1 A hot wattle thing of the new wave—a heel trestle tactician of new sex.
2 A treble tabernacle template … condolences!
3 Heathen tree table temple—tinplated condom.
4 The hot new textile and treetop heating tableau concluded. (normal tempos at operettas not included)
5 The necessary texture of watermarks and towropes. A trek of heaved temptation. (opiate condor forward)
6 The advised necessary heaven tenancy. (refill the tablespoon of conclusion)
7 The hot heavyweight tremolo of the opossum conductor.
8 Thatcher and heckler tremor of the tablet concluded. (tendencies normalized going forward)
9 (a. – e.) Your waterspout trachea. Your tender tabloid resignation. Your conclusive and necessary thaw. Your hectare trench. Thee conduit opportunist.
10 A tendon that should be taboo.
11 Hedge proctor trend-setter, tendril tabulator, theatregoer waterspout in the guise of a chancellor of the exchequer.
12 Hedgehog trespasser—tenement confessor at default opposition.
13 As hot tether and heater treaty—a tempest as scheduled maintenance.
This transmission has concluded.
What I’m Reading:
I go among the stones stooping and pecking like a sparrow, imagining the glacier’s final push resounding still.
where i dont upbraid myself continuously—where john currin paintings dont come to life—where id like to be in some remote place like yellowknife—but as the earth is burning there—and there remains no place to go—that isnt burning—and there remain too many places to go to upbraid my fellow man—because life is one endless upbraiding—i unbraid myself some more—upbraid my boulder—upbraid existence—upbraid the cure— because they remind me of camus—with that song—i even upbraid myself—again—i dont upbraid my curry chicken—because its ethiopian—or should i say eritrean—but as im not certain i upbraid that as well—im upcycling my upbraiding—im braying in my seat right now—as i mute my video and sound on zoom—which i often upbraid—which brings me joy—oh joy—
What I’m Reading:
The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.
Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.
— Miranda July / All Fours
Yet amid this atmosphere of nationalist triumph, Remnick identifies a submerged sense of dread—and a glimmer of resistance. The writer Etgar Keret attends weekly protests against the government, even as he acknowledges the “nonexistent” political influence of liberals like him. “When we go to the beach, you can hear the booms from Gaza. When you eat a lollipop or an ice cream, you hear things being blown up,” Keret explains. “We are doing horrible things, and it’s important for me that people know I oppose this.” Such expressions of moral clarity are rare, though, in an age of confusion and endlessly contested facts that has been harnessed by the Netanyahu government, which speaks a fluent dialect of the MAGAlanguage of politics. “Not only is reality horrible,” Keret notes, “you also don’t know what the real story is.”
— Ian Crouch / “Israel’s Zones of Denial” / The New Yorker Weekly
I write, “The rope dangling from darkness will execute the enjambment of everything.”
— Garous Abdolmalekian / “How Can I Bring This Poem to a Halt?”
On Tuesday, the Ukrainian president “gutted the independence of his country’s anti-corruption agencies,” Franklin Foer writes. “In the world Trump is building, there’s no need for disguise—corruption is a credential, not a liability”
— Franklin Foer / “Zelensky Learned the Wrong Lesson From Trump” / The Atlantic
Last night the fire died into itself black stick by stick and the dark came out of my eyes flooding everything.
— Philip Levine / “Breath”
Living a moral life in an age of bullies requires collective action; it cannot be done alone. Each of us must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance.
This is what civilization demands. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it.
— Robert Reich / “How do we lead moral lives in an age of bullies?” / The Guardian
There was no way to fix it, nothing to open-source; life was just a struggle. It was supposed to be.
— Miranda July / All Fours
What I’m Listening To:
“You’ll figure it out,” is what they say What they say You’ll figure it out But when? But when?
Time off from his seedling firebomb. A ferment. A long liquidizer, he calls it.
He’s the provost of powerful concussives. Cursive clash send-off specialist for hire.
Spontaneous handicrafter and score- keeper. Author of sharps embedded in walls.
The outsider poet of archangel dynamic plosives. Send you on a one-way trip.
What I’m Reading:
The Good Book says that the meek shall inherit the earth and I expect that’s probably the truth. I aint no freethinker, but I’ll tell you what. I’m a long way from bein convinced that it’s all that good a thing.
Trump abducts thousands of hardworking people within the US and puts them into detention camps – splitting their families, spreading fear. His immigration agents are accused of targeting people with brown skin.
He usurps the powers of Congress, defies the courts, and prosecutes his enemies.
He and his Republican lackeys cut Medicaid and food stamps – lifelines for poor people, including millions of children – so the wealthy can get a tax cut.
Hate-mongers on rightwing television and social media fuel bigotry against transgender people, immigrants, Muslims, people of color and LGBTQ+ people.
Powerful men abuse women. Some of the abused are children.
Powerful male politicians make it impossible for women to obtain safe abortions.
— Robert Reich / “How do we lead moral lives in an age of bullies?” / The Guardian
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
thee istsfor manity reader 