thee istsfor manity reader

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

We are all afraid. It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.

— Sen. Lisa Murkowski (AK) / “A Startling Admission From a G.O.P. Senator: ‘We Are All Afraid’” / The New York Times

He’d like to be at one with his new self
but memories sit in him like eyes.

— Jana Prikryl / “The Moth”

They use this “anti-woke” talk to justify the destruction of the infrastructure of a functioning government. Because expertise and rational governance, subject to ethics rules and a democratic process, is the enemy of autocracy and unearned wealth. Modern democracy relies on specialized knowledge. It relies on expertise and rational accountability to function. Trump’s people understand intuitively that this kind of rationality is inimical to their efforts to gain power. So they have set about destroying centers of expertise within the government. And they have continued to lie and spread disinformation as vigorously as possible. Very simply they understand that the truth is their enemy.

— Christopher Ketcham, in conversation with Katherine Stewart / “Burn Down the House” / The Baffler

I ate the fruits of loss and shame, not knowing
they marinated for weeks under the tree bark out back,

poisoned with words I was too young to understand . . .

. . . I leaned over the sink to wash out my mouth, I caught Loss

staring at me in the bathroom mirror, or at least a girl who looked like Loss.

— Nora Gupta / “Poisoned Elegy (Green Apples)”

The anti-woke derangement syndrome, as I call it, points to the role of scapegoating and demonization in authoritarian movements. These movements always thrive by targeting a specific group and blaming most or all social ills on them. In its first stage, the anti-woke movement targeted the alleged beneficiaries of wokery as scapegoats: LGBT and black people. But as the movement has evolved, it actually has made a scapegoat of the “woke” liberal, who allegedly represents a kind of insidious insider threat that has a disproportionate amount of power. This group is represented as global, secretive, with lots of money, and part of an international conspiracy against the ordinary “folk.” Sound familiar? The “woke liberal” serves the same function as Jews and other groups have served in previous fascist movements.

— Christopher Ketcham, in conversation with Katherine Stewart / “Burn Down the House” / The Baffler

Because I breed.
Because I breed what I claim

I breed what I do not understand.

— Amanda Auerbach / “Rights”

The nihilism is also evident in the moral cowardice of leaders of the Republican Party. The Hegseth Signal chat is a case in point. The members of the administration are flat-out denying what we can all see with our own eyes, which is that they engaged in an incredibly dangerous breach of security, and they did so without following lawfully prescribed processes. They lie to our faces about this, and no major Republican leader, as of this writing, appears to be standing up for the national interest. They all cave, just as they caved when Trump started backing Russia against Ukraine; just as they caved when the attacks on federal judges undermined the rule of law and the constitutional order. This is the behavior of people who appear to have contempt for democracy and believe there is nothing of value apart from power.

— Christopher Ketcham, in conversation with Katherine Stewart / “Burn Down the House” / The Baffler

What I’m Listening To: 

My mother said
Why must you drag all the hopes out of bed
I blame the seasons
We all have our reasons, I meant

— Aldous Harding / “Damn”

We Become the Planet We Kill

I get to bake the cellophane cake.

You: insouciant acolyte of peregrinations plus, and you ameliorate my angst. You’ll find me a way to progress as a pilgrim that isn’t full of that old time religion. Then you’ll find me a way to plant a flag in Patagonia.

I tell you the farfisa is the garfish of spell correct.

You spell check me on the profane and change it to the divine.

No one is truly enthralled with conspiracists — our eyes on the mounds of flesh decaying while the landfills overflow with our wretchedness — we are all husks.

We become the planet we kill.

We are elaborate confectioners and puppeteers of malice (we are) — we add no value. We desecrate and fill morgues with dispatch.

You call me Angel, but you are a devil of a teenage hoodlum, hoodwinker, hood scratcher.

Sell me a Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy planner to keep the narrative slant.

Instead we Rochambeau thumb it for rock flautists: you get the Moody Blues guy spouting poetry, and I get the Jethro Tull tippy-toe psychotic. We’ll play it like it’s 1972.

