thee istsfor manity reader

Dilatory Prelate (redux)

The prelate drafts an encyclical announcing that the werewolves and camellias will be delivered on Friday to all diocese in the mountainous regions. It encourages all Englishmen and yogis to traipse about nude and re-stage the highlights of the Inquisition.

The document goes on to explain that castanets, “fingertip cymbals” (for he has forgotten that they are called zills) and censers will be distributed liberally among the cairns about the ridge tops—“Help Yourselves,” he flourishes in his complicated calligraphy.

He insists that discussions of reincarnation will not be part of the programming. And furthermore, that “Virgins Need Not Apply.”

He’s buoyant with his ideas, they come to him in torrents. He surmises that it must be something about that moldy bread at breakfast. He continues with momentum:

“Recently 50,000 perforations were distributed throughout the bishopric. The adhesives which bound them were of an open-ended and mysterious nature—lacking in optimism and alternating and overlapping in swells of violin trills when touched or added to morning cereals. They are altogether too piquant and picaresque for our flock’s conservative constitutions—Please Avoid! Toecaps and personal backyard derricks will be distributed in their stead. A recurrence of tedium and inefficiency is all that is required and asked of you. OBEY!”

But a sort of boredom swamp bounded by alienation hammock islands spread out before him. Never has he been gripped by such a visceral ennui—as if it was bequeathed to him as a grand heirloom that he should wear around his neck. 

And he does! He wears it around his neck. 

And it is heavy, baby. A ‘heavy-o-sity’ he’s never experienced—or maybe once, when he missed the 1847 College of Cardinals’ sabbatical.

He considers the Ancient Mariner and the awful pestilential albatross crawling with monosyllabic bird mites (wa, wa, wa, wa, wa…they stridulated) around his neck, and the ‘heavy-o-sity’ becomes too much to bear.

He tears up the draft encyclical, inkwells his pen (he never liked the damn thing anyway) and laments, Why’d I ever take up writing? He descends to the cellar for a bottle of wine.

There is no remuneration in fermentation, but the bottom of a bottle is as good as any place in this world, he reasons. 

And he adds: At the least I’m not in Florida, so I have that going for me. But there was something poetic about werewolves and camellias…

He’ll eventually come round to that.

What I’m Reading:

The Earth wobbling on through space, riddled with life,
from the thickening mothers of vinegar
to insomniacs anonymous who see
a future of unscheduled meetings with death,
from sap-green bamboo for Shanghai scaffolding
to an old dog running away in his dreams.

— Chris Andrews / “Prop”

Ready to Order

With the waiter largely offscreen, none of the cheeses are what they seem . . . 

Absorbing his friend’s accident—a taciturn stoicism gone limitless and flagrant—growing increasingly unsettling as midnight strikes and the Gouda appears.

Bystanders switch perspectives as the rubbish becomes the menu incarnate. Mold elementary.

Windscreen marks on his forehead and rinds on his cheeks . . . 

The crash of canned Spam ever-shifting into an unexpected perversion with the Camembert. 

Are you ready to order?

What I’m Reading:

The solipsism of low self-esteem is one of the wonders of the human psyche. So inexplicable is its grip, so binding its influence, it can feel almost mythic. And why not? Myths are what we invent to accommodate the mysteries of nature: our own if not those of our surroundings. Scientists can explain daylight and darkness, gravity and rainfall, but who, after all, can explain why we are born with a need to think well of ourselves, and why, when we don’t, life becomes an exercise in humiliation?

— Vivian Gornick / “Always Inadequate” / The New Yorker

make a flat about me

implore the dishes
as an ill-fated magazine might
after a few tumultuous departures
spent amiably among the geraniums

she wheels an epilogue of desires
words pale in sequence
misericordia perhaps
a sugar narration for certain
cut along the arthouse seam

it rains all day here
episodic and flat
the haze of woodsmoke
disintegrating on a sugary cloud
beggaring at the sunset
elliptic and amorphous

he omits knocks
along the charnel house doors
counting on the spectator to dot the i’s
and cut the t’s
taking stabs at the cult of the inflatable earth

fingers the absurd artistic crown
he’ll never wear

What I’m Reading:

Evil has no alternate plan. It is simply incapable of assuming failure.

