“In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.”
— Wallace Stevens / “Of the Surafce of Things”
“Some time ago, I wrote an essay about napping outside how I would, for instance, see a carpet of moss in the forest or a cradle of rocks on a summit, and then feel inexplicably tired, lie down, and fall asleep quicker than I ever could in a bed. How, also, I’d awoken in a blizzard on a mountainside; another time in a graveyard with two men standing over me, asking if I was ‘practicing’; woke in a field with a mouse in my pocket eating the peanuts I carried. I felt a freedom to be in the wilderness that I know is not given to everyone.”
— Ben Shattuck / Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau
“The beauty of modern Man is not in the persons but in the Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.”
— Robinson Jeffers / “Rearmament”
“What is this secret power of trees that makes us so much healthier and happier? Why is it that we feel less stressed and have more energy just by walking in the forest?”
— Dr. Qing Li / Forest Bathing
“Perhaps walking is best imagined as an indicator species, ‘to use an ecologist’s term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble.”
— Rebecca Solnit / Wanderlust: A History of Walking
“I’m winding down. The daylight is winding down. / Only the night is / wound up tight. / And ticking with unpaused breath.”
— Charles Wright / “Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes”
“A week of black, amnesiac sleep followed my homecoming. Exactly what I wanted—to be obliterated by the insistent presence of the sea, as the sea had done to Cape Cod.”
— Ben Shattuck / Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau
What I’m Listening To:
“I got high I thought I saw an angel But he was just a ghost He was making wooden posts out of my family What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming”
I was assigned a sanity rating at birth that does not compute. The birds don’t sing as much as they scream—a singer once sang that, and it was recorded—go and check. I’ve checked my packets, and all the seeds are missing, not even so much as a coating of seed dust. I ingested my ulterior motives and they are now the extra padding in my posterior. None of this has been pasteurized (or proof-read for that matter) and it’s been proven that dingoes occasionally will eat scabies. Hold on … something seems amiss with my autocorrect. Just keep holding there. I’ll be back.
What I’m Reading:
“The world I see looks to me like a game of children. Strange performances and plays go on night and day.”
That I’m trying to figure out why Pablo Fanques Fair was such a scene?
That the scree and other debris that gets in my shoes is really comforting?
No.
I’ve run away from home on a fast ferry!
I’m picking off a dozen deer ticks before I get the Lyme bullseye rash.
I don’t want the Lyme. I don’t want the Covid.
I left my neighborhood for another neighborhood—pictures tomorrow.
Stay tuned—more news at 11.
What I’m Reading:
“I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.”
The fable persuader The deep pocket pusher of dreams Fine line sharpener of fancy and flight Scrimper and scavenger of marrow-bone pithy and white Nails plastic lobsters onto dead sycamores Inscribes chalk circles in the middle of the street Loves Luci Dead Limb Cries at the wax of the moon
What I’m Reading:
“Darkness starts inside of things but keeps on going when the things are gone.”
“I stole the yellow bird That lives in the devil’s sex He will teach me how to seduce”
— Joyce Mansour / “I stole the yellow bird …”
“on Sunday after church I took a walk so I could discuss your nipples with the friendly woodpecker who visits the birch tree”
— Wayne Koestenbaum / “David’s Nipples”
“It’s called Cyclone Mocha, but it might as well be called Cyclone Exxon or Cyclone Chevron—they were among the companies that ignored the clear evidence of pending climate crisis and kept pushing their product till the Bay of Bengal was a hot tub. And it’s oil companies that are currently mounting a drive in California to overturn a law that would simply prevent them from drilling directly next to schools, hospitals, and homes. Rage is not an answer, but it is the thing that comes before an answer.”
— Bill McKibben / “Thoughts, Prayers, Rage, Resistance”
“Consider: the verbal dearth that is always a main ripple of extinction.”
— RK Fauth / “Playing with Bees”
“I’m feeling excited about writing, but it’s only because I’m not doing it. When I’m doing it, I feel miserable. When I’m not doing it, I can’t wait to do it again. It’s so frustrating to write, and I get so depressed when I’m writing. Right now, I’m not writing and I feel great about writing.”
— Anelise Chen / The Creative Independent interview
“Tender Is the Flesh is a meditation on what capitalism is – it teaches us to naturalise cruelty … Capitalism is a system into which we are all born, we have it inside of us, and patriarchy is part of that system. I tried to work with this idea that we eat each other in a symbolic way. With women it’s so obvious, because you can talk about human trafficking, war and the way women are made invisible in different spheres. Here in Argentina, they kill women every day. Capitalism and cannibalism are almost the same, you know?”
— Agustina Bazterrica / “Bookmarks” / The Guardian
“… the world is violent. Why should fiction pretend it’s not?”
another year dead another dread come to pass another dashed hope as you drift to sleep you wretch—
make lemonade tomorrow
What I’m Reading:
“But those were good days … and now like everything else, the cigarettes and the wine and the cock-eyed sparrows in the half-moon, it’s all gone. A sorrow heavier than tar. Goodbye, goodbye.”
thee istsfor manity reader 