I told you to move my father’s stuff over and put your stuff in there — not the zombies!
You said it was your day of the dead prerogative and quoted dialogue from Hiroshima, Mon Amour.
This is how we doomscroll our days of the dead in the Anthropocene.
What I’m Reading:
While leaders in Europe are grappling with overtourism at popular sites, tourism officials in the United States are scrambling to let the world know that the country is still open despite government shutdowns, political rhetoric, tariff wars, shootings, National Guard deployments, expensive visas, and immigration crackdowns.
— Christopher Muther / “Global tourism is surging, with one notable exception: the United States” / The Boston Globe
An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates / The Message
Long has paled that sunny sky: Echoes fade and memories die: Autumn frosts have slain July.
— Lewis Carroll / “A Boat, Beneath a Sunny Sky”
“On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29 percent more expensive than the best result for your search,” Doctorow claims. “Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen, and you’ll pay an average of 25 percent more than you would for your best match. On average, the best match is located seventeen places down in an Amazon search result.”
From the perspective of these platforms and their shareholders, you might call Stage 3 enrichification. But, for users and business customers, Doctorow writes, this is “the end-stage of enshittification, the stage at which a platform turns into a pile of shit.”
— Greg Rosalsky / “A theory why the internet is going down the toilet” / npr
Parties passionate for power Crashed No words were binding No oaths reconciled When the plague broke us We broke each other
— Rosanna Warren / “They set about wasting the land”
Each of these steps has elements of military theatrics and cosplay authoritarianism, but the more the White House insists on the trappings of war—the troop deployments, the “warrior ethos” grooming, the emergency legal powers—the more it risks nudging us toward an actual one.
— Benjamin Wallace-Wells / “Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the ‘War from Within’ “ / The New Yorker
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey. I belong there.
— Mahmoud Darwish / “I Belong There”
The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates / The Message
What I’m Listening To:
Baby’s on fire Better throw her in the water Look at her laughing Like a heifer to the slaughter Baby’s on fire And all the laughing boys are bitching Waiting for photos Oh the plot is so bewitching
Celibates and Paraphiliacs (dead sooner than later)
Sustain yourself with necro-normative inclinations, make use of what you consume, trap your inner child in an iron maiden. Spend time with your inner critic’s internal monologues parsing the sections of your Id with a rusty chainsaw giving your unconscious a case of terminal tetanus. Sublimate your inner demons to outer space—a wise man once said: “in space no one can hear you scream”—but it wasn’t really a wise man, not some mountaintop mandarin sitting lotus post-mantra, but merely a disembodied voice over in search of narrative sense, shilling a sci-fi flick—a lot of sound and fury signifying dollars for a moribund industry providing opiate delusions. Dziga Vertov once said: “film drama is the opiate of the masses.” I tend to aggress, and find egress repellant in the midst of an imminent dissolve.
Cut to:
So on this Day of the Dead in the confabulated year of 2025 CE (common to exploiters and the exploited, common to prelates and agnostic fronts, common to atheist cutlery and baptismal fonts, common to celibates and paraphiliacs) may we rejoice our dead—in those we knew who sloughed this mortal coil—and have a kind thought for the living (specifically, those who deserve kind thoughts) and may those who live now, whose great desire is to foment anger, misunderstanding, strife and division … well, may they join the dead sooner than later, so their peeps may remember them and rejoice this time next year.
(uncredited image in public domain)
What I’m Reading:
Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody. Nobody is asleep. In a graveyard far off there is a corpse who has moaned for three years because of a dry countryside on his knee; and that boy they buried this morning cried so much it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.
— Federico Garcia Lorca / “City That Does Not Sleep”
a welfare check on my chickpeas a moral bankruptcy pulls me from a restraint on my stoop a clue found in my miniature espresso
rasp—my neurons are frayed while packing peanuts + PFAS dilute my membranes thumb-actuated airguns are hard to beat
silt screws cut like symbols (or is it cymbals?) weaned from reluctance + rigmarole merchants it’s the threat of the enema that never threatens that threatens incessantly
a glob of hornet + a flicker of worm a channel for my undesirable tendencies i eat the burglary of unmediated terms
What I’m Reading:
The whole Third Term Project isn’t actually about Trump. The people behind it know he will likely be dead or enfeebled by 2029. It is about them, the vastly unpopular group around Trump, wanting to grift us forever without elections.
Feeling particularly frisky and having been born in foul moonlight amidst the rancor of heat and the solitary investiture of a love shorn largesse — and because of this tainted spite — he bears a maggot face full of youthful miscarriage. A little awkward. A little stagy. Full of concocted melodrama and a derangement that recalled O’Connor’s Misfit: No pleasure but meanness. It’s no real pleasure in life. . .
Huh?
Despite your emerging self, despite your arc of transcendence, you fear there may be something to that bit of causticorioum. You bind your feet and clench you teeth and fling yourself at the open window. Your defenestration keeps you youthful looking — never mind the Botox. Your wish for a properly dramatic soundtrack to your speeding descent is fulfilled with shards from twelve-tone symphonies, something abortional from Berg or Webern — or better yet, both superimposed and played at once. This echoes from the left corner of the sky.
Oh, the sky.
Oh, the street.
Here’s the top of a cab.
Headlong. Accordionesque.
A suppuration of madras lentils or a dal makhani — or better yet, both superimposed and manifesting (curiously) at once.
This is the movement of fear.
What I’m Reading:
All it took was for a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power, and then pay for their innocent choice.