— Cormac McCarthy / The Passenger

These Were a Few of the Dreams

These were a few of the images retained:

The final scene is all she remembers.

Massive black horses in water—a marsh, blue sky, angry cumulus darkness roiling in the distance.

They need this, a disembodied voice says. They stand in this water to take the weight off their veiny haunches. It’s therapeutic.

Instantly, she and her horse are a mile out at sea in deep swelling water. The horses swim as if a maelstrom wasn’t upon them—they’re enjoying it—the ocean breaking over their heads.

She isn’t enjoying this—briny fear and seafoam in her nostrils.

And in another instant the sea is drained, there is no tumult, but she is suspended two feet above the seabed, just feet from the old beach line. The marsh is now reedy savanna.

Someone is screaming—bear, bear—in the reeds behind a tall chain-link fence. She has to start her long hike, but she can’t get out of her frozen hover. She can’t move.

These were a few of the dreams. Then she remembers her Shelley. She mutters: 

We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day…

This is a bit of the wreckage.

What I’m Reading:

Quite often I talk about being a pacifist, and about how important non-violence is to me, but by virtue of where my tax dollars are being spent, I’m one of the most violent people on earth.

— Omar El Alkad, to Dan Sheehan /“Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West“/ Lithub

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The dead are carried away in tote bags.
Because they got carried away, they are borne away.
Only some of those borne away got carried away.
Some of the others borne away were newly born or else had borne
them.
They got borne away from home. Or was it to home.

— Eugene Ostashevsky / “Falling Sonnet XI”

If you had to point to one continuous theme in all of Pynchon’s work, it is a silver Christian fish bumper sticker turned right-side up to look like a rocket. Our science worship has usurped the God worship of previous centuries, but ultimately points to Old Testament outcomes: Apocalypse, holocaust, and the fascistic desire to dominate. The phallic sex-death drive of the 00000 V2 rocket—produced using concentration camp labor—ends the world of Gravity’s Rainbow, but also begins the nightmare with a horror; you will never hear that screaming which comes across the sky, because the impact of a supersonic rocket outpaces the noise of the explosion.

— Devin Thomas O’Shea / “Why Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland—a Disappointment When It Was Published—is the Novel We Need Right Now” / Lithub

You think there is someone there, standing in your skin, but there isn’t. Accept it. If you would like for there to be someone where you are, albeit briefly, you must choose who to be and be that person. 

— Jesse Ball / The Repeat Room

wordless, but not quite silent
unless to say love, unless not to speak
—there is leftover gunpowder in this line
becoming a simplified beginning

— Duo Duo / “If No Echo, No Monologue”

Scientists think sleep is the brain’s rinse cycle, when fluid percolating through the organ flushes out chemical waste that accumulated while we were awake . . . cerebrospinal fluid, the liquid bathing the brain, seeps through the organ via tiny passages alongside blood vessels, sweeping away metabolic refuse and other unwanted molecules. Fluid flow through this so-called glymphatic system ramps up during sleep . . . vigorous glymphatic clearance is beneficial: Circulation falters in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative illnesses.

— Mitch Leslie / “Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself during sleep” / Science

Sometimes, you say, I wear
an abstracted look that drives you
up the wall, as though it signified
distress or disaffection.
Don’t take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it’s time for me to practice
growing old.

— Stanley Kunitz / “Passing Through”

He looked up. His pale hair looked white. He looked fourteen going on some age that never was. He looked as if he’d been sitting there and God had made the trees and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then his own again. Above all else he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one else had heard of yet. Some vast tragedy not of fact or incident or event but of the way the world was.

