Keep pets near. (So dear!)
Do not feed alligators …
Well … maybe the kids.
What I’m Reading:
“To me, the frontier is a tundra of intergenerational amnesia.”
— Lisa Wells / Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World
An enormous vapor plume,
metastasizes thousands of feet
up in the air, billows, gains
strength & furious glower,
& grows in the vast
Pacific.
The planet’s duliluvial wrath—
gonna’ wash us clean—
gonna’ put it right—
is gonna’ wash us all away.
Don’t wake me—
I want to go while I sleep.
What I’m Reading:
“Then everything was darkness
In a great … big … night.”
— Langston Hughes / “Sylvester’s Dying Bed”
She’s gonna’ tendril it straight … but she could tell it straighter, and tendril a strategy that is easy to understand.
Her words are usually turgid, garish and lurid—feel the wrath of her bombast. This may not be a particularly happy strategy, but again, at least it’s not some awful strategy for complacency.
It’s in the same general stylistic verity as her previous work, and the specter of hopelessness resounds of “over-dialed diatribe.” This is all set against the backdrop of natural events careening into breakdown—think the Permian Mass Extinction Event. (You get the drift!)
It may be akin to the strategy of a mango during the dog days of a muzzled mango-less summer. (But this has not been proven as of this writing.)
She touts the sunroof on her 2001 Mazda to anyone who will listen. She joyrides an excavator wearing ancient pantaloons.
She’s an avatar for perilous and acute dehydration.
She is an avid matinee moviemaker, and leads colloquia on film gate benedictions and kleig light embargos on overnight shoots. David Lynch is too mainstream, she says.
She continues to have an acute aversion to poorly devised mise en scène, and the continued yaw of a cinematographer’s shaky handheld work.
She has a propensity for gala non-linearity and jump-cuts. She acknowledges that she must write with others in mind, and shoot straight if she wants to be seen.
During a recent intrusion she disowned her previous work and said she’d work for a fiver and wolfbane, and only then consider other possible expenses.
In short, as much as she would like others to enjoy her work, she’ll continue to make what inspires her in manuscript form, and then shoot, tendril, and chance assemble it for multiple fivers.
If others come along and watch—well, all the better.
What I’m Reading:
“Is this where I am supposed to apologize? Not
only to the fish, but to the whole lake, land, not only for me
but for the generations of plunder and vanish.”
— Ada Limón / “The First Fish”
“The cumulative effect of thousands of ethical actions can help to save and improve our world for future generations.”
— Jane Goodall & Douglas Abrams / The Book of Hope
“I am willing to walk
away, willing to be
on fire, to blaze
to Blake, to sink
into the moon’s
aphorism and
its garden of figures.”
— Peter Gizzi / “Song”
“Let’s stop sleepwalking towards the destruction of our planet by climate change. Today it is Pakistan. Tomorrow it could be your country.”
— António Guterres / U.N. Secretary-General, August 30, 2022
“The average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021, the sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years and a stark reminder of the toll exacted on the nation by the continuing coronavirus pandemic … In 2021, the average American could expect to live until the age of 76 … The figure represents a loss of almost three years since 2019, when Americans could expect to live, on average, nearly 79 years.”
— Roni Caryn Rabin / “U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Again in ‘Historic’ Setback” / The New York Times
“This virus is going to continue to throw 210-mile-an-hour curveballs at us, so get ready…It’s not done with us just yet.’’
— Michael Osterholm / “What we’ve learned about COVID-19” / The Boston Globe
“As usual, predators are wreaking havoc on the internet. Predators are the only people in town. If she had to summarize the plot of contemporary life, the mother would say: it’s about everyone punishing each other for things they didn’t do.”
— Tess Gunty / The Rabbit Hutch
“Hope is contagious. Your actions will inspire others.”
— Jane Goodall & Douglas Abrams / The Book of Hope
What I’m Listening To:
“They were planting seeds at night
To grow a made-up paradise
Where the truth was auto-tuned”
— Gorillaz / “Cracker Island”
greedy the image
reedy the voice that quavers
needy the sharp tooth
that abstracts the raw terror
beneath the fig banyan tree
What I’m Reading:
“… but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can …”
— Hart Crane / “Chaplinesque”
I took umbrage at the penumbra—
The darkling darkening of my mood—
Was it the partial eclipse of the moon?
