once we have torn shit down
wanting and being
immersive works
Expanding the surface dimension
the revolutionary leader
a ruin
enslaved against the colonial
government of the united states
the surface indigo
enslaved
A driver
woven
into “true blue” americana
What I’m Reading:
If the trees looked at men
The way men look at women
We’d never get out of these woods
— Zan de Parry / “Movie the Size of a Deck of Cards” / Cold Dogs
A new year brings the promise of more longanimity and asceticism. Nothing is as safe she expects in the age of vulnerability and shame.
She liked it more when every emotional situation didn’t need a “name” where you could “hold” it in its “safe space.”
There is no room for nostalgia, but she has no use for these “isms” either.
She wants to crawl into a garbage can large enough to hold her and live out the rest of her days like that lady in Beckett’s Happy Days — remember, she has no room for nostalgia.
But there are bills to pay and some sort of food preparations to be made if she wants to continue on living in this hovel.
And there is the crow.
Always that crow! She inherited it from someone she cared about deeply once, but she can’t remember quite who.
The crow is tethered to the radiator and has to be fed often. And if the food isn’t placed just so, on time, the cawing is insufferable.
No room for nostalgia, but she longs for the halcyon days of pandemic when she knew what to expect — even if it was the worst.
This new post-apocalypse state of being is a bit dull. And this noisome, pediculous crow leaves much to be desired.
What I’m Reading:
I thought it was unfair, and then I understood that, alone and terrified, anger was my only weapon against the horror.
— Jacqueline Harpman / I Who Have Never Known Men
But what needed to be understood was not how all Germans were as evil and guilty as their leaders: clearly, they were not. More troubling was how the ordinary bourgeois German had turned executioner not because there was a gun at their head, but because they had persuaded themselves, with remarkable effortlessness, that a job was a job and feeding the family came first. How had evil been organized so that it became so commonplace? That was the question.
— Lyndsey Stonebridge / We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience
I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.
— Susan Sontag / “The Art of Fiction No. 143” / The Paris Review
We had survived the prison, the plain and the loss of all hope, but the women had discovered that survival is no more than putting off the moment of death.
— Jacqueline Harpman / I Who Have Never Known Men
It seems apt. A melting glacier made from tears.
— Rebecca Priestly / End Times
We are living in an age of mass migration.
Millions of people from the poor world are trying to cross seas, forests, valleys and rivers, in search of safety, work and some kind of better future. About 281 million people now live outside the country in which they were born, a new peak of 3.6 percent of the global population according to the International Organization for Migration, and the number of people forced to leave their country because of conflict and disaster is at about 50 million — an all-time high. In the past decade alone, the number of refugees has tripled and the number of asylum seekers has more than quadrupled. Taken together, it is an extraordinary tide of human movement.
The surge of people trying to reach Europe, the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia has set off a broad panic, reshaping the political landscape. All across the rich world, citizens have concluded — with no small prompting by right-wing populists — that there is too much immigration. Migration has become the critical fault line of politics. Donald Trump owes his triumphant return to the White House in no small part to persuading Americans, whose country was built on migration, that migrants are now the prime source of its ills.
— Lydia Polgreen / “Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World” / New York Times
People talk and talk more
about black holes.
I believe the blackest hole
is the one we inhabit . . .
— Eugenio Montale / “People talk and talk more …”
There was a palpable sense of relief that it was now possible to leave the earth behind. This was mad, she thought. The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition. The world that men wanted to escape was the one which they had made themselves.
— Lyndsey Stonebridge / We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience
What I’m Listening To:
That Californian sun on my face
All those drugs they
They fogged his brain
— Squid / “Blood on the Boulders”
So she’s says to him, “when I was younger and finally got a prescription for Prozac and Lithium I thought my life was finally pivoting.”
He was nonplussed. He’d been talking about the horses and such.
But she went on: “I hoped the medication would uptake all that awful brain chemsistry and wash my brain in the good stuff, and that the darkness that pervades my thoughts, my emotions, my outlook would somehow lighten…”
But he’s still thinking about trifectas and quinellas, and if the odds are correct for that pedigree. He’s still engrossed in the Daily Racing Form.
What’s that?
The horse racing newspaper, dear.
Okay, and then?
She hadn’t paused a beat, she was still wound up, she said: “I never wanted to be an ‘up with people’ type person, and attend Sunday services, and say things like ‘praise the lord’ and ‘thank you, Jesus’ in conversation—I still wished to enjoy David Lynch, Joy Division, and Samuel Beckett, without having to live the life portrayed in their art. But much to my amazement the medication—”
And he hit her!
Don’t even!
He hit her with that Daily Racing Form. I remember it was the July 14, 1997 issue. The newsprint left that date marked upon her forehead.
It was the darndest thing!
What I’m Reading:
If the only thing that differentiates us from animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little…”
— Jacqueline Harpman / I Who Have Never Known Men
convincing a dogfight-like statistic mesmerizing
infantilizing possessive of thee individualist
on edge and impudent
two young woodlouse butchers
sewing odd pieces of wax paper —
caring for a rusted motorboat —
no skippers at any of these helms!
tinctures resembling continental plates
shifting and ferreting away sickness —
but sickness is our innate condition!
says the pasty faced one with the junk toupee deterrents work says the leathery one—
keeper of incremental disclosures and sewers— remember thee good old days of political respirators and incendiary chlorine essences?
oh the warmth of consent and release —
all woven seamlessly into the composition faction of the daily expedients — reminisce
of the manifold fraudulence pepperpot
and cheez whiz orange coiffures —
has anyone reported on the Sabine Women yet?
what’s up with them?
these are the angst-ridden days of the butt frisk — weighty sedentary mongooses of seminary-actualization and undaunted showpieces —
it’s the age of no swelter addendums addenda —
painfully immodest
conspicuously unintelligent
meticulously unempathetic
little men…
What I’m Reading:
When did we know for certain that we had no future … and how was it that we hadn’t died from sheer nausea?