— Cormac McCarthy / The Crossing

What I’m Listening To:

Gotta keep moving from a life of losing, reading news by the sea
Sentences are ending me
Even from the water, the deepest things are talking
By only going further into it

— Ty Segall / “Buildings”

stained pink rayon

first responders were able to get him out
the stained pink rayon nightgown beneath
his torn clothes was unexpected

no one says a word
he was not in the water but he was taken
by the 8-foot wave nonetheless

rough surf justifies
a rough serf
higher and higher
both he and the waves

he had plenty of sunscreen
slathered on slippery as a forlorn right whale
the right whale for harpooning
back in the day

humidity is up
but it’s only monday

im bleeding
he says

so he’s got that going for him

What I’m Reading:

one hears a hymn to killing
a hymn to lead bullets
piercing through the human flesh
like angels

— Tomica Bajsić / “Hymn to Killing”

Queen Travis Meets Whit Fictions (redux)

Queen Travis declaims that feculence has nothing to do in this affair. She says:

“I was bequeathed a third rate hand me down in consignment and inquisitiveness—a loan from dog. I’ve got the scrabble tiles blues—a compulsion to put handfuls of tiles in my mouth, and store them there until we stop clear cutting the world’s forests. There’s a depth to the sky that terrifies me—there’s something biding its time behind that quaint cerulean facade. So keep calm, but get ready for love, because the blackness of space is manifest in our every gesture.”

She tilts her head up from her privy papers, sniffs at the air, flares a nostril, continues:

“I’ve got stockyard pictographs of trestle beam investitures. Get all of these words out of my head, Doctor Ambassador—my thoughts no longer serve me but trip me up at difficult moments. Platitudes will get you everywhere—speak in riddles and baffles. If you, my subjects, dig trenches in cement—it’s hard work—I’ll extract the juice of yet grown fruit from the air. But don’t ask me to be clear for clarity’s sake, it doesn’t become me.”

Fanfare. Gentle applause. Fanfare.

In strides Whit Fictions, fresh from America. He bullhorns, apropos of nothing, without invitation:

“What dribble! Talk about disjunction and linearity. I want my plastic rat, and I want to put an end to Sunday morning pleasantness. It’s all sound and drury until someone gets hurt. It’s dribble in the middle of each waking hour—and let’s take it outside because the making of treaties is provincial. You, your excellence, at the top of the great chain of being, think it’s too quaint for a bully type like me? Why are you asking for a ride? You think this is Lennon-McCartney territory, sister? Well, sis, it’s not. This is it, this is mythical shit. I pray twice hourly for the day of eagles and hegemony. You, there, singing your Deep Purple refrain from “Hush”— sweet jeez, do I hate that song! For the time being take thy ferrules and place them round your pinky fingers, and chop off the slag ends. Stay calm. As you were, and all that. I am lord of the swill bucket!”

One could say there was much rejoicing—but why lie? Decrees, treaties, agreements and promises were broken. Rationalizations were stoked, and everyone walked away to their corners promising to tend their gardens. Naked and afraid.

What I’m Reading:

I believe in death, in death’s eternal pulse, and I believe our
moment will come again when the sea regains its color and the
sphere lights up, emblazons the hilltop, and celebrates the
dignity—this time—of the sick at heart.

— Ennio Moltedo / “86”

excessive levity

markets are drafted
into stock fists on actual horseback

see ya in alaska now that 90 degree days
are common + we float away on glacier melt

wildfire smoke flood tornado broad
applications of anthropogenic love for ma earth

physical comedy with the grim
red of precariousness of starvation + unemployment

higher than ever prices + fewer than ever benefits
die of neglect if u aint got ur own private rockets

voodoo economics without the gipper
frippery + witchery + cheap 19th century tactics

put the jacksonian back in treachery
bark loudly + carry a brownshirt in a backpocket

gimme dat ol time derision + white supremacy
look at da world weve made / look ma we made it

peacelove+happiness
aint we da sweetest animaloids going

goose stepping like a paradoxical network of birds
nesting in dat frayed nest on ya head

aint good for nuthin else anyway
never was

the future aint as good as it used to be
bittersweet + bowdlerized as it is

wartime astonishment / genuflection in da genocide
weve exploited ourselves for cheap

or for reasons of excessive levity

What I’m Reading:

Appeals to homogeneous nationalism had to be constructed against non-Caucasians. Of course, the concept or category of “whiteness” is itself an ever-evolving category. So non-Caucasian was a moving target, and the unifying animosity eventually had to be directed against outside others. Historian Richard Hofstadter has characterized this ongoing feature of US politics as the paranoid style, the perennial fear of outside others. 

— Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone / Consequences of Capitalism