thee istsfor manity reader

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Their present situation reflects a broader dilemma in America: A large group of people feels one way, while a small group with a disproportionate amount of structural power tells them they are wrong to feel it.

— Lydia Kiesling / “Lydia Kiesling on Refusing to Speak at an Anti-Trans University” / Lit Hub

Please, someone—
tell me a poem can coax 

oil from a sea bird’s throat. 
Tell me what to do
with my hands—my hands—

what can my hands do now?

— Rachel Dillon / “A dead whale can feed an entire ecosystem”

My family huddled hidden under one another in the house our Dad had built alone. The house where we’d spent these years together. The old roof groaned under the pouring. The leaking basement filled with goo.

LOST: my gun collection.

LOST: every board game you can think of.

LOST: mother’s bowling trophies (30+).

LOST: our hope for some new day.

— Blake Butler / Scorch Atlas

They could be an orchestra.
A single one looks in the mirror
& sees a note. A quarter note.

— Sandra McPherson / “Las Hormigas”

What you feared, to put it bluntly, was the possibility that the powers Al had would grow to far surpass yours, such that Al would take over human society as a result.

— Hiromi Kawakami / “Destination” / Under the Eye of the Big Bird

a generation dies, and the next generation doesn’t really mourn
a country dies, most of the time just leaving apocrypha
a country that doesn’t leave apocrypha wasn’t a real country
if it wasn’t a real country, when it dies no one mourns

— Xi Chuan / “Mourning Problems”

There are pundits who are dining out on a theory that the Democrats handed the election to Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, and Nayib Bukele, because the Democrats insisted on caring about trans people (they didn’t), and that “gender ideology” is upsetting to most Americans, and that these Americans were thus forced to vote for some of the worst people of all time. This is morally bankrupt. There is no way to play three-dimensional chess with bigots.

— Lydia Kiesling / “Lydia Kiesling on Refusing to Speak at an Anti-Trans University” / Lit Hub

What I’m Listening To:

Flawed, the extradition request
Blown, the freedom of conscience
Is there some form of justice possible or
So long, public’s right to know the truth
Gagged, muzzled by the powerful
Cultivate ignorance and hate

— Stereolab / “Melodie Is A Wound”

Lean Times (redux)

When I tire I sleep on a patch of rocks where our library once stood. Early the next day I walk back to the complex — to my cell smelling of urine and fear. I love my little hole.

In this parallel world which I inhabit only the objects that become the subject of my consciousness truly exist, everything else is a ghostly simulacrum that plays on unseen film screens in theaters I don’t attend. And that I wouldn’t attend had I the capacity…

And I am a capacious man, even in these lean times.

What I’m Reading:

She opened her mouth as if her throat were a bird
ready to leave her. I thought she was going to sing
for the dead, because she said she always saw them.

— Yuki Tanaka / “Séance in Daylight”

Titular Stuff Here (redux)

It’s a ragged sort of heat. The call of the west again.

Then a discomfiting sort of rain. It’s my first day out of the house in nearly three weeks. Just 2 days ago I was fetal, on the bed, unable to sweat the thoughts away.

I found a litter of puppies feeding in the corner of the living room, and dry shit streaked on the bathroom towel. The Christmas tree is canted and some of the balls have unfurled their string covers revealing the styrofoam balls beneath. I remember the last year they had glass ornaments the piles of colored glass shards spread about the living room and the multiple band aids on my cousin’s feet. Those styrofoam balls must be 25 years old now. But it was the smell that was truly distinctive, a mix of sour broiling turkey mixed with wet dog fur, overfull litter box, and Lysol.

Someone’s cut and paste — forlorn and left out in the desert — cries out for purpose. There is no liability. There is no curse.

I considered the crow a baleful thing; it darkened my day instantly like a light speed sarcoma. My day, my year, my life was shot in that cut and paste. And in that instant I wrote this, and never wrote again.

What I’m Reading:

The time has come for sages, mystics, and prophets to cede to an AI. In this way, history marches on.

— Laila Lalami / The Dream Hotel

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Listen. This is modern times all over the world
Go sit under a tree.

— Lorenzo Thomas / “Displacement”

Somehow, the entire human race seemed momentarily united in a single entrancing dream—the hope that the next generation they would bequeath to Mother Earth would be whole, healthy, sane, capable of making amends for the rape they had inflicted in olden days.

— John Brunner / Stand On Zanzibar 

There’s many things perching
in the sky. Oh many things
perching. But no pepper birds.
They don’t come.

— Paulé Bártón / “The Bowl Seller”

Many more of me would yet be born, but I didn’t have much longer to live. Goodbye, I repeated silently to the many of me I’d never meet, then carefully brushed away the dusting of snow that had started to settle on my garment.

— Hiromi Kawakami / “Narcissi” / Under the Eye of the Big Bird

He is remembering a place
he has never come back from
trying to learn of whatever
finally became of him
Hurrying across the paper
his pen makes the sound of
evening pushing through grass

— Fredric Matteson / “In Jackson’s Study (A Year After He Has Gone)”

You can’t blame the people who can’t hear the warnings; you have to blame the ones who can, and who ignore them.

— John Brunner / The Sheep Look Up

And a day goes by, and the snipers, and the market
itself has no salt: so I said: No worries,
the merchants have plenty of sadness.

— Nasser Rabah / “Untitled”

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
What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming

— Aldous Harding / “What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming”

Watch Your Broccoli Sprouts

Proficient in “metaphoricals,” but lacking in “metonymicals,” it was decided he had some finesse for the “synecdochicals.” It mattered to no one on the staff that they were bastardizing the terms in this official report they were collating, but someone had to get rid of that little bastard language “prefigurator”—no matter how many neologisms they cranked out.

“Norms was norms,” and this non-normative fellow could not stand—would not stand—in the department!

So they devised a plan to spike his broccoli sprouts with psilocybin bits (that would fix him for good!) before he presented at the symposium.

So much for his disquisition on Thee Synergies of the Literary Fruits of Charles Bukowski and Judy Grahn: Thee Literary Love Story. It was destined for doom, his presentation, because of his “turgidity” and “floridness”—and his altered state of consciousness.

But the talk was especially memorable as he waxed aphasic (Wernicke’s) occasionally spouting something about chocolate covered grahams, ladybugs, Blind Lemon Jefferson, cherry blossoms, and a case of plantar fasciitis. There was bafflement among the attendees—worried looks—but once he summed it up by saying:

“Baby Gongas are fierce … harrumph … hooray!”

To the departmental staff’s dismay there ensued a thunderous 10-minute long standing ovation.

The moral here is … wash and watch! your broccoli sprouts—and Baby Gongas always win the day!

That’s the philosophy of my life.

What I’m Reading:

Reading should feel a little subversive… because it is! To sit around and read a novel in the year 2025 is an act of resistance — you’re swimming against the current of the entire contemporary shitstream.

— Austin Kleon / Substack