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.
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
debilitating as 1-2-3… awful as awful can be, and slightly elevated but apocryphal
after the apocalypse we walked on the littered shore of lacuna beach
no word from paramaribo pam, but a fine bread crumb trail of… well, bread crumbs
trailed off into the wreckage of a civilization unhinged and unleavened
she was germinating a fear of wheat, though one couldn’t really call her glutenous… yet
she once said: a night in suriname is equal to two weeks in french guiana
i understood nothing, but the smell of decaying sargassum was intoxicating
she was spotted at the fringe of the jungle at the interstice between life and death
made dyspeptic by the cold medications she attempted to o.d. on
but the bardo was not “taking” and her ass was festooned with deer ticks
What I’m Reading:
Black walnuts hitting a barn roof Fairly rapped the morning. Massachusetts, Autumn. Orioles and pumpkins. And the crack of those round shells Like a hardwood mallet hammering a wedge Into the moment, splitting it ever open
O, pallid bat, wombat, scarlet tanager, marmoset and all the little animals of the world that spark wars and worldwide grief… Listen! ye who visit our leaders’ dreams at night and whisper all types of destructive and inhumane council — planting the seeds of war, hyper-capitalism, oppressive totalitarianism, and oligarchical greed that passes for socialism in practice — you are on notice.
All these bad ideas are planted by the cutest life forms on planet Earth.
While Attenborough gallivants about the world, here and there, galumphing with whirring machinery in order to show us this and that, and it’s import in the world; he fails to notice what the pretty beasties are doing to our leaders every night — and by extension, what they are doing to our world. OUR world.
O, low and cavorting bestiary! We shall hunt you out by deforestation, overfishing, pollution, over-development, and wildfire. You shall stop this chimeric invasion into our sleep and equanimity.
We are man! The highest and greatest link in the Great Chain of Being… (sorry, so sorry, dear father)
We are man! Highest and greatest eminence on the Great Chain of Being here on earth!
We bend the elements to our will — the atoms do our bidding. We will move on beyond this planet, because this is what we do. Invade. Conquer. Control. Cleanse. Fold. Assimilate!
So, Red Panda; so, chin strap penguin; so, octopus; so, ring-tailed lemur — we bring you the Anthropocene, free of charge — but it will cost you dearly.
I pity the fool-animal earwigging it’s way into our beloved leader’s ear, in the dead of night, at the hour of fog.
You shall atone!
Then we will flay you, stuff you, catalog you, and put you up on display in a musty diorama — next to the heads of our enemies. Because this is what we are expert at. Because this is what we do.
What I’m Reading:
We have named our species Homo sapiens—the wise human. But it is debatable how well we have lived up to the name.
— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that, after two and a half centuries — about the length of the Roman republic in its glory — American democracy is disappearing.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, the universal ideas of the founding documents no longer seem to have their hold on many Americans, especially younger ones.
— George Packer / “America’s Zombie Democracy” / The Atlantic
. . . your world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions. And we will devour you, my friend. You and all your pale empire.
— Cormac McCarthy / Cities of the Plain
I have taken to photographing my every moment in an attempt to locate the place where I lost myself.
— Cynthia Cruz / “Phosphorescence”
Humans are by far the planet’s most destructive species, but we’re also the only species that has ever worked together to ensure other forms of life don’t go extinct.
— Connor Knighton / Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia to Zion Journey Through America’s National Parks
Make me dirt. Gone are the days of serenity. Guns are the words of humanity. I have no food but a thorn, No sport but a sigh.
— Refaat Alareer / “O Earth (Land Day Poem)”
The Indian Empire is a despotism—benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object.
— George Orwell / Burmese Days
The signs pointing to doing something right and failing. Educated and I lost my job. Bipolar and I cannot lose my mind.
— Erica Dawson / “The Month When I Watch Joker Everyday”
Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate.
— Omar El Akkad / One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
What I’m Listening To:
A man wants to smell like a man To crumple a can in the palm of his hand This is a man . . .
— Reverend Fred Lane / “The Man with the Foldback Ears”
•pond-seeking sir what sadness do you heap upon my eyes / the weariness sinks into my bones / oblate & undone / repeated ingestions of your misery elide / have driven me to stress / suicide your stockbroker gig / conflate your delusions into one great drunken indifference / your shadow has overtaken me / my gannet’s billet is done for / drink of the datura thorn apple / forget•
What I’m Reading:
Let the fog’s calls go to voicemail. Tell the fog to eat shit, burn the fog’s letters.
His fragrance remained in the room when he left, and she picked up notes of Ambien and gin.
He turned into a dragon and blew smoke up his own ass: in this manner he floated away on convection currents over the next county into the tri-state area.
She was disputatious. She said she loved living in Bwana Johnny Time — the epoch of real mealy mouthed crying. She said she had cramps. The walls cared nothing of it. She insisted and sang “Silent Night.”
He was tall with small joints and thick limbs. His hair, tufted, was buffeted by the winds which were strong and cool this high in the atmosphere. Before he blew smoke up his ass he washed windows without panes, and took pains in his assiduousness. (His father once digested him during a midday snack — and since then he felt as if he were covered in a film.) He felt slightly dirty and smelled worse.
She was small with oblong limbs, and royally blonde-haired down to her quadriceps. She analyzed the filigree in the milliner’s shears and chose “deckle” as the word of the day; and cellophane was “thee” fabric. She smelled of Lithium and a life roughly lived. She ate only the crusts.
His name was Funty. Her name was Frenta. He blessed his goldfish. She fried hers. “Orange Poppers!” she proclaimed. His favorite animal was the Pileated Woodpecker. She peeled his navels.
She was obsessed with the texture of his body. His tortured male narcissism despaired. He happily fathered a wonderful future in Hades. He wanted to write a skeezy text in the underworld.
What I’m Reading:
Tragedy lurks like a wounded lynx. Like the sea, tragedy knows no fatigue, there is no rest in its mysteries.
thee istsfor manity reader 