I’m the pit of a floating wreck. Decked in dreck and delivered with the deckle of dynastic disjuncture — stop me from breeding before this sickness festoons another dead end generation. A wireless conflict limned shows phrenological depressions — your skull is a paradise of the longing for extinction. I’m superstitious of cemetery intimacies and apparitions with no soils or tactile imposition on this earth. Find me a day of the dead sugar skull phylactery factory for my arms feel naked and uninhibited and my hands uncontrolled specters at the chopping block of reason. Once I witnessed humanity acting humanely — just that once. Since then it’s reliquary aplomb, nuclear options, and dayglo charnel enemas. What a wonderful world. I stand in the shadows, that’s where I look best. Your peculiar gait suits me — a shuffle of consternation. You appear lost. I’m distinguished by my lack of intellect and abundance of orifices. Aren’t we two of a perfect pair?
What I’m Reading:
When you’re born into this world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.
an eye asquint at weather roam through the ruins frontispiece in shards anew
cling to my vestments forks in the road are not forks my hairshirt newly shredded
you look up and smile blinded by the ecliptic — apocalyptic — you shall never attain this the world barren bears nothing
What I’m Reading:
Climate fiction is one reason ‘dystopian realism’ is increasingly ‘near-future’ rather than set in some inscrutable distant time. We’re in an era where we don’t have to construct thought experiments to see what a dark future might look like, because these days it feels the end of world as we know it is looming over us. In fact, it can make writing a near-future dystopian a tricky endeavor: Predictions might come true before a book is published.
— Yume Kitasei / “‘It’s Okay But It’s Also Really Not.’ When Dystopian Fiction is No Longer a Thought Experiment” / Lithub
The A plane by way of A. Johnson, brought down by ritual and lack of victuals. Deadeth on arrival: thorny ocotillos and twenty minute count downs. Tomorrow I’ll learn about writing what you don’t know—what throws you. Where have you been all these haggard years? My tears in time are tin stripes running down the length of your inebriate life. You left me unsure of myself and strident and missing the glyphs of my youth. You perish-wither— periscopes down—the Monitor and Merrimack your bedmates at the bottom of the bay. Bring back the ironclads by way of Iron Beer, or at least pass me a Materva because it is tomacal.
What I’m Reading:
… every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder.
With the events in Cuba and the Philippines, the United States increasingly became a “culture of war” with a sense of global purpose, prone to jingoistic eruptions. The rhetoric of war became that of patriotism.
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
In my day, we knew how to drown plausibly, to renounce the body’s seven claims to buoyancy.
— Ben Lerner / “The Lichtenberg Figures”
The Splendid War created this, becoming the template for every American “small war” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It was a “war of choice” that started in a wave of idealism and disintegrated into brutality. America’s dependence on overwhelming force would form the assumption that, as in Cuba, war should be quick and relatively bloodless. Instead, outgunned opponents became an insurgency: the U.S. response throughout the coming decades would proceed with such near-identical ruthlessness as to seem scripted. Though usually treated as separate conflicts, the wars in Cuba and the Philippines should be seen as a continuum—one that begins with two similar Cuban and Filipino poet-martyrs who shape their nations’ identities and ends with the United States entering as a savior, only to become a scourge . . . As we’d already done to Native Americans, in order to save them, we had to kill them.
Not until the conflict in Cuba and the Philippines did America’s love of war become so bold that one can track the transformation.
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
no more money for the endless throat of money. no more syllogisms that permission endless suffering. no more.
— Sam Sax / “Ode to Those Who Block Tunnels and Bridges”
The culture of war became indelible: a new Orwellian world in which, according to Paul Fussell, war becomes “peacekeeping” and the acceptance of any act “in the name of freedom” a citizen’s duty. “Those who challenged the authenticity of American altruism were by definition evil-doers and mischief makers,” observed the historian Archibald Cary Coolidge. “So fully were Americans in the thrall of the moral propriety of their own motives as to be unable to recognize the havoc their actions often wrought on lives of others.”
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
Today my mum said she doesn’t remember arriving at my house with a dishcloth, doesn’t remember me telling her my kitten stayed overnight at the vet, that I’d be coming over to help with bills. What she remembers is now. She knows her memory is a ship leaving port without permission . . .
— Kelli Russell Agodon / “Dementia Is a New Way to Be Buddhist”
It’s easy for moral certitude and blindness to be one. At its heart lay a darker certainty: those who needed our help were lesser beings—because they were not American. It lay in the order of things that they accept American guidance; dissenters were not only misguided but corrupt, and thus enemies. The myth plays out often—in my life, from the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The leaders we elect always act surprised when things go awry.
Since one classical definition of mental illness is the tendency to repeat obviously self-destructive behavior, one wonders how deeply our cherished myths make us willfully blind and mad.
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
What I’m Listening To:
Everything we love is gonna start to die It’s only a matter of time Till all we love has gone and died It’s only a matter of time Till all we love has died At least we tried At least we tried
The longing for home—as darkness descends & sickness and death lurk at the peripheries.
The new ice—the medium-density amorphous ice.
The geophony of home—how the wind howls at 212 feet elevation.
It’s good to be home—wherever that is.
What I’m Reading:
JR: Could you tell us your biggest sources of inspiration?
LK: The bitterness. I am very sad if I think of the status of the world now. This is my deepest inspiration. This could be also an inspiration for the next generation or generations in literature. Inspiration to give something for the next generation, somehow to survive this time because these are very, very dark times and we need much more power in us to survive this time than before.
— László Krasznahorkai, to Jenny Rydén / “First reactions. Telephone interview, October 2025” / nobelprize.org
thee istsfor manity reader 