What I’m Reading:

Beasts
At the threshold
Rats
At your feet
Mansions
Madness&murder
In the streets…

— Yasiin Bey / “One Called Trill”

What I’m Reading:

Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.

— Max Porter / Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Now, the rain, the iron rain, with its little keys
is closing all the doors . . .

and I think we’re all dead. See how the sky
sits like a tombstone on the roofs.

— Bert Meyers / “Rainy Day”

DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES faces a critical threat in the rise of fascist revolutionaries. These deadly serious right-wing extremists have found a home in MAGA and a source of cash in oligarchs hellbent on bankrolling the destruction of the American system of republican government. Antithetical in every way to conservatism, backed by deep-pocketed authoritarian elites, and allying far-right ideologues with Christian nationalists, the new fascism is a radicalized movement steeped in the rhetoric of bloodshed and upheaval, its goal to capture government and deploy the state’s monopoly on violence to remold society and crush dissent. The endgame is not only to merge the state with corporation and church—a modern redux of the classic fascist configuration of Mussolini and Franco—but the exercise of raw power, brute force, and unfettered avarice. Think of it as owning the libs with an AR-15 while bowing to Mammon and smashing what remains of the welfare state. With his second term underway, Trump is making swift progress implementing this vision of … “reactionary nihilism.”

— Christopher Ketcham, in conversation with Katherine Stewart / “Burn Down the House” / The Baffler

My poems were not major

enough to even make me

a “minor poet,”

but I did sit here

instead of getting up,

getting the gun, loading it.

— Olena Kalytiak Davis / “I Was Minor”

But now, Lyft has given a group of researchers access to detailed data from their drivers. The results confirm that minority drivers get more tickets, and they pay higher fines when they do. And the results also show that minorities aren’t in any way more likely to speed or engage in unsafe driving. Which suggests, in their words, that the problem is “animus” against minority drivers.

— John Timmer / “Study of Lyft rideshare data confirms minorities get more tickets” / Ars Technica

I have no
high stake in this world, no
children to want to leave
a better world to, nothing
but fucking & bookmaking
that is my legacy & it is as
undeniable as smoke; yet
may disappear like it too.

— Yesenia Montilla / “High Stakes”

And where was education in all this? The initial goal of the student aid program was to make it easier for straitened low- and middle-income students to afford a college degree because, as a nation, we believed that was mutually beneficial for individuals and society. This motive had been lost in a morass of cynical disputes about the federal budget and political posturing over personal responsibility. Students and the degrees they sought for themselves and the country were no longer placed at the forefront of decisions about higher education. Instead, they became figures on a ledger aimed at enriching private contractors and reducing the federal deficit.

— Ryann Libenthal / Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis

You’re a poet, don’t be silent, lives are lost under cover of silence.
Speak up, read a couple of lines, read us verses, keep talking to us.

— Mir Taqi Mir / The Homeland’s an Ocean

What I’m Listening To:

Greed is an unfillable hole, insatiable
Avid the fear of death
Thirsty is the fear of death, there is no way
We can’t eat our way out of it
We can’t drink our way out of it no more

— Stereolab / “Aerial Troubles”

Three Dreams on a Somnolent Afternoon (redux)

I.

I went under last summer. I was tedious. I was trite. Summer raged. I withstood, until I couldn’t anymore. Lids often closed as I approached. Blinders blinked. It was forever the moment after the storm. Summer claimed closure. I sang bereft of benevolence. I stood alone. Summer anchored itself in wafts of my being. I sang contrite. I whispered sinecures to hourly priests. I rankled raffish pincers downtown. Summer melted with ease. I bobbled adrift. I fished for fifteen words. I wasted my time. Then six words found me, and I stopped fishing. Summer was no more.

II.