(Its waxing moony-moony face: jejune)
Or was it a flaring sunspot’s craquelure of quietude?
Or was it the plague?
Or the fascist wave?
Or the tactless foot?
Of the biomass soot?
Or was it the phallic gun-shaped state
I’m in?
What I’m Reading:
“In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. Today, 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%, and CEOs of large corporations make a record-breaking 350 times what their workers earn.”
— Bernie Sanders / The Guardian
The hibiscus were impartial but patricide was the topic of conversation, not the usual coacktail party banter. A dragonfly drained a pistil daiquiri, while a croo of white ibis pecked at some takeaway boxes, and Lagartija Ron watched silently in blitzkrieg formation from the tree line.
I was on a two week jag to the past—in the shape of Florida—in the key of Spanglish. My ancestral forelocks were trapped in a cowlick, all mortise and tenon-like, as if we were on an all-inclusive at a Bahamas resort, specifically Eleuthera—but full of temperate zone tchotchkes and such.
It was an altogether vertiginous and humid afternoon. The wet bulb temperature was nearly 95° F—deadly, you see—so the impartial hibiscus were decidedly on a manatee fissure, fig banyan, sorta tip—and I was, like, sure! Aha! I second that!
But I really had no conception of where I was or what I was going on about. See, that’s the thing about Florida. . .
Don’t.
It didn’t work out for Ponce de Leon. It definitely went sour for Hernando de Soto. And now… well… just…
Don’t.
What I’m Reading:
“The hardest part
is the songbirds
and their fugue state,
fug state, fuck it.”
— Peter Gizzi / “Song”
who?
who’s says it’s hot?
who?
What I’m Reading:
“The world is neon
in the gloaming quiet.”
— Peter Gizzi / “Song”
i’ll help you—hold on—paradise is flailing—it’s too hot or too cold—too parched or waterlogged—the ice age is coming—the sun’s zooming in—the ice caps are melting—we’ve lost the sweet spot—418.90 ppm—1.2° C—meltdown expected—the wheat is growing thin—crises abound—keep hope alive—keep treading water—stay in the shade—steer clear of the plague—this too shall pass—or we’ll die striving—and after all this, won’t you give me a smile? (over—out)
What I’m Reading:
“. . . What good
is accuracy amidst the perpetual
scattering that unspools the world.”
— Ada Limón / “It’s the Season I Often Mistake”
“She always knew that she was too small and stupid to lead a revolution, but she had hoped she could at least imagine one. She takes a deep breath, attacked by an awareness of how impossible it is to learn and accomplish all that she needs to learn and accomplish before she dies.”
— Tess Gunty / The Rabbit Hutch
“we watch the red birds in the morning
we hope for the quiet
daytime together
the year turns into air”
— W.S. Merwin / “The Solstice”
“‘We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.’ We had all simultaneously realised that our home was not limitless — there was an edge to our existence.”
— David Attenborough / A Life On Our Planet
“I miss who I was. I miss who we all were,
before we were this: half-alive to the brightening sky,
half-dead already. I place my hand on the unscarred
bark that is cool and unsullied, and because I cannot
apologize to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry.
I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.”
— Ada Limón / “Salvage”
“The science is clear: animal-based foods account for 57% of agricultural greenhouse gases versus 29% for food from plants. By cooking meat, people are cooking themselves.”
— The Guardian Editorial
“That is the trouble with writing a book about climate breakdown … By the time it is published it is already out of date. That is how fast things are moving.”
— Bill McGuire / The Guardian
“‘I live here!’ Ida yells. ‘And I think a person who’s lived here for over thirty years has a right to a peaceful home! A right to a balcony without any corpses on it!’”
— Tess Gunty / The Rabbit Hutch
What I’m Listening To:
“Do you want to make tea at the BBC?
Do you want to be, do you really want to be a cop?”
— The Clash / “Career Opportunities”
thee istsfor manity reader 