.
So I go to my new room and I put the Runaways “Cherry Bomb” on the turntable and “Doctor Love” by Kiss on the cassette player, and play them simultaneously, and hiss obscenities at the walls—bare and pockmarked with fist and knuckle markings.
And the neighbor woman sings something in the backyard. Her rasp scratching through the jalousie slats and dusty screen.
She sings: “I don’t care what you’re talking about, noooo!” And it ain’t good, there ain’t no way to parse it—it’s pained. And she continues: “don’t shoot for craters, no…” and then it sounds like she sings: “don’t shoot the the prattles of my menstrual age…” and I don’t understand a thing now.
And I don’t think I ever did. Nothing in my life makes sense. So I expect the unexpected—and expect pain. I live those rules now. Good rules. The only rules, I realize, I’ve ever known.
I learn to argue from a point of syllogistic logic and scream at my grandfather often. His bristly hands this way and that.
Grandpa’s off his rocker, for sure. I go and find Brillo pad puffs and stuff them in his loafers. I glue Brillo pads as afro puffs on his bald head when he sleeps in his recliner—three Kent 100 butts deep in his smoky whiskey glass; and I stick a fork, as if it were an afro pick, into the fold of his wallet on the chifferobe; and I magic marker a bottle of his Aqua Velva into a bottle of Afro Sheen and leave it on his nightstand.
I want to remake him into Stevie Wonder, my favorite. I like “Living for the City” and “Don’t You Worry Bout A Thing,” all of Innervisions, really. Grandpa thinks it stinks.
I hate it here. I hate my room. I hate my house. Dare I say, I hate grandpa.
He’s always making me go buy him cartons of Kent 100’s, and insisting that I write 100-words just to round myself out, but I don’t enjoy the rounding out—especially when he grabs my backside and rubs it all soft, and the like; or when he sticks his hand in my underwear and jiggles me and says I’m becoming a big boy now.
I get a bad gassy feeling in my stomach and hardness there below, and I don’t understand none of it, other than I don’t like it at all. I understand he’s a man, and he knows the world and all, especially from the war—but it feels strange, wrong, to feel that way.
But he’ll buy me a Whaler from Burger King or get me a Hamburgler glass from Mc Donald’s and it sorta’ makes me feel better.
For a while, anyway.
What I’m Reading:
Maybe this will be the day the ocean rises up and cleans their town off the face of the earth. She doesn’t hope for it, so much as she’s grown up expecting it: Grandma carried off by a wave, still in her chair with a blanket over her lap and her eyebrows bent in rage, Carmen treading water, lecturing everyone about how they should have prepared better for this.
a fata morgana on the desert horizon to catch a falling knife a future murk an opacity so dense void 0
What I’m Reading:
Amandeep Gill, the United Nations special envoy for digital and emerging technologies, warns against a “slow death” in which “we slip, step by step, into a space where we lose our human agency, we lose human creativity, and the joy we derive from some of our human interactions”.
— Flora Graham / “What the people steering AI really think” / Nature Briefing
I’m curious. How did you get here? According to my records you have a Pontiac station wagon with exterior wood panels on the doors, and yet you say God is in your kitchen filching the gas and feeding the mice. That’s not a very Pontiac sort of attitude. You seem more like a Plymouth Duster dude to me. What gives?
Um, how can I say this… I eat junk mail for second breakfast after feasting on broken communion wafers for first.
First?
First breakfast, that is, you should try it—fortified with savior nuggets at the processing plant. Intrinsic. Expensive. Totally formulated with cosmo dust.
A flash and a gash and the trash is ours …
Have you listened to Able Noise, circa 2024, and felt like wviscerating yourself?
Why no? Is it tasty and chock full of aleatoric detritus? Are there tempo changes? Dizzying repetitions rendering one nauseated?
You nauseous?
I mean nautical.
Another flash. The smell of tar presses down on them. They’re unable to take full breaths. They spasm.
A disembodied voice thunders:
… of white dwarves and fiery red giants!
I read that men who have trouble falling asleep have a twenty five percent chance of dying earlier.
I vow to never sleep again…
What I’m Reading:
Now you are cypher and palimpsest, collateral damage, slippage of signifier and signified. Syllables we’ve scrubbed from our vocabulary.
The combined effect of rising inequality and economic stress, and the ubiquity of rich or seemingly rich people on the internet and society writ large, can result in people feeling poorer than they actually are, a concept called “money dysmorphia.”
— Janelle Nanos / “‘Still not satisfied:’ How the cycle of social media fuels middle-class discontent” / The Boston Globe
How terrible to entertain a lunatic! To keep his earnestness from coming close!
