death row lights bait him
guilty domed screen suicide
dram of hemlock breath
What I’m Reading, or: What I Just Finished Reading (a continuing series)
I Hotel / Karen Tei Yamashita (2010)
Sprawling novel comprised of ten novellas; each a year in the history of the I Hotel in San Francisco and the counterculture unfolding around it from 1968-1977, and the eventual closing of the hotel and the displacement of its residents.
I started reading this last year, specifically the three individual novellas 1968: The EyeHotel; 1970: The “I” Hotel; and 1974: The I-Migrant. Then I found the entire novel (beefy, at 613 pages) and finished it this year. Nothing else quite like it.
Expansive, recursive, and full of anecdotes to live and learn by — it’s also quite interesting. / Ebook, 01/12/21.
***
MOME #1 / Eric Reynolds (Ed.) (2005)
Reading this series out of order. Read volume 10 first and then found the rest via Hoopla and my public library. Some great oblique takes on life here, and some very good graphics too, especially Gabrielle Bell’s “I Feel Nothing,” Paul Hornschemeier’s “Life with Mr. Dangerous Pt. 1,” and Jonathan Bennett’s “Dance with The Ventures.” / Ebook, 01/13/21.
***
Holy the Firm / Annie Dillard (1977)
There is something transcendent about Dillard’s writing, even when one doesn’t agree with her metaphysical views. Dense, decorous, and well written, despite that old time religion. She doesn’t appear to be out to proselytize, but the religiosity is a bit thick. Well written, but hermetic to a point. Ebook, 01/14/21.
***
City of Coughing and Dead Radiators / Martin Espada (1994)
An exceptional collection of poems. Espada generates great feeling through the indelible images he captures at just the critical moment. Chronicles the broken social compacts in the Americas and the promises and dreams deferred for immigrants in the US.
From the first line, “Columbus hallucinated gold…” (“The Hidalgo’s Hat and a Hawk’s Bell of Gold”) to the last line, “…of the Alamo / in black streaks of fire.” (“The Other Alamo”) you are in for an accounting and a taking-down of the worst of hegemonic America.
Espada is a divine imagist with an acute sensitivity. / Paperback, 01/14/21.
***
Surviving Autocracy / Marsha Gessen (2020)
Gessen knows her stuff. She’s studied it, written about it, and lived it firsthand under Putin and Trump. A facility for clarity and an excellent writer to boot. I’ll read any Gessen I come across, especially her New Yorker magazine pieces. She saw it and called it early, just like Timothy Snyder. In the midst of a Gessen and Snyder read-a-thon on autocracies and tyrannies. / Ebook, 01/16/21.
“Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
“You think grave digging is something to be embarrassed about? Everybody needs a grave digger, son.”
“I believe you father, but in these times of pestilence I feel overburdened. While the other kids play kick the skull at the green, here I am burying the dead. It’s quite dull and difficult work in these pits.”
“Listen, son. I buried Yorick yesterday, and that distracted pain in the ass prince was here waxing alexandrine and indecisive. He is difficult, but son we’re among kings and princess, it’s not all lower class rot and rigor we deal with.”
The fissile rocks burst against the grain.Clouds swathed the moon in a green cast.The grave digger’s son decides to go into tax accountancy, another steady, but cleaner, job.
II.
Not alone. I’ll see you in the morning.
I’m hearing this for the first time.
Tell me something you heard when you were injured like an animal missing a limb.
Does it need to be a seven part story?
No but if it’s made of sinew and crag I’d enjoy it more.
A rabid coyote has been here at night while we sleep.
Listen, your father was not a starfish. Your sister was not a line of enjambed poetry.
If we don’t get to choose when we are transfigured,
Are we allowed to choose when we are transmogrified?
We only get to choose if we go into tax accountancy or grave digging.
They’re both very steady jobs.
The steadiest.
“I blame God. I want to complain to the boss of God about God. What if the boss of God is rain and the only way to speak to rain is to open your mouth to the sky and drown.”
Once, my father’s gun
was proferred open-handed
as proof of his love.
He sat naked, wet,
at the edge of the bed, said,
“I didn’t, for you.”
I felt horrible
that I was keeping him dead
amongst the living.
“If we’re being realistic about what an end goal should be, creating something with no ambition other than to get something off our chest might be the purest thing anyone could aim for.”
You: insouciant acolyte of peregrinations plus, and you ameliorate my angst. You’ll find me a way to progress as a pilgrim that isn’t full of that old time religion. Then you’ll find me a way to plant a flag in Patagonia.
I tell you the farfisa is the garfish of spell correct.
You spell check me on the profane and change it to the divine.
No one is truly enthralled with conspiracists — our eyes on the mounds of flesh decaying while the landfills overflow with our wretchedness — we are all husks.
We become the planet we kill.
We are elaborate confectioners and puppeteers of malice (we are) — we add no value. We desecrate and fill morgues with dispatch.
You call me Angel, but you are a devil of a teenage hoodlum, hoodwinker, hood scratcher.
Sell me a Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy planner to keep the narrative slant.
Instead we Rochambeau thumb it for rock flautists: you get the Moody Blues guy spouting poetry, and I get the Jethro Tull tippy-toe psychotic. We’ll play it like it’s 1972.
“We have a choice — to be on the side of creation, or surrender to the powers that destroy.”
(click on play button above and watch my short film vomitus)
Waiting for the Reichstag Fire (01.07.21)
I’m waiting for the flood.
I’m waiting.
I’m hoping against deliberative hope
that the storming of Congress wasn’t the prelude for the pretext —
that it wasn’t the Reichstag Fire that failed to catch —
hoping that we’re not headed for a “state of exception”
that we’re not on the path to enabling
the autocrat to break through.
I’ve heard it “can’t happen here,”
like a nauseating refrain,
five years running.
Look around, look back,
it’s all happened here.
“To be sure, Americans in 2020 had access to vastly more information than did Soviet citizens in 1986. But the Trump administration shared two key features with the Soviet government: utter disregard for human life and a monomaniacal focus on pleasing the leader, to make him appear unerring and all-powerful. These are the features of autocratic leadership. In the three years of his presidency, even before the coronavirus pandemic, Trump had come closer to achieving autocratic rule than most people would have thought possible.”
Venn diagrammer, Pusher of flea-bitten particulars, Play me the warped Uzbek blues.
Trip pacifier, Draw me a Cossack Hat I can burn embers in Out on the steppe.
Bring me the blues On a white table cloth, Pass me a caviar spoonful Of that old resentment roe.
Hammer and plumb, Sing the ‘74 blues, Bring a Peckinpah frame And bring me, please, Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia.
That movie don’t play Until ten after four.
“It is said that some artists abuse their need for coffee, alcohol, or opium. I do not really believe that, and if it sometimes amuses them to create under the influence of substances other than their own intoxicating thoughts, I doubt they kept up such lubrications or showed them off. The work of the imagination is exciting enough…”
— George Sand / Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand
“An Era of Emergencies is bearing down on us. We must now consider, for example, how to organize the last industrial extractions of oil, fresh water, natural gas, timber, metallic ores, and fish in order to ensure our own survival; and we must consider, of course, what comes after that. We must reckon with the Sixth Extinction, which will remove, for example, many of our pollinators and one day, probably, many of us. We must invent overnight, figuratively speaking, another kind of civilization, one more cognizant of limits, less greedy, more compassionate, less bigoted, more inclusive, less exploitive.”
thee istsfor manity reader 