thee istsfor manity reader

What I’m Reading:

Next he was sitting in on a congressional
Hearing on whether to classify pancakes
As cake. A conservative senator warned of
A slippery slope. What next? he said,
Icing on biscuits?

— Ishmael Reed / “The Diabetic Dreams of Cake”

What I’m Reading:

Death is not an emergency but the body limping against
its own walls as it realizes freedom.

— Feranmi Ariyo / “Fission”

What I’m Reading:

Scientists said “heat domes” and related atmospheric events behind extreme weather around the world had almost tripled in strength and duration since the 1950s, as tens of millions of people sweltered in “dangerous heat” in parts of the US and Europe.

— Attracta Mooney & Steven Bernard / “Temperatures reach dangerous highs as ‘heat domes’ hit Europe and US” / Financial Times

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Two brass rings:
ornaments, curatives, punishment,
what’s the difference,
pain swims for a microscope.
The rings around Saturn swim too,
a girdle of mist which hurts space.

— Fanny Howe / “Original”

That’s what white supremacy, what racism is. It is an act of violence. What was new was the cameras. There was certain technology that was able to take that into the living rooms of America. And we’re going through a similar thing right now, but the violence is not new.

–Ta-Nehisi Coates / “Ta-Nehisi Coates on Police Brutality: The Violence is Not New, It’s the Cameras That are New” / Democracy Now

III. Do Luna Moths Hurry?

When life is but ten
days: one turns sage in a week.
Wide eyespots evolve.
One disdains food—thinks only:
legacy, new moon, lift, glow.

— Antoinette Brim-Bell / “Insomniac Tankas”

The worst heatwaves are being supercharged by climate change, posing a threat to ecosystems and to people’s health and livelihoods. Scientists used predictive models and looked at historical data to discover that the most extreme heat waves are getting longer, and their duration increases faster with each degree of warming. In equatorial Africa, for instance, heatwaves that are longer than 35 days are projected to be more than 60 times more common in the near future (2020–2044) than in the recent past (1990–2014).

— Flora Graham / “Extreme heatwaves are accelerating fastest” / Nature Briefing

I was alive in a decade. Sometimes
dreaming of another region
was my religion. It was
a place before trees, prior
to the flame. When the deer died,
I was in my house dreaming. Then
the drought came. Cessation
of sound. Flames as red as apples
lodged inside my throat hissing.

— Andrea Rexillus / “The Way Language Was”

An artificial-intelligence system called Centaur can predict the decisions people will make in a wide variety of situations — often outperforming classical theories used in psychology to describe human choices. Trained on data from 160 psychology experiments in which 60,000 people made more than 10 million choices, the system can simulate human behaviour in tasks from problem-solving and gambling, and even those it hasn’t been trained on.

— Miryam Naddaf / “This AI ‘thinks’ like a human — after training on 160 psychology studies” / Nature

I was digging a hole to virtue
in the body of a beast.

— Fanny Howe / “The Original”

What I’m Listening To:

When I police myself I never made contact
When you betray yourself
You’re only revealed
And when I see your face
I never see reason
How can you move so well
Spinning inside yourself
And not understand me now?

— Loma / “Half Silences”

What I’m Reading:

Even so, even the thousands of fragments of images AI would use to make a non-existent child had to have come from children who’d been complete children once.

Where were they now? All of them, the maybe-real ones cupping their chins so happily here in the sun in the photo and all those ones whose images had been fragmented into digital splinters and borrowed and used to make up an aggregate image of a child who’d never existed.

— Ali Smith / Gliff

the wrist

the flesh
domestic squabbles sexual torments
and economic setbacks

a piano
of arresting tonal crudity
corporeal and untamed

headlong riots
cantankerous contentious
the wrist on fire

remarkable pluck
caustic worldview
a portrait of defeatism

What I’m Reading:

It can be difficult to distinguish forbearance from resignation, sorrow from partial reconciliation, fortitude from loneliness. I thought about how difficult it can be to tell these emotions apart on the basis of facial expressions and gestures, about how the person in question may struggle to distinguish these feelings in themselves.

— Han Kang / We Do Not Part

flicker film fugue

i sat through a flicker film festival
paul sharits
tony conrad
a couple kubelka’s

fences on color
or was it
feces in dolor?

crowds snakes choral singers
did I see helen dance the frug?
(look it up on youtube!)
in a flicker film?

oy!

it was all too much too fast
too fractured
to take in

amateur potters
carvers of sophisticated wooden celluloid
six-cornered exasperation dreams explicit
full of vibrant constellations of synecdoche
succotash filled with ethnic + linguistic diversity

then the inexhaustible error of human creativity
in miniature and endlessly hilarious
in three dimensional silver halide crystals

it caused a wave of seizures throughout
the screening room pilfered by rapid fire

images repeating + repeating
repeating

What I’m Reading:

4 Billion
The number of people — about 49% of the global population — who experienced at least 30 additional days of extreme heat between May 2024 and May 2025 because of climate change.

— Climate Change and the Escalation of Global Extreme Heat Report

star foil frappé

we are all transience
waiting to happen

a shooting hardens into a moral expense
cutting and loathed

a gutting shorthand anchored in a heart
prickly and petty

a persistent vicar of bastard pipe nets cast
dreamlike and bleak

a dirge a dirge a dirge
stark
dark

What I’m Reading:

I discovered violence
which lay, like pointed orchids under the scab
of the Earth, in me,
and the violence was good, and better.

— Fanny Howe / “The Original”

Fissure

It snapped
The great mass of humanity
A final offence
Floating coal
A dream softened then brutal
Reflection and prison
Sweat-kissed pressure
The fissure underlying the weak substrate
A giant maw
Gnaws cloaked in shadow

Doomed as all other empires doomed
Distorted by the ripe and endless cavils

A fire.
A fissure.
A fruiting of smoke

We are all rendered new and
Alien

What I’m Reading:

I want to leave a record so that, in case the inevitable happens, the people who come after us, the future generations, can know that once we all lived in the same country. That it was possible, once, for us all to live in a shared reality. If they can understand the process of our separation, perhaps they can figure out the process of rebinding, if there is a process of rebinding.

— Debbie Urbanski / “Long May My Land Be Bright” / Portalmania

congealed bacon (redux)

i googled white nationalism—
flashes of congealed bacon

you play the tragic heroine
toothy femme fatale

dont judge my painting
until i finish my ropa vieja

dont cut your hair
before tinting it blue

i fix you a tongue on rye
my marbles gather dust

we wait for slide guitar solos
on an unmoored pontoon bridge

in darkness your voice
has the timbre of rime

the choice you say—love
love

is love

What I’m Reading:

The factory makes food, and also children. The origins of the children are randomized. Some are derived from cows; others from whales or rabbits.
“Why don’t they make human-derived children?”

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