1 A hot wattle thing of the new wave—a heel trestle tactician of new sex.
2 A treble tabernacle template … condolences!
3 Heathen tree table temple—tinplated condom.
4 The hot new textile and treetop heating tableau concluded. (normal tempos at operettas not included)
5 The necessary texture of watermarks and towropes. A trek of heaved temptation. (opiate condor forward)
6 The advised necessary heaven tenancy. (refill the tablespoon of conclusion)
7 The hot heavyweight tremolo of the opossum conductor.
8 Thatcher and heckler tremor of the tablet concluded. (tendencies normalized going forward)
9 (a. – e.) Your waterspout trachea. Your tender tabloid resignation. Your conclusive and necessary thaw. Your hectare trench. Thee conduit opportunist.
10 A tendon that should be taboo.
11 Hedge proctor trend-setter, tendril tabulator, theatregoer waterspout in the guise of a chancellor of the exchequer.
12 Hedgehog trespasser—tenement confessor at default opposition.
13 As hot tether and heater treaty—a tempest as scheduled maintenance.
This transmission has concluded.
What I’m Reading:
“Going to visit my mother is like starting in on a piece by
“Once upon a time when everyone had pubic hair and read books and had been taught penmanship and bombs and oh good PB&J there was pleasure in things specifically now forgotten or rather abandoned Let’s forget the crusted nostalgia of the global ruling classes Go fist yourself a roasted duck on a warm spit”
— Maureen N. McLane / “Prospect”
“It is usual to speak of the Fascist objective as the ‘beehive state,’ which does a grave injustice to bees.”
— George Orwell / The Road to Wigan Pier
“Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher, came up with the term solastalgia to describe feelings of unease or homesickness that someone might experience when climate change, disaster, or environmental degradation mars the place they love and call home. He has also noticed that those who take action to restore or protect their home landscapes, or those with a strong sense of both community and personal empowerment, tend to overcome the sadness of witnessing environmental damage at home. He calls this phenomenon soliphilia . . . ‘Soliphilia introduces the notion of political commitment to the saving of loved home environments at all scales, from the local to the global.’”
— Madeline Ostrander / “In the Era of Climate Migration, What Will ‘Home’ Mean?” / The Nation
“Is that your panty line Or a silken esker of longing”
— August Kleinzahler / “Orientation Weekend”
“I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.”
— Bill McGuire / Hothouse Earth
“If you think this is bad, you should have seen the end of the Permian period . . . I find reading about catastrophe is actually helpful.”
—Jim Shepard / Interview with Amy Sutherland, The Boston Globe
“Gentlemen, it is the microbes who will have the last word.”
— Louis Pasteur / The Life of Pasteur, vol. II
What I’m Listening To:
“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”
You Cannot Be Anything If You Want To Be Everything (redux)
In her dream she was at a garish fairground carnival under a cloudless dayglo blue sky. She was separated from her parents. She panicked. She was lost in this strange loud place. Carnies barking from the fringes — fleeting glimpses of them as the crowd momentarily parted — snarling mouths with spittle teeth in flashes between elbows and tilting towers of cotton candy.
A dry tongue mouth in the midday sun and sweat. She reaches for the water bottle she didn’t know she had, and there it is full of a thick pink liquid. Then fear seeps in from her vignetting field of vision — someone is trying to poison her, and she can’t find her parents anywhere in this whirlpool vision aflame — only booming music and the sharp screams of overexcited children.
It becomes clear to her she’ll never see her parents again. The thirst is overwhelming but she can’t drink the pink liquid. She knows viscerally that it is poison. She needs a drink. Her head is like the puck in the High Striker game — a shrill, insistent, “Step right up,” keeps looping in her ears — and someone continually pounds the mallet on her head as if he has something to prove to his cheap girlfriend. Every strike, a deeper guttural concussion exploding deep in her brain stem.
Alarms go off.
The first waking words she hears from the radio are: “You cannot be anything if you want to be everything.”
And this is the instant her restive head settles and the headache which has been her sole human companion for the last three days melts away. She says to the cat purring at her side, “I know what I need to do now, Antigone. I am going out with mother’s old typewriter, ribbons, and plenty of paper and compose lines for a living. In this way I’ll make a new life doing what I love. You see, Antigone?” The cat stops purring and shifts away from her mindless, fidgety, petting. “Yes, that’s it,” she says.
Later that afternoon, after quitting her brokerage job and leaving the managing partner mouth agape — incredulous and alarmed that his best broker is walking away from a six figure salary, and having talked him out of a Marchman Act call — she sets up her new workspace.
She sets up at the center of the Bowery station platform. She places the Underwood Noiseless Portable atop two overturned milk crates — draped by an elaborate antimacassar made by her great-grandmother that retained the oiled indention of her great-grandfather’s death head — to this she adds a low slung lawn chair.
The J and Z trains stop here, and for years it has been her favorite subway stop because it’s imbued with the promise of seeing a good show on the way in. And on the way out it is tinged with a sense of great satisfaction of having seen a show that exceeded what she expected. She’d seen some of her all time favorite shows at the Bowery Ballroom: Lou Reed. Luna’s farewell show (before they came back a decade later). Yo La Tengo numerous times. The Sun Ra Arkestra. Sonny Rollins. The Butthole Surfers. Mission of Burma (on their comeback). Le Tigre (no, wait, that was at Irving Plaza…) no, not Le Tigre, but Kathleen Hanna’s other incarnation The Julie Ruin (yeah, that’s right). They Might Be Giants. So many great shows here. This must be the place.
She sets up a sign that reads: “Will Compose Poems And Stories For You or Your Sweetheart.” She throws out a used beret she picked up at Goodwill. It entrances her for a moment. Then she quickly makes a note on her phone to get a deeper, more voluminous, hat as tossed coins might roll away onto the tracks.
