It Is Little Wonder

It is little wonder — this ill wind.

We’re the largest exporter of young martyrs. They travel with confidence and exotic lawyers, falling into maggot defences, and jaunty tweeds in cooler weather. All so sanguine. Are you afraid?

A single empire in its crosshairs — colonial possessions and all else thanks to their regrets and embarkations on cancelled television series.

Touch yourself not … I’m kidding, touch yourself all you please, and go ahead place your hand on the hot burners and watch your skin slough off. 

Elsewhere, readers sing concatenations of the mining of rare earths and rejoining the arms race. Two right arms for your left, please. Either you colonize yourself or settle for an enema. 

Wit and worth are absent, and inspections are rare. Do you sniff the familiar trope of boy loses girl?

Social commentary need not apply. Violence will. Let’s chart the protagonist’s intellectual and moral emotion and touch nothing. Fall back or spring forward. See if anyone cares.

You randy chatwit, nitwit, godwit water wading sand flea. See if I care. 

Go ahead and snift your brandy and enforce your immigration law writ large. Wade into proofing wool and gather your navel gaze. 

Now you’re smart enough to be an American Prez.

What I’m Reading:

Since the world is ending, why not let the children touch the paintings?

— Ben Lerner / 10:04

Gutbucket In Buffet Time

Mutagens remain in the environment. The disaster follows a now familiar course. During the early stages of the emergency clean-up a bestial man cried:

I sing in praise of older gutbuckets. I pledge to be benefic and soporific at court gatherings. I will pray 23 times daily and take no more than 5 morning constitutionals. I will no longer place myself in front of others (as naturally my space is above all others).

I will play my left handed guitar twice each morning and I will remain ghastly and pale in the afternoon cloud light. Later, by the night light, I will blow my right handed harmonica.

Play! Go, daddy, go!

If someone, anyone, calls me a child of the universe — I will go apeshit and devalue their municipal bonds and charge remainder pay to the government coiffers in buffet time.

Such is the nature of my sardonic tonic.

It blasts a hole in my imperium. Someone say, Amen, and shut up! Because that is what I’m about to do.

What I’m Reading:

The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.

— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Shadow Language

This fridge arrives with a toothache, and the dialectical fright squad was chop-licking with overwet prosody. It is poor form to be rich and our canines are oversharpened while our molars have ground down to battlefield dust.

The government of alchemists — seeking admixtures of lucre-baiting consciousness — without tongue, without signifiers, within a sangfroid winning way are lost in a ruthless world dominated by amateur dentists. 

These burial lands are infested with cicadas charging oppressive rents — their gestures the  shadow language of cargo cults and trepanators. 

Is that a hole in your head, she says.

We are fractured and without shelter.  All exhortations are moot, but with a side of mediocre marmalade. Huckleberry. 

Accept this gilt logorrhea as a guilty pleasure averted. We’re a surly lot full of liquid loquacity misplaced. This is irreconcilable, but it is nonetheless. Nonetheless. 

This is the twilight of empire!

Look, it’s lunchtime!

(Insert appetite here)

What I’m Reading:

In the end we knew what was ahead. 

Postapocalypse was our present tense.

— Alison C. Rollins / “Springtime Again”

point of illumination

sitting on a box of squirrels smearing graph paper archives with bodily fluids

it seems meaningfully aligned with bit rot aloof
feldspar arrested in amber

something i recovered from the rubble of the present tense presented on mute

my eyes occluded by pellucid water easily understood to be thematic sludge

life only gets darker from the point of illumination this much is visibly blinding

life only gets darker
life only gets starker

tear tear tear until there is nothing left to shred there are only three words to listen for —

we’ve forgotten what they were

What I’m Reading:

Some days are measured by caesuras,
some hours by snakes in the grass.

— Alison C. Rollins / “Springtime Again”

The Tuneless Ballad of Rostay Toonany and Chemo Destrapè (redux)

Clowns and claustrophobes both. Masters of microbes and microbiomes—and bonhomie. Too much probiotic nonsense squelching their wheelhouse one day, and they took to fisticuffs.

Oh, what a dastardly day for all! The day the two friends took to whinging, winging and knuckles. The magpies alighted on the witch alder to watch. The eastern cottontail hare trained their mysterious obsidian eyes on the row. The red efts and copperheads ignored each other in utter transfixion—neologisms were created for the event—so rare it was.

Rostay Toonany landed sharp jabs, but Chemo Destrapè eager to be done with the punch-out threw a barrage of roundhouse lefts and uppercuts and dinged Rostay’s temporal lobe—bumping about in his skull—trebly charged, in a timbre of orange and reds.

The bestiary cackled, hissed, and meeped.

It was bitter-cold day that—the day of the bust-up. But Chemo’s arms were raised forevermore in victory and infamy—the day the protozoan roared.

