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
… Death and those who use or serve it—this I did not feel or sense (because I refused to) but I knew it was in the air as sure as I sensed the movement of the breeze among the areca leaves right behind me in the courtyard.
the fear bitterness & hatred the witch fellow falters the work the starkest darkest & the most sharply subversive pair of shoes the wartime years self maneuvered & censored the jingoistic pension conditional the use of memory & his own words the struggling fellow & his eleven existential roadblocks the ensuing disarray & immiseration the annoyance laced travails the low key lighting the austere camerawork the crossfade to black the avant-garde soundtrack
the elbow to the side of the head the endorsement of filial piety followed by the kick in the eye the filth the pith the pit
the the
What I’m Reading:
The mobile phone has collapsed the space between private and public language. All language is public now. It’s as if the illusion of public anonymity of the private conversation has been amped up. Everyone is intensely aware of the phenomenon of public cell phone use, most viewing it as inconsiderate, a nuisance. But I like to think of it as a release, a new level of textual richness, a reimagining of public discourse, half conversations resulting in a breakdown of narrative, a city full of mad people spewing remarkable soliloquies. It used to be this type of talk was limited to the insane and the drunken; today everyone shadowboxes language.
The 10¥ Marketplace (Impediments Galore: A Courtroom Drama)
A savant mushroom with a seedy past in Africa discovers that its worst fears have come true.
An artisanal clutch of gourmands are out to ambush — deracinate, tear and shred. There are ambuscades forming at the usual fringe mush casinos.
The Order of the Medieval Tamarinds of Chivalry, Tamarins and Rookeries are on high alert.
Two chimeras claim their birthright on a magical bluff—advertisers stumble over each other to sign lucrative sponsorship deals.
You rummage through neighborhoods of kipper prints keen to be deposed.
The first-perversion is an introspection — an accusation of a man’s lifetime in exchange for neutrality.
A successful yachtsman is asked to help solve a locked-rosary rush of the stage — nannies and ninnies need not apply. Although Ned had previously applied for the position of Autocue Presenter and was now baffled.
I arrive at a courtyard with glass eels and aubergines — all are nonplussed and embroiled in pedantic sophistries.
My father’s grating voice keeps counterpoint to mother’s grating of ptarmigan (for the ptarmigan parmigiana).
Busybody pollsters allude to les accents aigus and oleander glower, while vicious workmen heeled in sod transcribe “Hotel California” to Morse Code via ASL.
This is an invocation to prove the innocence of a convicted Shiitake.
During the courtroom sidebar the Asterisk Committee undertakes an undercount of footnotes and bibliographical references.
A mutant blancmange eats a buckeye, then an eclair, an English schoolboy, a darkened alcove, and a memorial to brocaded sofas.
A king’s unfounded jerkin destroys his fanfare and picket rigging. We are disgusted with meritocracy and resort to meretriciousness for a 10¥ note.
We found deterrents in the aphrodisiacs and asphodels in the aphorisms.
Objections overruled — no one says a word.
What I’m Reading:
… do these dolphins want the baloney to arrive? …
is this the way to probe death? candied lights in long dark rooms? code name Bladder Tribes now there’s a new use for all these worlds let the Gummy Bears bear me out
Sometimes I am asked to clarify my position and I say I’m equidistant to roil and root.
Sometimes I am asked to qualify what I mean and I say this hand is love and this hand is hate.
Sometimes I wonder what all of this means and I say to myself: I didn’t ask to be put on this ride but I’m going to have to ride it out.
Sometimes I rail and Sometimes I sleep through it all
Sometimes I think in English and Sometimes I think in Spanish
and …
In this way I moved ever so much closer to where I thought I needed to be. What I needed to do to regain some balance in my life.
I turned on my tuneage.
I listened to John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Music Series Volumes 1-3, all three records put me in the mood to do something drastic.
