Distortion principle no. 3: degauss after every visit to either of the poles.
Distortion principle no. 4: cleanse fold and manipulate.
Distortion principle no. 5: literature is overrrated; read only pulp.
Distortion principle no. 6: there are only 5 distortion principles.
“Imagine Milton enrolling in a graduate program for help with Paradise Lost, or Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him that, frankly, they just don’t believe the part about the guy waking up one morning to find he’s a giant bug.”
If you insist I write at least 100 words everyday in this space, then, here goes: if I started at one hundred and started to count down until I had written another 99 words in this space then it would go something like this.
Somewhere around this point I’d have 50-some-odd words left to finish. Then I’d think hard and deep about concision, and how I’d write something meaningful in the space left to me—always being aware that 100 words is a minimum, and I could always write beyond that.
I’m not limited to 100 word stories, 100 word poems, or 100 word micro-essays—I could elaborate and reel off well beyond 100 words!
And then there’d be the picayune issue of extending the verbiage by writing “one hundred words” v. “100 words” every time I mentioned it—I’d add a word at every mention, further diminishing the pressure (the burden) to get to 100 words. Then, I’d want to know if (parenthetical) words would count against the self-imposed word count.
Then I’d come to my senses, my thumbs getting tired from poking at the gorilla glass (TradeMarked) on my phone’s writing app—and then I’d wonder just how far along am I? And I’d count (and include the parenthetical words) and find I’m at 223 words—more than the RDA calls for—and then I’d come to a dead stop at 240 words.
Here.
“If a plane crashes in the middle of a pandemic, would the world make a sound? How do we grieve one loss among so many?”
The dying day teethes On the tinny taste of bus exhaust. Eight O’ Eight roars away. Bayside shadows cast and reel back nothing. And now the toothy breeze Seizes the silver weeds With a violent shake, And rasps the bayside clear. Distant machines whir. The muted stars reappear, Briefly, in refracted waterlight. Then, bared, the incisors of the night.
“Ants can carry up to five thousand times their own weight. People are puny in comparison — they can barely lift their own body weight once, let alone the weight of their sorrow.”
— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld / The Discomfort of Evening
overheard in the uzbek restaurant… wayward talk of chile and ecuador, the prime stops on the silk road, techniques of the boustrophedon, raging poppy fields, too much hash the one-upmanship sharp… peripatetic call and response about the tang and other merits of uzbeki beer and uruguayan women, the obscurity of radiohead and the future is billie ellish the timbre maudlin the umka a perfect puff… wanderlust in the south, remaking the ruins of venezuela in the image of argentina, death by clear cutting, petrodollars ruin everything, and somehow the talk turns to czars the plov congeals in its oil… meandering laments of the rarity of this ritual, forecasts and promises to do it more, something in the voices belies that certainty the crash of a kazan clanging a death roll in the kitchen… peregrinations of assiduous maths parsing a $109 bill 3 ways to the tenth of a cent, then a drunken 3 card pile up on a plastic credit rectangle… yes, let’s, more often while a terminal point chicken is beheaded in the alley…
“Only the violence inside me makes noise. It grows and grows, just like sadness.”
— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld / The Discomfort of Evening
We kissed there in the stone entrance, In the great cool stone mouth of the building, Before it took you. We kissed under the granite arches. And then you turned and were gone And high about and above were the hard towered walls, The terrible weights of stone, relentless, But for the moment they had been kind to us, Folding us with arms While we kissed.
(1918, poem in public domain)
“Fear has more disguises than my mother has floral dresses, and that’s saying something as she’s got a wardrobe full — ”
— Marieke Lucas Rijneveld / The Discomfort of Evening
“They drilled holes in his head, vacuumed out the blood and more words. My father was finally arrested, he turned in the rest of his words, they bound his tongue. And he dreamed in blank paper.”
Oh nine oh two what a time to be blue. What a place for heartache and heat. You wrap your fingers around godness and restrict, redistrict, reapportion us on the path to hellion days.
Nothing good is coming, nothing fair awaits us.
You say things have been this bad before, but we’ve heard that 1850’s before—and proffered at these late dates—and at such exorbitant prices? It’s beyond late—we’re overdue for a reckoning—we’re headed for a wreck. We are functioning wreckage.
We are Wile E Coyote looking up at the anvil headed toward our head.
(Cut. Long overhead shot.)
A puff of smoke below in the canyon.
image: warner bros.
“One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.”
thee istsfor manity reader 