— Witter Binner / “Madagascar [Opus 104]”
Of all the reasons Americans have been losing sleep recently – hunger, canceled flights, Democrats betraying them – the most ominous has to do with an institution usually absent from discussions about the fate of our democracy: the military. No need to be starry-eyed about US imperialism and what has long been criticized as an ever-expanding “national security state”; one can still appreciate that it is a good thing if generals do not take sides in politics – just ask anyone from the many countries around the world where they do. But a pattern is becoming clear: Donald Trump is purging the higher ranks based on his prejudices and demands for loyalty; the military is being turned into a partisan instrument and a political prop; more dangerous still, the president is instilling the logic of impunity that has come to characterize his entire approach to governance.
— Jan-Werner Müller / “Trump is turning the US military into a political prop” / The Guardian
When it was clear that my father would not come back, my mother began making lists: where to throw out his clothes, where to get the pills, the places his hands had been. She substituted food for Virginia Slims and at night tugged the phone off its hook.
— Matthew Gellman / “Snipe”
In Spanish America, in contrast, uti possidetis removed the imperative for genocide: the lines were fixed, and indigenous peoples—be they Mexico’s Maya, Chile’s Mapuche, or Gran Colombia’s Wayuu—could stay put. First peoples would continue to lose their lands, especially as export agriculture spread. And no matter what the new constitutions said, they would continue to be abused and misused, treated as second-class citizens. But, unlike in the United States, their dispossession, and their disappearance, wasn’t integral to territorial aggrandizement nor a requirement for the realization of national sovereignty.
— Greg Grandin / America, América: A New History of the New World
You are bombing the sea. Did the fish declare they’re Palestinian, too?
— Fady Joudah / “Concentric Circles”
But what we have isn’t peace. What we have is a continuing genocide, albeit one that has shifted gears and has—for now—moved into the slow lane. Rather than hundreds at a time, it is killing by twos and threes—an obscenity that has coalesced into a new normal. To quote a searing poem published last week by Fady Joudah: “After the genocide, the genocide.”
— Saree Makdisi / “After the Genocide, the Genocide” / n+1
What I’m Listening To:
Tied to the wheel, nailed to the ground Put to the sword, fed to the hounds All carved up, break them down (Shake to the ground, shake to the ground) (Shake to the ground, shake to the ground) (A season in Hell A season in Hell)
It is she who lost her hydrogen and must fetishize herself in denial. She has an uneasy remand with her lunchbox: objection, objection! The most remarkable assertion is the dialectic of finger traps, wholly without precedent.
Wholly holy in the warp and woof of latter day unrhymed couplets.
Her prominent mother’s tensions are depicted as completely natural. The ministerial portfolio constantly hovers around her resentment. She commands an imminent dissolve and eminent crosscut, though she prefers the term lap dissolve.
She feels no remorse for the 400 earthquakes plotted around Mt. St. Helens recently.
Nothing saintly there. Not remotely.
She wants to riot in the snow. She wants to dollop a bristle benchmark of freshly ground … round or peanut butter?
The grapefruit navigators are mustered. Snowblowers are scrambled. Then one full minute of delusion leads to a break with policy, an unremitting appeal to unreason, and personal harm.
What I’m Reading:
It’s difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child’s body. It is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I know that my tax money is doing this. And it is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have been watching people snatched off the streets by masked agents of the state for daring to suggest that Palestinians might be human beings. I am nonetheless deeply grateful to the writers who have spoken out, and there are many in this room.
— Omar El Akkad / 2025 National Book Award acceptance speech
A luminous train exposed to the emptiness flickers. Images repeated in a flicker film. A flickering image worth repeating. And repeating. A superstructure altogether fleeting and returning in fractions of a second. Indefatigable. Insistent. A plodding workhorse.
See here, you — step back!
400, maybe 500, sparrows flicker. Flit like cult oddities. Praise their flitting. Raise the standards. See there. The standards flicker. The sparrows flicker. The train flickers. The world flickers. Precarious. We are made of stronger stuff… are we made of stronger stuff?
We flicker.
Among the discarded tins. Inside these burnt forests. Surrounded by deserts. Bounded by water. Contaminated.
Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history—if we can keep accelerating the pace, we have a chance.
— Bill McKibben / Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization
uncover your dusty radios you are two billfolds shy and your locutions are broken in the froth of the bulldozer black and yellow cysts, and marshmallow wheat sideswipes remain there’s too much red in the blue sky your wheels will be removed from the moors through the use of radiogram bullets on your broken locutions resort to your dystopia; or, if you don’t, you will soon have your lodge broken and be removed your voice may be paroled to the furthest bullfight ringlet except briefly during mopping season voice-over paroxysms include: frustration of the bullfinch; wheeler-dealer siege of the daffodil; two binges short of bilge then, the two views without perspective will have their frames broken and be removed these are :
still life of uncovered radishes on the plinth
fry of the bullfrog
moving forward: every violent binge must have a persuasion clearly displayed we need reinforcement stilts, otherwise, we have no way to reach the pacifiers thank you for your attention
What I’m Reading:
XIII
It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
— Wallace Stevens / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
thee istsfor manity reader 