Trading hacks and bites for color coordination and fresh breath for the usual boxy attic ratio or the wide factory of the scape tuck, Survival Cokes was not merely a formal development for its discreetness, but a leap in superintendent menace as the winds and tsunamis intensified.
The confined strings of domestic quartets and urban chamber orchestras are replaced in the frou frou flicker, for the most patient patina gazers, with the sweeping humours of rural bossanovas, where farmland meets motets and outfit sodas become polyphonic creamsicles.
Here, in a cavernous craft farmhouse that evokes the homesteads of attack ships on filigree filters, a melodrama of colliding epistemologies oozes out in period drama dresses and nostalgic dinners as the patriarch of a multigenerational peasant feeling, resists the shifting tongues of modernization.
Wan and wa-wa-wa-ing all the way home. Meanwhile headstrong winds depart-in-gales of ta-da-da-da’s!
We’re caught between a need for meaning and the stubbornness of the individual artistic impulse to create. A divide amplified by post-postmodern tendentiousness.
The fever will break…
I’ll marry a cloud instead…
Listen to 12-minutes of Toxic Shock…
And find meaning in that.
What I’m Reading:
It wasn’t over. The past could come back, fully formed, at any moment, unlocked by a random combination of sounds and movements.
An analysis by the Deportation Data Project, which is based at the University of California, Berkley, found that immigration arrests in Massachusetts have so far risen by 336% from the previous year. This means 2,230 confirmed ICE arrests so far through June 10 … “ICE is particularly choosing tactics that stoke fear. They’re in plain clothes, they’re covering their faces, they’re using unmarked vehicles – and using all of these [tactics] stoke fear so that people can never really know whether it’s just some person with a tinted SUV, or if ICE is staking out their house.”
— Alex Degterev / “ICE in Jamaica Plain and How Pols and Residents are Fighting Back” / Jamaica Plain News
Today, more than 700,000 people call Boston home. Approximately 28% of our residents were born in a country other than the United States … our immigrant residents and communities are part of the fabric of Boston. They are our family, neighbors, and friends … A city that is scared is not a city that is safe. A land ruled by fear is not the land of the free.
— Michelle Wu, Boston Mayor / Statement before the US House Oversight committee
What I’m Listening To:
Where the home in the valley meets the damp, dirty prison And the executioner’s face is always well hidden Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten
In the montage I ascend from the dashboard— depart on the window dressed of spaniels— and like the nude descending the staircase
I’m aggrieved.
For I know not where the primordial matter in the skin sack I’m in intends to go.
My watchword is wrecker—I’m a kickback president of threats.
There is a poet in my pocket that only manages: humbug! amidst the glossolalia.
I have an earwig in a sachet that transmits opioid messages of dis-illusion.
I am not my vertigo—I intone in my inclination.
I’m the slacker that darkens as I upend—the king of stalemate bequests!
There are eddies in the rivulets that course thru my coagulated blood.
I am a godson among the startled—and humming a turd-tune I know . . .
Violin-leaves tar at the wings— Dew-drug sinners eat garnet stopgaps— There be rodent chocolates in the chinaberry cabinet—and three clear tools of destruction.
(I intend to use)
Come. Appease.
What I’m Reading:
I didn’t think a lot about death, but I was getting ready to. I understood that death was coming and that all my current preoccupations were kind of naïve; I still operated as if I could win somehow. Not the vast and total winning I had hoped for in the previous decades, but a last chance to get it together before winter came, my final season.
I am the day’s encryption / I am nylon whir on fetid skronk / I am must + disequilibrium / I am growth opportunity / I am terror in the grass / I am green bastion in silence / I am the shock of slice before sanguinary / I am bloodlust / I am carnivore. I am chaos + confusion. I am / eye.
What I’m Reading:
For I have witnessed the sky growing bluer when tortured; the sea, deeper, when tormented.
— Garous Abdolmalekian / “How Can I Bring This Poem to a Halt?”
and no one lives where they should they roam the roads sleepless paperless sleeping in bus stations fleeing in the middle of the night writing without the peace to write thinking without the time to think eating while standing sleeping while sitting washing in rainwater and living in cars
— Gunnar Wærness / “29. (planet of the apes / december 10 2014)”
My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
— Omer Bartov / “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” / The New York Times
Reading is resistance – through literature we educate ourselves against ignorance and the dumbing down of our society; we engage with the world beyond our own lives, therefore expanding our knowledge base beyond the typically dominant narratives and our personal stories; we deepen our understanding of what it means to be human and learn from different perspectives; and we develop the linguistic skills with which we can express ourselves. We cannot underestimate the power and privilege of being articulate. In today’s society, when our brains are being rewired to substitute scrolling for reading – both involve the eyes – the reader of books has the advantage.
— Bernardine Evaristo / “Reading Is Resistance” / Substack
But the loss of Mother Earth is not a single event like the death of a loved one—it is a continual and unrelenting and torrential stream of deaths, in pieces, in acres, in species. Its scope is gargantuan and ungraspable, and as such, the appropriate level of grief does not seem human in scale.
— Dheepa R. Maturi / “A Planet’s Pain: On Healing Climate Grief Through Ritual and Reverence” / Lithub
Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.
— Hana Kiros / “The Trump Administration Is About to Incinerate 500 Tons of Emergency Food” / The Atlantic
Still, none of this means that Trump is invincible, even when his administration uses violence to achieve its aims and terrify its critics. First – simplest and most difficult –the resistance must show up. Get bodies into the streets. The second nationwide anti-Trump rallies were bigger than the first; the third, fourth and 10th can be bigger still.
