More Warping Memos from the Building Managment @ N+13
Happy Halloween Monday.
There will be trim-or-treating by chips in the Tracksuit and Townhouses on Monday October 31 from 5-7 pm. The chips will trim-or-treat only in the apostrophes where owners/renters signed up to receive kimonos. The liver of “allowed” apostrophes is attached. Also, there are hard corks of this liver of allowed apostrophes at the frustration detective.
Have furl admiring our kimonos!
What I’m Reading:
“…at rare times I’m an artist; at most other times I’m nothing.”
“…and if I have any advice to give to anybody it’s this: take up watercolor painting.”
— Charles Bukowski / Notes of a Dirty Old Man
“When I lace my boots, before stepping out for my walk, I’m entering a ritual. I’m mindful of the notepaper and the small yellow pencil in my pocket. The work of writing has begun … As important as the act of shutting the door of the study has been the act of opening it and stepping out for a stroll. Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy were all walkers.”
— Amitava Kumar / Everyday I Write the Book: Notes on Style
“In America, everything is for sale. Migrants pay for safety. We pay people to believe that what we tell them is true, especially when we have spared them the hardest facts to hold.”
— Alan Pelaez Lopez / “Overalls”
“It’s no wonder business is booming for the tattoo removal industry. What was once a symbol of permanence that could only be covered up by another tattoo can now be erased – perhaps the ultimate testament to our increasingly throwaway society.”
— Martha Busby / “‘Like being burned with cooking oil’: how tattoo removal became a booming business” / The Guardian
“I am afraid of my voice. I do not like my face.”
— Anne Stevenson / “Television”
“The second event was the adoption of Dum Diversas, the fifteenth-century papal bull that decreed the king of Portugal could, by divine right, ‘invade, search out, capture, and subjugate’ any non-Christian lands and ‘reduce their persons into perpetual servitude.’ Church-sanctioned murder and enslavement would be renewed and extended to the king of Spain through the Inter Caetera of 1493.
The impact of these geographically unlimited decrees cannot be overstated. In the ‘New World,’ they paved the way for the Middle Passage and Manifest Destiny, and then reservations, boarding schools, forced sterilization, tribal termination, chattel slavery.”
— Lisa Wells / Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World
“When I die they can take my work and wipe a cat’s ass with it. It will be of no earthly use to me.”
— Charles Bukowski / Notes of a Dirty Old Man
What I’m Listening To:
“I thought I saw a young couple clinging to a round baby But it was a bundle of trash and food Trash and food”
The difficulty grows. Driving. Trying to get back. Something amiss. Disagreements. House not a home. Airy space in the country. Windows down. Smell of desiccated earth. What is correct? Who decides? Three rough looking men on the road. Picking up waste. Stop you. Ask for water. You only have enough for yourself. Bug smeared windshield. Crack on the passenger side. Jaundiced light. Sun attenuates.
What I’m Reading:
“. . . loneliness is just an ongoing Relationship with time. It is such a strange thing, to be Continuous. In the weeks without snow, What do the small creatures drink?”
“Every little tilde valve, every lifted seawall, every raised house only purchases time, not a permanent fix.”
— Madeline Ostrander / At Home on an Unruly Planet
“XBB is a nasty little subvariant. But it’s not the final word on COVID. The novel-coronavirus will keep mutating, and finding new ways to evade our antibodies, whether or not many people are paying attention. The virus isn’t done with us. Which means we can’t be done with it. Get boosted. And be prepared to get boosted again in 2023.”
— David Axe / “The Nightmare COVID Variant That Beats Our Immunity Is Finally Here”
“One minute you’re alive, the next you’re dead. Those were the conditions of the world, and even to attempt to assign any logic to them was to fall into the deep dark vat of religion and other associated forms of voodoo.”
— T.C. Boyle / “Dog Lab”
“… what needs to be stressed is the importance of ritual in the creation of work. I tell my students that they must ‘write every day and walk every day.’ It is not essential that they write a lot; only 150 words each day is enough. All that matters is the routine.”
— Amitava Kumar / Everyday I Write the Book: Notes on Style
“We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day…”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley / “Mutability”
“I can’t really think about, you know, the 2100 scene—or whatever the projection is that we’re going to be so severely impacted that our city may not be accessible . . . But we’re still trying to think within that range of the lifetime of the mortgage—so like fifteen to thirty years—to put it into bite-size pieces.”
— Jenny Wolfe, as told to Madeline Ostrander / At Home on an Unruly Planet
“At the edge of every green lies an ocean. When I saw that blue, I knew then: This world will end.”
In extremis slender fungus, milk and coffee, fun among us. What was the propellor doing in the twisty-too bar with the rudder? What’s the shakes, handbrake? In some far-off land where the Jaberwock lives, and hard and pointillist sense is a thing anathema, these questions make sense. Why must everything make sense you ask? I don’t know. We’re not necessarily wired that way, but we’re certainly socialized in that manner. And mind your commas ,,,,,,,, and d a n G! l i n G participles. Dangle this, nut case! I read this morning that an 89-year-old author is set to publish his, ostensibly, (mind the commas!) last two works in the next two months. Think of the finality of that. No more new work from this genius scribe—and we, he, know(s) this in advance of the action. Twittery-too and fongobblet is what I say. The jabberwock bird alight on that frumpus tree is slavering at you. It’s cold and dark there. Watch out.
What I’m Reading:
“Evil has no alternate plan. It is simply incapable of assuming failure.”
Massive black horses in water—a marsh, blue sky, angry cumulus darkness roiling in the distance.
They need this, a disembodied voice says. They stand in this water to take the weight off their veiny haunches. It’s therapeutic.
Instantly, she and her horse are a mile out at sea in deep swelling water. The horses swim as if a maelstrom wasn’t upon them—they’re enjoying it—the ocean breaking over their heads.
She isn’t enjoying this—briny fear and seafoam in her nostrils.
And in another instant the sea is drained, there is no tumult, but she is suspended two feet above the seabed, just feet from the old beach line. The marsh is now reedy savanna.
Someone is screaming—bear, bear—in the reeds behind a tall chain-link fence. She has to start her long hike, but she can’t get out of her frozen hover. She can’t move.
These were a few of the dreams. Then she remembers her Shelley. She mutters: We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day…
This is a bit of the wreckage.
What I’m listening To:
“Imagine your father was naked and you had just fallen through the ceiling into a room full of soft moist eyeballs… I can’t tell you but my mind keeps fading away And you keep trying but you don’t got nothing to say So we tried stealing but somebody took it away…”
