thee istsfor manity reader

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

— Timothy Snyder / On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

My parents taught me solitude is another form of survival.

— Saúl Hernández / “A Note on Solitude”

I felt like Earth in that extraordinary picture of the planet surrounded by a thick belt of space junk. I felt it would be years before the knotted-string dream of other people’s performances of woe for my dead wife would thin enough for me to see any black space again, and of course — needless to say — thoughts of this kind made me feel guilty.

— Max Porter / Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.

— Margaret Atwood / “February”

But even the rubble in Gaza has meaning to us. It is where our loved ones lived and died. When the time comes, we are the only people who will be removing what must be removed, only to reuse it to rebuild.

— Mosab Abu Toha / “Gaza Must Be Rebuilt by Palestinians, for Palestinians” / The New Yorker

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they’re amiable and sometimes not.

— China Miéville / The City & The City

Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not at first have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another. After the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government, or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where communists were victorious, the next crucial step was anticipatory obedience. Because enough people in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. 

— Timothy Snyder / On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

What I’m Listening To: 

Polythene bags, they’ll never go away
Us dogs and rats, will never escape
If you said it could be better out,
l probably won’t believe you
I’ll knock the teeth out my head
And we’ll see

— Squid / “Cowards”

Trickle & Tone (redux)

She said, I long to shape
a moon from bone.

I heard that before,
somewhere—
it resonated. A chord
struck—atonal
& dissonant.

A wound—a pickaxe stymie,
a hurricane hole
in homogeneity.
Monosyllabic
trickle & tone. 

Where
you going—where
you been?

I’ll find a planetarium
to bathe in—
nothing more
to say.

What I’m Reading:

This  language is a chain of accidents. What I’m trying to say is no one gives a fuck about your poems but write them anyway. If you’ve got a body, a pen, a shadow that follows you like a dog, then make it mean something.

— Zaina Alsous / “To a Young Poet”

Memo to Memorama

Apropos of nothing . . . As ceilings evolved from feral rafters into beloved Victorian concatenations, a nascent pet-forest economy arose on the carts of so-called “pulpy curiosity pools involving hitmen.” We will explore the linens they slept upon and the gnarled toes of these itinerant offal splattermen.

I will then grift you an overcoat made of castor beanlets in a blanket.

Subsequently, president-New Wheel SlipperyMan Deep Unthinker—a pioneer of thee queerest directives, and wearing “unclassifiable fleshiness” unfolds in a torrent of psoriatic folds and crepey skins. He feathers abortive invectives at squelching tires in an impenetrably viscous fog. 

He speaks in fragmentary sentences, mired in orange spread, and plays with his tiny pens of eviscerating fraudulence. 

You wear your Midday Mask as the rats run rampant through the works.

Jack the Ripper Day is thee new national holiday—so have a bloody pleasant vacation from reason and sanity.

Time to travel cross country and across time to get thee head correct . . .

Goodbye!

What I’m Reading:

Poets should be concerned with how an empire makes us hate the people without papers. Who could be us, who are us, but temporarily less human because it is convenient for the jobs. The jobs are too important to stop the bombs that burn the  flesh of the children who were my face as a child, but I live here, with papers.

— Zaina Alsous / “To a Young Poet”

Funkytown 45

Somewhere someone is playing
“Funkytown.” Loud. Very Loud.
Forty-five years old this song!
How has this endured so long?

What I’m Reading:

As I sat on the toilet
of a Boeing 727,
somewhere over Ohio
riding United tourist,
I imagined my last moments
of life
falling bare-assed through the sky…

— Mary Kathryn Stillwell / “Travel Plans”