The Best Stuff I Read This Week
“A storefront mission in a slum
Where we come together at night
To confess our fatal addiction
For knowledge beyond appearances…”
— Charles Simic / “Metaphysics Anonymous”
“Right now I am experiencing this split notion of time. Hopefully, one day that feeling will end and everything will be reunited, like in a story. Before writing, I should probably wait until these two days have merged together in my own life.”
— Annie Ernaux / I Remain in Darkness
“… war allows people to surpass themselves … As soon as you have tanks and dead people all around you, you’ll be able to feel alive, once more powerful, magnanimous, and generous to all the world.”
— Kathy Acker / My Mother: Demonology
“I’m also very not interested in any of that materialistic consumption type stuff. I wear jeans until they fall apart, which I think comes from the punk rock, but also just years and years of not having stuff. Growing up, we went through periods of time where we didn’t have money, certainly not to a degree that a lot of people have had to struggle through. We weren’t worried about ever being homeless, but we had to move with my grandparents. So thinking about what you spend money on, and what it actually makes you happy, which also comes from punk rock where it’s just that kind of anti-materialism.”
— Matt Fantastic / The Creative Independent interview
“I’ve always written using set intervals of time as a kind of constraint, because I never really knew how to end anything. When you have a time frame, you know when it’s over. A day, a month, a year.”
— Bernadette Mayer / “Bernadette Mayer remembers Memory (1971)” / Artforum
“Sometimes we give them a hard time, the martyrs.
Look at you – we shout – with your tragic backstory
and your little legs and your incompetent veins.”
— Claudine Toutoungi / “Martyrs”
“Descartes, I hear, did his best philosophizing
By lazing in bed past noon.
Not me! I’m on my way to the dump,
Waving to neighbors going to church.”
— Charles Simic / “Sunday Service”
What I’m Listening To:
“And I’m drowning
In irrelevance”
— The Smile / “We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings”
thee istsfor manity reader 