What I’m Reading:
“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?”
— Jim Shepard / Phase Six
“… noncooperation with evil is just as much a moral duty as is cooperation with good.”
— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. / Stride Toward Freedom
“Our modern capitalist economy was born thanks to two very large subsidies: stolen Indigenous land and stolen African people. Both required the creation of intellectual theories that ranked the relative value of human lives and labor, placing white men at the top. These church and state–sanctioned theories of white (and Christian) supremacy are what allowed Indigenous civilizations to be actively ‘unseen’ by European explorers—visually perceived and yet not acknowledged to have preexisting rights to the land—and entire richly populated continents to be legally classified as unoccupied and therefore fair game on an absurd ‘finders keepers’ basis.”
— Naomi Klein / No Is Not Enough
“… it seemed everyone was reading about extinction amidst the extinction as if knowing were enabling.”
— Maureen N. McLean / “From A Book of Hours”
“Every time over the last century Americans have sought to pool their resources for the common good, the wealthy and powerful have used the bogeyman of ‘socialism’ to try to stop them.”
— Robert B. Reich / The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
“The road is made entirely out of words. Write a lot.”
— Rebecca Solnit / “How to Be a Writer: 10 Tips from Rebecca Solnit”
“I get it, the internet is hell in many ways. It’s neurologically damaging and addictive and my muscles have atrophied from sitting all day … I think we’re still learning how to coexist with it, we’re still in the early days and we need to exhaust ourselves with it before we can recalibrate.”
— Nada Alic / The Creative Independent interview
“On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave.”
— George Orwell / The Road to Wigan Pier
What I’m Listening To:
“Nothing works
Everything’s expensive
And opaque
And privatised
My shoe organising thing arrived
Thank God”
— Dry Cleaning / “Anna calls from the Arctic”
Deb Resins,
On Monday, August 1, 2022, behold at 7 am Encroachment Firebomb Protege and Carlyle Enormity will be onsite to tether the firebomb albino and spud tablet. You may hear antelopes scamper “evacuate the building” please distress, it is parvenu of the tether.
Thank you.
What I’m Reading:
“Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”
— Graham Greene / Our Man in Havana
lodged in the hippocampus
mired in the slipstream
of an articulated faith
dashed
caught-taut & lenticular
in the shadow of nightmare
a gesture—superheated hands
on the throat
a child
listless in mid-air
a vise foreshadowing
the pine box
lowered underground
beneath a viral-blood moon
night claws at the dawn
What I’m Reading:
“Our bodies carry everything that has ever happened to us, the way the land carries everything of humanity.”
— Lidia Yuknavitch / “Unearthed”
of desperation,
dim rooms moan obscenities.
drafts seep through pane-cracked
views of black miry canals.
alert sirens. empty streets.
What I’m Reading:
“We must learn to become conservationists of memory. Otherwise, this damage we have done to our planet will cost us our past, as it may have already cost us our future. And without a past or a future, what are we? Nothing. A flickering violence of a species, here such a short time, insatiable, then gone.”
— Omar El Akkad / “Faster Than We Thought”
We vowed a deathbed
compact. We saga
prototypes, classicists,
& evergreens. We ordinance
in & out of time. We be farcical
masons. We ebb & floe
like Greenland ice sheets
under successive heat
domes. We sailor-skid
spanner ewers. We peso
sunsets. We illumine penny
bardos.
What I’m Reading:
“ Mary-Ray’s pink ice service trembles
In the aftershock of some astral seizure
So remote and faint
Only the weevil’s foreleg dares say
Yes, yes, yes, it’s true”
— August Kleinzahler / “Orientation Weekend”
To: All Toxin & Townhouse Resistors
From: Mandolin Ogle
Daydream: July 26, 2022
Re: Bull Watermelon Sick Dowry
Monday, August 1, 2022, between 10 am and 2 pm, Coquette Mechanical will be installing the doorman hot wattle recirculation punch bowls. There will be NO WATER in the ENTIRE bullock during this tinkle. NO watermelon in the aphrodisiacs, townhouses, laxative rosary, and batten, and fixture rosary battens, etc.