What I’m Reading:

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

— Allen Ginsberg / “Howl, Part II”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.

— Omar El Akkad / One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Who’s that on his bike
Tears on cold cheeks . . .
. . . Most odd to be crying
And pedalling hard

— Seamus Heaney / “The Race”

You can feel the onset of authoritarianism in your central nervous system: shock, disbelief, fear, paralysis. Familiar norms and rules disintegrate every day, but the ultimate consequences remain unclear, and Americans don’t know how to assess the danger. We haven’t lived under authoritarianism. We haven’t experienced this level of sustained polarization and vitriol since the run-up to the Civil War. During the McCarthy era, careers and lives were ruined, but the White House didn’t lead the pursuing hounds.

— George Packer / “America’s Zombie Democracy” / The Atlantic

Fall fell wind-wise today—
trembles of dried lilac stalks, dead
hydrangea that couldn’t reach
water, all the finches and wrens
boldly on the move. Fall fell, my friend.

— David Roderick / “Message for Jim in Syria [Fall fell wind-wise]”

. . . Las Casas issued a famous declaration: Todo linaje de los hombres es uno—All humanity is one.

At the same time, the New World’s conquerors mocked the idea of humanity’s oneness, laying the foundation for race supremacy. Spanish settlers and colonists legitimated cruel killing on an unprecedented scale, forcing the New World’s inhabitants to labor in mines, fields, and waters, to extract the riches of America—gold, silver, pearls, dyes, and soon sugar and tobacco—that Europe would use to gild its empires, muster its armies, fund its wars, build its cathedrals, and pay for more voyages of conquest and enslavement. Never mind what priests like Las Casas were saying. Theologians were known to say one thing and its opposite. Indians were little better than apes put on earth to serve man. To dominate them was just. To work them to death no more a sin than to butcher a hog.

— Greg Grandin / America, América

in my home town, when I was a child
in elementary school, faithful in my recitation
to the flag, the L.A.P.D. pounded into a man’s body
on the side of the freeway, caught on tape,
the camera candid, the verdict not guilty,
my neighborhood ablaze, the smoke visible
from the kitchen window and on TV.

— Donika Kelly / “What I Might Sing”

The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.

— Omar El Akkad / One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

What I’m Listening To:

They swerved around the planets
A thousand times a minute,
Singing songs, I sang along
But my heart wasn’t in it.

— Jad Fair & Yo La Tengo / “Texas Man Abducted by Aliens for Outer Space Joy Ride”

(exhaust)

there’s a trace of optimism beneath your heels —
are you walking on your hands?

i’m perilously close to using a capital letter
in my suicide note unsent / unspent

i’ve a taste for the macabre stewed in offal
awful & awe-filled from watching monochromatic aurorae

it’s not bright enough, this anhedonic scrim
what did you expect — a gloating of fog horns?

i preferred the meep, meep of my volkswagen bug once
now i prefer to suck the rusted exhaust —

a pip of a pipe —
too exhausting to contemplate

What I’m Reading:

This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you’re going to say “I lived” . . .

— Nâzim Hikmet / “On Living”

Canyons of Mistrust

The superintendent of state struggling to meet winter, raising a circle out of oblongs, was struck to the head with future dread. Bread returned to its silent pile, but rarely with as much gravitas as in Dusks of the Illiberal Liberal Empire. This film is disintegrating in its own ancient nitrate content — patiently losing narrative from its spliced frames. 

Imagine a leader at an icy seaside brothel testing flumes and ratcheting loose crampons — independent clauses flying this way and that.  Imagine his speech — his friable ideas — crumbling in the wake of his hubris. 

Insert cracking rivers, dust-storming praries, swamping of coasts here.

His country grieving, begging to check his speeches and seeking penance for his cowardice. Nary a redemptive arc in sight. Insight to nothing. Cataclysmic auguries in situ — the site of postwar torn sock battles, ripped silences and diminished mental acuities. I’ll cite this alone:

We are allergic to palliatives, and the downward spiral that ensues, emblazoned with a flurry of exclamatory sins — this is the  bleakest of moments before the fall.

What I’m Reading:

My favorite postcards are from the 2030s and 2040s, the last decades before the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself. They featured pictures of the great ocean beaches before rising waters took them; images of the Southwest before it turned to embers; photographs of the Midwestern plains, endless and empty under bluest sky, before the Inland Exodus filled them with the coastal displaced. A visual reminder of America as it existed in the first half of the twenty-first century: soaring, roaring, oblivious.

— Omar El Akkad / American War

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 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 hold 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.”  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:

Anything to avoid contending with the possibility that all this killing wasn’t the result of a system abused, but a system functioning exactly as intended.

— Omar El Akkad / One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This