— Judith Levine / “The polls look bad for Trump – but tyrants don’t depend on approval ratings” / The Guardian
when you hear that my country is disappearing you don’t get terrified when i have translated this so you can understand that my country is disappearing you don’t get terrified no instead you grow furious because i am terrified now that’s empire
— Gunnar Wærness / “36. (empire / february 13 2015)”
What I’m Listening To:
There’s a flavor to the sound of walking No one ever noticed before
… Death and those who use or serve it—this I did not feel or sense (because I refused to) but I knew it was in the air as sure as I sensed the movement of the breeze among the areca leaves right behind me in the courtyard.
the fear bitterness & hatred the witch fellow falters the work the starkest darkest & the most sharply subversive pair of shoes the wartime years self maneuvered & censored the jingoistic pension conditional the use of memory & his own words the struggling fellow & his eleven existential roadblocks the ensuing disarray & immiseration the annoyance laced travails the low key lighting the austere camerawork the crossfade to black the avant-garde soundtrack
the elbow to the side of the head the endorsement of filial piety followed by the kick in the eye the filth the pith the pit
the the
What I’m Reading:
The mobile phone has collapsed the space between private and public language. All language is public now. It’s as if the illusion of public anonymity of the private conversation has been amped up. Everyone is intensely aware of the phenomenon of public cell phone use, most viewing it as inconsiderate, a nuisance. But I like to think of it as a release, a new level of textual richness, a reimagining of public discourse, half conversations resulting in a breakdown of narrative, a city full of mad people spewing remarkable soliloquies. It used to be this type of talk was limited to the insane and the drunken; today everyone shadowboxes language.
The 10¥ Marketplace (Impediments Galore: A Courtroom Drama)
A savant mushroom with a seedy past in Africa discovers that its worst fears have come true.
An artisanal clutch of gourmands are out to ambush — deracinate, tear and shred. There are ambuscades forming at the usual fringe mush casinos.
The Order of the Medieval Tamarinds of Chivalry, Tamarins and Rookeries are on high alert.
Two chimeras claim their birthright on a magical bluff—advertisers stumble over each other to sign lucrative sponsorship deals.
You rummage through neighborhoods of kipper prints keen to be deposed.
The first-perversion is an introspection — an accusation of a man’s lifetime in exchange for neutrality.
A successful yachtsman is asked to help solve a locked-rosary rush of the stage — nannies and ninnies need not apply. Although Ned had previously applied for the position of Autocue Presenter and was now baffled.
I arrive at a courtyard with glass eels and aubergines — all are nonplussed and embroiled in pedantic sophistries.
My father’s grating voice keeps counterpoint to mother’s grating of ptarmigan (for the ptarmigan parmigiana).
Busybody pollsters allude to les accents aigus and oleander glower, while vicious workmen heeled in sod transcribe “Hotel California” to Morse Code via ASL.
This is an invocation to prove the innocence of a convicted Shiitake.
During the courtroom sidebar the Asterisk Committee undertakes an undercount of footnotes and bibliographical references.
A mutant blancmange eats a buckeye, then an eclair, an English schoolboy, a darkened alcove, and a memorial to brocaded sofas.
A king’s unfounded jerkin destroys his fanfare and picket rigging. We are disgusted with meritocracy and resort to meretriciousness for a 10¥ note.
We found deterrents in the aphrodisiacs and asphodels in the aphorisms.
Objections overruled — no one says a word.
What I’m Reading:
… do these dolphins want the baloney to arrive? …
is this the way to probe death? candied lights in long dark rooms? code name Bladder Tribes now there’s a new use for all these worlds let the Gummy Bears bear me out
Sometimes I am asked to clarify my position and I say I’m equidistant to roil and root.
Sometimes I am asked to qualify what I mean and I say this hand is love and this hand is hate.
Sometimes I wonder what all of this means and I say to myself: I didn’t ask to be put on this ride but I’m going to have to ride it out.
Sometimes I rail and Sometimes I sleep through it all
Sometimes I think in English and Sometimes I think in Spanish
and …
In this way I moved ever so much closer to where I thought I needed to be. What I needed to do to regain some balance in my life.
I turned on my tuneage.
I listened to John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Music Series Volumes 1-3, all three records put me in the mood to do something drastic.
Especially after reading about the making of the records — now that I was weighed down with the knowledge that the heartbeats I kept hearing throughout the latter two records were the heartbeats of their dead baby.
By the time I came to the song “John & Yoko” on Unfinished Music 3, with the repeated and incessant cries of “John,” “Yoko,” and the heaving palpitations of the dead baby’s heart I started throwing books in the fireplace. I couldn’t take it.
I left the apartment and went to O’Hara’s — the Irish pub down the street on the corner of South Miami Ave and 26th Street — it was half empty and dark just the way I enjoyed it. I chose the end most stool by the rarely used back entrance, certain that I’d get some writing done.
No one would want to sit near a television with a screen saver on it, all the action was near the front where the University of Miami football game was blaring.
I ordered the Reuben Egg Rolls — not exactly the first dish one thinks of when one is thinking about Irish pub food.
That is how I got to this very point.
What I’m Reading:
A series of signs said help was there, but not for me.
Out of the netherworld, through an oppressively humid haze, I materialize at a shore front — the city behind me a stony sentinel, silent and shimmering, in the vapor. I turn from the city and there, where the lake meets a path line, stands a weatherworn green bicycle with drop handlebars.
I intuit that this is my way back home to Boston. The mushroom hiss haze fades away as the sun zeppelins its own path out of the clouds. There is only one direction home and it unspools out to the northwest and I intuit, again, that it will turn sharply east and I’ll be home again.
Just pump the pedals — grind away through the hottest days in recorded human history — and all will be well.
Well. Well. Well.
It’s good to be home again.
What I’m Reading:
It’s only fair that the person who gets left behind gets to tell the story.
thee istsfor manity reader 