The last wastrel in an open sky. The voices echo down from above — well, if they’re echoing down isn’t the “from above” assumed? Ok, but the editor is supposed to stay out of the way for a while. I dreamt that I was in Gala’s kitchen asking her about the water for the rice. She was making rice and beans, but just as easy as it was Gala it was Olga too. “How does this top come off?” I said. “It’s an incredibly elaborate way of camouflaging a pot — the water goes where? How do I take this apart?” The rice had been soaking for hours. I put it back in the pot but it felt soft, and it was broken open like the rice in chicken and rice soup, and so I put the rice back in the pot, which I managed to open — “god damn over-elaborate thing.” And I wondered what I was doing there dreaming of Gala, which could be Olga.

III.

There’s hemming and hawing and there’s scritching and scratching, and that’s what’s happening upstairs at this moment. The scritching and scratching of renovations being done so the folks upstairs can move out. Their place has gone without renovations for forty years (“I don’t need no mule, Jack!”) So on and on it goes with the scritching and scratching, the sawing and drilling, the hammering and jammering… and at some point the water in this stack is going to be turned off when renovating time comes for the ancient bathroom — above where I sit at this moment — it’ll need to be replumbed and reapportioned. Oh, baby, take me to the bayou and drop me on thee anthill heap. Take out your washboard and tambourines. Start with that polyrhythmic scritchy-scratch ‘cause that’s the only type I enjoy. Take me away, spirit!

What I’m Reading:

. . . you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life is a chain
of words
that one day will snap.

— Ai / “Conversation”

Meet The Beetles! (redux)

Briefly, gentlemen, it has come to my attention that there has been an inordinate amount of “buggery” going on between you and our beetles. This will not do.

As of tomorrow at 7:00 am all those apprehended singing plaintive love songs to our collection of Coleoptera will be suspended for a minimum of one month and lose all members privileges.

Additionally there will be no more dressing up our rhinoceros beetles in little sundresses. This is not a carnival, good sirs! We are not puppeteers, this is not the Punch and Judy caper hour. This must cease.

And whomever is painting the brown beetles dayglo blue, you must stop immediately. Now the confused flour beetles are demanding to be painted fuschia and emerald green on alternating days.

Decorum, gentlemen. We are civilized men.

And stop it, stop it, with the little tank tops on the stag beetles! We are not infants. I expect these hijinks to stop immediately, but the culprit who has “toilet-papered” all our dung beetles may continue to do so on a biweekly basis.

Civilization is progressive, and we are exceptional, gentlemen. Carry on!

What I’m Reading:

She’s justly proud of her efforts and her talent, she does have a gift, you can see it in their eyes. She executes well, she gives good death: those entrusted to her care go out in a state of bliss and with feelings of gratitude toward her, if body language is any indication. 

— Margaret Atwood / The Heart Goes Last

No Longer Required (redux)

Hortensio awoke and his arms were on vacation. 

A note stated that his left arm was touring the Costa Brava, visiting the sites where Joan Miró sketched a biomorphic vision or two—while the right arm was tracing Darwin’s “finch routes” through the Galapagos.

Over the next weeks the arms sent him postcards, twice-weekly, as they extended their travels to the former ice fields beyond Ilulissat, slowly paddled the Zambezi River, and covered portions of the Annapurna and Appalachian Trails. The arms had a fruitful summer. 

Back at home Hortensio became well acquainted with the adroitness of his feet. They were both usurpers, ever trying to make him realize the superfluity of his arms. 

Daily they harangued him to break off relations with his peripatetic and prodigal arms: “The fortune they are spending! Their wanton disregard of your dexterity!” was the constant cavil.

At his feet’s prodding, Hortensio wrote both arms a note at their next appointed stops—Iquitos for the right arm; Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky for the left—telling them not to bother returning home: “Your services are no longer required.”

At the right foot’s prompting, Hortensio filed a complaint with the State Department which prompted an alert from Homeland Security. “That’ll fix ‘em,” the left foot said.

His arms are wandering rogues to this day.

What I’m Reading:

I was lying on the sofa to rest, to sleep
a few minutes, perhaps.
I felt my body sag into the hole of sleep.
All at once I was awake and frightened.
My own death was drifting near me
in the middle of life

— Donald Hall / “Sleeping”