Especially after reading about the making of the records — now that I was weighed down with the knowledge that the heartbeats I kept hearing throughout the latter two records were the heartbeats of their dead baby.
By the time I came to the song “John & Yoko” on Unfinished Music 3, with the repeated and incessant cries of “John,” “Yoko,” and the heaving palpitations of the dead baby’s heart I started throwing books in the fireplace. I couldn’t take it.
I left the apartment and went to O’Hara’s — the Irish pub down the street on the corner of South Miami Ave and 26th Street — it was half empty and dark just the way I enjoyed it. I chose the end most stool by the rarely used back entrance, certain that I’d get some writing done.
No one would want to sit near a television with a screen saver on it, all the action was near the front where the University of Miami football game was blaring.
I ordered the Reuben Egg Rolls — not exactly the first dish one thinks of when one is thinking about Irish pub food.
That is how I got to this very point.
What I’m Reading:
A series of signs said help was there, but not for me.
Out of the netherworld, through an oppressively humid haze, I materialize at a shore front — the city behind me a stony sentinel, silent and shimmering, in the vapor. I turn from the city and there, where the lake meets a path line, stands a weatherworn green bicycle with drop handlebars.
I intuit that this is my way back home to Boston. The mushroom hiss haze fades away as the sun zeppelins its own path out of the clouds. There is only one direction home and it unspools out to the northwest and I intuit, again, that it will turn sharply east and I’ll be home again.
Just pump the pedals — grind away through the hottest days in recorded human history — and all will be well.
Well. Well. Well.
It’s good to be home again.
What I’m Reading:
It’s only fair that the person who gets left behind gets to tell the story.
I was having a moment, so I went home and covered myself in princess stickers.
— Matt Broaddus / “Emotional Rescue”
“The message we keep hearing is that the nuclear risk is over, that that’s an old risk from the cold war,” says physicist Daniel Holz, who is one of the stewards of the iconic ‘Doomsday Clock’. “But when you talk to experts, you get the opposite message — that actually the nuclear risk is very high, and it’s increasing.” Nuclear deterrence is no longer a two-player game. And there are new risk factors: online misinformation and disinformation can influence leaders or voters in nuclear-armed nations, and artificial intelligence brings uncertainty to military decision-making. The result is a risky new nuclear age.
— Flora Graham / “Don’t get complacent about nuclear war” / Nature Briefing
What part of your life’s record is skipping? What wound is on repeat? Have you done everything you can to break out of that groove?
— Andrea Gibson / “How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best”
. . .a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me—more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears. I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking, ‘This is where I belong. This is it.’
— E. B. White / Letters of E. B. White
Here’s the thing: fission does not begin when a father holds a scan speckled with the gleam of small explosions. It’s a delicate process— the body expiring, the intricate design of it: cells chugging on their suicide vesicles without argument, blood vessels giving up their elasticities, or telomeres untwining in perfect obedience to the secret Latin of rot.
— Feranmi Ariyo / “Fission”
When we wake from the dream-laden phase of sleep, the brain boots up step by step. The first brain regions to rouse are those associated with executive function and decision-making, located at the front of the head. A wave of wakefulness then spreads to the back, ending with an area associated with vision. This precise understanding of how the brain transitions from slumber to alertness could help to manage sleep inertia — the grogginess that many people feel when hitting the snooze button.
— Flora Graham / “How the Brain Wakes Up” / Nature Briefing
I had a dream once, perhaps it was a dream, that the crab was my ignorance of God. But who am I to believe in dreams?
The Administration—Stephen Miller and others—are already calling on other red states to do the same. The federal government would give these states money, in part, to open these facilities. And the money is largely coming from FEMA’s budget. We’re seeing flash floods all across the country, including the devastation in Texas. But FEMA has basically been gutted in its capacity to deal with those sorts of things, and instead money from FEMA is being used to help stand up these facilities.
— Erin Neil / “The Shame of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’” / The New Yorker Daily
thee istsfor manity reader 