Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

. . . and he looked out to where the grass was running in the wind under the cold starlight as if it were the earth itself hurtling headlong and he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all.

— Cormac McCarthy / The Crossing

The last day on earth 

will be short. It will be quick. The car engines will suck back their toxic fumes. The shepherds will put down their sticks. The phones will ring all at once and then all at once will stop ringing and no one will pick up. Everyone will be sitting on something. A flat rock. A dirty pavement. The edge of a ruffled bed.

— Rewa Zeinati / “The last day on earth”

Language as medicine? Literature
as ceasefire? Maybe when/if it’s over,
fire from the sky snuffed out, some of the rubble
lifted, and a survivor emerges.

— Marilyn Hacker / “The Returnee”

‘I wonder if a sillier and more ignorant catachresis than “Mother Nature” was ever perpetrated? It is because Nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilization. One thinks of wild animals as savage, but the fiercest of them begins to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea; as for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror. There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by “Mother Nature”. Each species must strive to survive, and that it will do, by every means in its power, however foul – unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.’

— John Wyndham / The Midwich Cuckoos

somewhere in the shallowest lake
the earth’s change in fate is accumulating
or growing heavier
and withdrawing

— Anna Glazova / “* [1. / it’d be nice to have some recognition by now]”

Small rivulets of MDMA
in the heartland. Beaked men beneath
your window, the lunacy of stars.
I gather it all in my cloak and set off
towards a future we would have wanted
had we known it could be known to us.
Pilgrims strung from the jiggly boughs
of maples, the hounds’ corrupting song.

— Michael Martin Shea / “[Not that it was as it was said to be]”

Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.

— Cormac McCarthy / The Crossing

What I’m Listening To:

The grass is growing
All over town
From the cracks in the sidewalk
Where all the shops shut down
One tiny flower I’m jumping over
One tiny flower I’m jumping over

— Jeff Tweedy / “One Tiny Flower”

I stopped fugue-ing

I lost my motivation when my lizard died. I stopped fugue-ing at the moon in the midday sun. I grooved in clandestine sweaters while all about me clouds of gnats figured trifecta bets on Morse code calculators. If you’re in the same boat I’m in then we really need to be torpedoed out of the sea. You see?!

I’ve had this problem with brown studies, brain fog, and generalized  ash-gray existential fugs. My dentist, podiatrist, and abortionist recommended I tell you this so that I may burden you in order to unburden myself. Now we’re yoked together in a plasticine hoodoo weathered to a crusty infirmity. These badlands desiccated to the dedication of blue sleep in yellow pajamas. The time for imbibing is now.

What I’m Reading:

Back to sleep 2 nightmares
Solid ones down not to be told
Woke not wanting to be in life
Wasn’t, outside warmed

— Alice Notley / “Four Sonnets”

Alcoholics by Appointment

Tectonic plates nimbly moving between the two of us — threads separated by upsetting intertitles.  I understood wanting — the fist unfoldings like investigating what I wanted from life.

A propensity for unrelated stretches of boredom respectively interspersed with terror and subterfuge — a disenchanted evening of critical extensions of ourselves.  

We’d escaped the stultifying and mundane confines of the American dream. We marveled at the nothingness in every direction. 

Alcoholics by appointment, short on doorways and long on crashes. What are you doing on the floor, you said.

I’m a new admirer of your ruthless cankles, I said. 

You remind me of that pendejo from the capitol flanks, you said.

I really have grown to dislike your flans, I said. They fill me with buttermilk inertia.

Your voice tips up two octaves, little mermaid-style.

I’ve grown to love your threats of leaving me —  the dynamic prompting an existential jump in my gonads. 

Our lives chatter across that echo divide — the poles galvanized — our fists — threats arising in unison strands, like unspooled dice, and popcorn ceilings estranged.  

Your brasses and my ramen noodles forever spiced with the peppery taste of hickory paste on fire. Here, though, the motifs relate loosely on symbolic resonances of iterative knock-knock logic. 

I’ll forge your signature on my birth certificate, despite your roundabout glares and slight variations of tonal displeasure.

We’ve grown accustomed to get what we deserve.

What I’m Reading:

Why don’t you drive & arrive up here
In your reversing Lochinvarish Chrysler Reliant
I’ve got my period & bleed in my Plymouth Horizon
Like when we went to the cave in your Volkswagen bus

— Bernadette Mayer / “A Catskill Eagle”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

My parents took me to Red Lobster to tell me they were getting a
divorce. Parents always take you to Red Lobster when they need to
tell you something awful and important, like failure. They figure if
they’re going to ruin a restaurant for you, it should be somewhere
lame, like Red Lobster or Olive Garden.

— Richard Siken / “Albondigas”

In the midst of life we are in death.
In the midst of the service station we are in death.
In the midst of the service station we are in
life.
In the midst of death we are in the service
station.
In the midst of death we are – we are.
We are.

— Samantha Harvey / The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

For most of this century, Israel and its allies have fought desperately to avoid any comparison with apartheid-era South Africa, recognizing that such an association would harm Israel’s standing in the world. For all its sins, however, the Afrikaaner government was never accused of fomenting a genocide. Israel’s government now risks being lumped together with Rwanda’s Hutu regime, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, Mao’s China and, yes, Nazi Germany.

The question to ask is whether, in a world of dissolving norms, the genocide label matters anymore. But however you answer it, the very fact that the discussion is taking place is a sign of a significant shift in political tectonics that should be worrisome both for Israelis and American supporters of Israel.

— Daniel W. Drezner / “Americans Are Changing Their Views of Israel. That’s a Problem.” / Politico

The cicada’s dry monotony breaks
over me. The days are bright
and free, bright and free.

Then why did I cry today
for an hour, with my whole
body, the way babies cry?

— Jane Kenyon / “Three Songs at the End of Summer”

Targeted rumours that spread like a virus across France in 1789 were at the heart of the ‘Great Fear’ — a period of panic and upheaval among peasants that laid some of the groundwork for the French Revolution. Using documents from the time period, researchers used modern epidemiological models to trace how false stories about roving gangs of bandits spread from one location to another. The team found that fearmongering deliberately targeted areas where peasant uprisings would be more consequential and that those with higher levels of literacy were more likely to be ‘infected’, which suggests that the false information had rational, not emotional, roots.

— Jacob Smith / “Fearmongering fuelled revolution in France” / Nature Briefing 

Why not just go on into Canada? someone said.

It was how the border had appeared so quickly when my experience was

that the roads that were the way over were

always further north than I had figured when I’d set out.

In my experience—waking

life—nothing had readied me for such an arrival.

— C.S. Giscombe / “Second Dream”

After the 2016 presidential election, many of my artist clients said things like, “Maybe I should quit making art,” “It’s kind of selfish for me to focus on my art now,” and “I should help people in a more effective way.” These are expected grief responses to the shock and horror of our times, but I beseech you: DO NOT STOP MAKING ART. I need it profoundly.

We all do.

— Beth Pickens / Your Art Will Save Your Life 

What I’m Listening To:

Ain’t got a cow, but I’m still a boy
I love my friends, and I love my toys
Mother says she misses me
She don’t get my life is poetry

— Ty Segall / “Another California Song”