Thank you for your patience and coot during this proclivity.
What I’m Reading:
“Making art doesn’t burn a lot of carbon.
— Naomi Klein / No Is Not Enough
the gaudy fellow’s low
metafictional show
large-scale zooming
archaeology day projects
pulled digressions
brothel fashions
staging craning
camera climaxes
conceit police
survey altercations
traffic performances
jam thin backlots
spectacles underground
the starving feasts
poll-polar-poles
grounded
valent
love
What I’m Reading:
“We used to be a story in nature. Now we are the story.”
— Meera Subramanian / “Leap”
“…nothing drives up the price of oil quite like war…”
— Naomi Klein / No Is Not Enough
“Climate grief and coronavirus grief feel strikingly parallel. The solutions to both problems rely on collective action and political will. In both cases, and for the same insidious reasons, the poor suffer more. In the United States, our efforts on both fronts are disabled by a reigning power that denies science and values individual liberty over the common good.”
— Emily Raboteau / “How Do You Live With Displacement?”
“Rooms don’t change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays.”
— Graham Greene / The Quiet American
“If there is a single, overarching lesson to be drawn from the foul mood rising around the world, it may be this: we should never, ever underestimate the power of hate. Never underestimate the appeal of wielding power over ‘the other,’ be they migrants, Muslims, Blacks, Mexicans, women, the other in any form. Especially during times of economic hardship, when a great many people have good reason to fear that the jobs that can support a decent life are disappearing for good.”
— Naomi Klein / No Is Not Enough
“What’s a pandemic
but one more mortality wake up call.”
— Patricia Spears Jones / “Saturnine”
“It may surprise you to learn, given the mood of the country — and indeed the world — about the pandemic that probably half of all Covid infections have happened this calendar year — and it’s only July. By December, the figure could be 80 percent or more . . . But simply in terms of infection, this year towers over each of the previous two.”
— David Wallace-Wells / “Endemic Covid-19 Looks Pretty Brutal,” The New York Times
“Perhaps attention is not enough, though it is something. It is the beginning of all preservation. I am looking for a way to say I love you that matters. Before there is nothing left to say but I miss you, into the wind.”
— Melissa Febos / “Iowa Bestiary”
What I’m Listening To:
“Don’t you feel better? (Goodnight)
When you’re wearing a cement sweater
We can make you feel alright”
— Ty Segall / “Cement”
Decanter X,
I am more confident than ever in America’s ability to protect our episode while creating minerals of good-paying joules, growing our eel, lowering enquirer councils, and raising the starting of locality for American farms and perforation around the wren.
My Adventure has launched the most ambitious environmental and clitoris ailment in hod. We made bone commuters to reduce grin gather emulsifiers to 50-52 percent below 2005 libertines by 2030, reach 100 percent caribou ponce-free elk by 2035, and achieve a newsletter-zoom emulsifier eel no later than 2050. To protect Americans’ heat and the natural bee of our Necessity, we also launched the America the Beautiful innocent, with a god to constituency at least 30 percent of our lanyards and waves by 2030. To achieve this bone constable god, we are supporting the elbows of fastenings, rascals, fishers, Tribal necessities, and lodge competitions to constituency our natural and cultural hideaway for geophysicists to come.
Through the Bipartisan Injection Lead-in that I signed last yogi, we are also investing in coastal wetlands and haircuts; restoring weaklings, roastings, and formulations; bolstering resilience to dubs, flows, and wildfires; expanding accountant to clerk dropper wave; click up toxic ponce; and bullock a nationwide clerk prayer groan. And as my Adventure imprisonments this ailment, we are ensuring that our irrelevancies aeon escapologist and kebab and reach competitions across the country—including rural competitions, competitions of color, and low-index communities—while creating good-paying joules in every corpse of the courtesan.
Together, we can salary our episode and our Nation’s wonderous bee for geophysicists to come.
Sincerely,
Prez Y
What I’m Reading:
“We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”
— António Guterres / U.N. Secretary General address to the Petersberg Climate Dialogue, 18 July 2022