— Jacqueline Harpman / I Who Have Never Known Men
What I’m Reading:
Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.
— Asata Shakur / Assata: An Autobiography
the two of us, rotation brain / you rouse / you were special to me from the very bell / there’s a sour acronym-feel that plunges through my mind about your pumped-up stopover / like a magma burbling thug / the sour of invective and bile that spinets from your braces / akin to a grin going off in your reptile brain / do you realize your malpractice now? / we’re talking about your stopover and your being unwell / sorcerer be sacked / next nation shellacked? / next tinderbox? / you and yours / don’t be a footnote / get your brain and headline correct•
What I’m Reading:
. . . I’m chock-full of indignation about the barbarism and relentless vacuity of this culture. How tedious always to be indignant.
— Susan Sontag / “The Art of Fiction No. 143” / The Paris Review
fall into rhythm
pilgrimage gains momentum
cross-hatched sunlight path
revelations—step by step
connect nothing with nothing
What I’m Reading:
But this means you exist only for the purpose of clearing away the sand, doesn’t it ?” . . . He was more and more upset. He had no intention of becoming involved in such a life.
— Kobo Abe / The Woman in the Dunes
millennium eye
something lethal this way comes
a man called malice
breaking everything in sight
now those rosy days are few
What I’m Reading:
Just about every government is taking at least halting steps to do something about the likely impending catastrophe. The U.S. is leading the way-backward. The Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives is now dismantling environmental measures introduced by Richard Nixon, in many respects the last liberal president . . . The hypothetical extraterrestrial observers can be pardoned if they conclude that we seem to be infected by some kind of lethal insanity.
— Noam Chomsky / “Marching Off the Cliff” / Because We Say So
. . . the fact that the stuff people think up to do to each other . . .
— Lucy Ellmann / Ducks, Newburyport
Hitler looked ahead to the next Reichstag elections with equally fierce determination in his effort to destroy democracy through democratic process.
— Timothy W. Ryback / Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power
I don’t want to forgive anyone anymore.
When I find ugliness, I don’t want to excuse it. I want to look it in the eye and talk about it.
— Maru Ayase / The Forest Brims Over
. . . the fact that “existential” is another one that nobody understands anymore, the fact that they all seem to think it just means you exist, the fact that they use it to mean something’s sustainable or something, nothing to do with Sartre and feeling alienated and drinking a lot of wine at Café Flore, ecology, but what do I know, the fact that I don’t know anything about French philosophy for a start, the fact that that stuff goes right over my head, in one ear and out the other, shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, the fact that people used to bring live animals on ocean voyages, and slaughter them along the way for food, the fact that maybe they still do, the fact that the poor animal must think he’s going on a trip somewhere, “Not so fast, Goldberg!”, the fact that Gillian had her own existential crisis the other night, crying into her pillow, the fact that when I asked her what was up, she said she was worried about the meaning of life, the meaning of life, the fact that I just didn’t know what to say, the fact that you can’t tell a little kid that it’s quite possible life has no meaning, the fact that what kid wants to hear that, the fact that it might push her too far and turn her into a Moonie or something, the fact that everybody means something different anyway when they talk about “the meaning of life,” the fact that for some it’s goodness or something, and other people think ice cream and popcorn and soap operas give their lives meaning . . .
— Lucy Ellmann / Ducks, Newburyport
The impulse is often to stress what divides rather than what unites, what Sigmund Freud called ‘the narcissism of small differences.’ This is most obviously so with Basque and Catalan nationalists, but it applies more widely in Spain today. The country risks becoming a kingdom of taifas, Felipe González often warned, referring to the mosaic of small warlord states that emerged in Muslim Spain following the collapse of the Ummayad caliphate in 1009. This fissiparous tendency ignores the many things that all Spaniards have in common, as women or men, parents and children, workers, professionals, consumers, ecologists, cyclists, football fans and basketball players, eaters of tortillas, tomatoes, squid, fish or steaks. And the focus on the local and regional has come at the cost of Spain’s national and international interests.
— Michael Reid / Spain
Cynicism turned out to be one of totalitarianism’s most fatal characteristics and may yet become one of its most enduring legacies. The men who administered Hitler’s and Stalin’s policies did not necessarily believe in racism or socialism, Jewish conspiracies or class enemies, any more than many of the GOP believed that Donald Trump won the 2020 election or the Russian high command thought that the Jewish-Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was a Nazi. But they did-and do all believe in one thing: human omnipotence and, perhaps most especially, although Arendt does not make the connection, male omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible, she concluded (OT 507). And it was.
— Lyndsey Stonebridge / We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience
Though, which would be better? To have a hard life but know your children will have a happier, more stable, more prosperous life than you have? Or to have a good life, with physical comforts, material wealth, state-provided healthcare, a fulfilling career, but to live it expecting that things will get worse for your children, and your children’s children, and to know that your generation had the power to change things but didn’t?
— Rebecca Priestly / End Times
What I’m Listening To:
Julie, wish I could tell you what you want
Well, there’s something on your plate
You wished it was more than you could take
We have so many mistakes to make
What do you want from them?
To have the same dream three times a week
Fevers too big for you to keep
We have so many mistakes to make
Mistakes to make with you
— Horsegirl / “Julie”
thee istsfor manity reader 