She rolls her first sheet into the Underwood in that transient confusion of the late afternoon commute. She has arrived.
What I’m Reading:
“She had indeed seen death and she was not afraid of it. What scared her were other people and their immovable selfishness.”
Apologia Sine Qua Pfft! (2016 Found Email in Trash Folder)
Dear Chunky,
What in the hell has happened to the Dictionary.com word of the day email. Why is it suddenly festooned with all these “Jail Hillary” ads and links to Donald Trump related stories? What gives? I much prefer the “25 Dog Breeds That Live Longer” ads… or…
Listen, I’m pissed with this change. I’m an artist, damn it!
I am a creator of worlds. I am a filmmaker. I am a writer. I create worlds whole cloth. I create worlds couched in the truths of our world. I create worlds based on my own life story.
A debauched woman, say, who may have been on her way to some karmic retribution—it would have been fitting, I think—it’ll have to wait until another time…
Yours, Coldcake Face
Dear Coldcake Face,
Please call me if you find my prescription sunglasses. I was sitting on red bench out front when I dropped them on the ground.. HELP please!!!!!
Chunky
What I’m Reading:
“You are so opaque to me your brief moments of apparent transparency
seem fraudulent windows in a Brutalist structure everyone admires.”
— Maureen N. McLane / “They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century”
We’re occupying schools across the world to protest climate inaction
Schools and universities all over the world are planning to take school strikes one step further and occupy our campuses to demand the end of the fossil economy. Taking a lesson from student activists in the 1960s, the climate justice movement’s youth will shut down business as usual. Not because we don’t like learning, but because what we’ve learned already makes it clear that, without a dramatic break from this system, we cannot ensure a liveable planet for our presents and futures.
Why occupy? Because we’ve marched. We’ve launched petitions. We’ve written open letters. We’ve had meetings with governments, boards and commissions. We’ve striked. We’ve filled squares, streets and avenues with thousands and, all together, millions of people in every single continent of this Earth. We’ve screamed with all our lungs. Some of us have even participated in blockades, sit-ins, and die-ins. And just as it seemed the seed for deep and radical social transformation was taking root in the midst of the massive 2019 climate mobilizations, COVID-19 came, and our momentum drastically decreased. What didn’t decrease, however, was the greenhouse gas emissions, the exploitation of the global south and the unimaginable profit produced by the fossil fuel industry.
It’s no secret that our enemy, the fossil fuel industry, rules the world. And it is far from falling; in fact, it is stronger than ever. Proof is a recent investigation by The Guardian that revealed to the world that the fossil fuel empire has 195 “carbon bomb” projects that threaten our hope for a global warming of up to 1.º5C, the safe barrier. That’s right, despite our politicians and institutions’ indeed hilarious show at COP26 in 2021, the biggest oil companies are on track to spend 103 million dollars on planetary destruction projects every day for the rest of the decade. What’s more, the climate crisis is not a fair crisis. The latest IPCC reports show that the ones who are most affected by climate change are often the ones who have done the least in causing it in the first place. As young people born right at the edge of the biggest catastrophe in human history, it is our historic responsibility to rise up to stop it.
So, what do we do? Since giving in to defeatism will never be an option for us, we must now organize at a massive scale. We need to create a new peak of mobilization, similar and even bigger than 2019. If we were waiting for a sign, this is it. With temperatures climbing faster and faster, we have never been so certain that mobilizing bigger than ever is not only possible: it is existentially necessary
We cannot repeat previous mistakes. We need to be more disruptive than ever to business as usual, as that’s our only chance for survival. The youth’s innovation and creativity, combined with a fierce appetite for disruption and liberation, has the potential to change the world. As a global generation of students, we need to disrupt business as usual, and start with the spaces where we have the power to mobilize and organize – our schools and universities. Sometimes they are directly implied in the destruction business, as is the case of the many Universities that invest in the fossil fuel industry such as Oxford, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, McGill, Northwestern, MIT, etc. In other cases, they are indirectly linked to it. They train us for a world which has no future, a world of fossil capitalism. They want us to sit in school and learn as if everything was fine. But the world we are learning for – the world which created the climate crisis – has no future. The big question of our generation “How do we create a world without climate catastrophe?” will not be answered by sitting in school.
The bottom line is: we can’t keep pretending everything is alright, studying as if the planet wasn’t on fire. As other students did before us – from the students of May of ‘68 in France to the Arab spring, from the Chilean Penguin Revolution and Primavera Secundarista in Brazil to Occupy Wall Street, we will stop our business-as-usual lives to show our governments and society that we need to change everything, now. From Lisbon to California, from Perú to Germany and from Madrid to the Ivory Coast, we call on young people to get together and organize an international revolutionary generation that can change the system.
Between September and December 2022, we will occupy hundreds of schools and universities worldwide to end the fossil economy at international level under the callout to action “End Fossil: Occupy!”. We invite anyone and everyone to join us and organize occupations in their school or universities, as long as they follow our 3 principles: youth-led occupation, climate justice framework, and occupy until we win. We will revive the youth movement, create new alliances, radicalize, engage the whole of society to support and occupy, & envision the world we want – where life and not profit is at the center – through this sparking international action moment. We will rise up in justice and liberation to crush the fossil fuel industry. We shall have no doubt: the youth are a revolutionary subject. We will turn the tide, change history, and smash the fossil economy.
We are here. We are radical. We are ready to occupy.
“Maybe democracy worked for restaurant reviews and movie ratings, but boy, was it creating problems in this case. What were all those dystopias she’d had to read about in high school, concerning the individual trampled by the state, talking about? Why hadn’t anyone imagined the chaos of no one in charge?”
thee istsfor manity reader 