Hardly Rickets, all American life saver and literary critic, wants to save the world from itself. Wants to don the all purpose All American Halloween costume—wants to be a fungal tree growth but can’t decide between bracket, polypore, or robustus conk. So goes for all of the above, fortified with Lockheed Martin nuclear modules and Raytheon laser vaporizers—the All American all the time choice for annihilating “third world” recalcitrants:
“We invented the damned holiday as the world knows it today. We know all. We kill all, but with a conscience. Let us show you our destabilizing Latin American election modules. Or may we interest you in a nation building for oil three card monte switchermaroo? Come one, come all! Give us bodies and resources and we’ll chew you up and spit you out like so much cudding for the cuddling hours before the Day of the Dead arrives. I’m Hardly Rickets and have I got an all purpose tzompantli for you. You provide the bodies—I’ll provide the bones. Hardly Rickets is the name. I am he of Halloween fame. My drones and hellfires shower flames. Death is my one and only game. Coming to your spooked-out skies this fall.”
The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children.
— Alexei Navalny / “Alexei Navalny’s Prison Diaries” / The New Yorker
Trumpism is a cancerous phenomenon. Treated with surgery once, it now threatens to come back in a more aggressive form, subject neither to the radiation of ‘guardrails’ nor to the chemo of ‘constraints.’ It may well rage out of control and kill its host.
— Adam Gopnik / “How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?” / The New Yorker
You look out in the world and you can see various versions of the oppressed becoming oppressors in different circumstances. It makes you question some of the underlying logic of our lives.
— Ta-Neishi Coates, to Moustafa Bayoumi in interview /“‘I don’t have much hope for a Harris presidency’: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israeli apartheid and what the media gets wrong about Palestine” / The Guardian
I escape to books when everything around me fails to make sense. When I read books, I search for a bond between me and those who are thousands of miles away, geographically and historically. And that’s what I hope my own work does for others who have never been in my position, I, a Palestinian refugee and a survivor of countless air strikes and lately of the ongoing genocide, during which I lost not only my precious collection of books but more than thirty-one members of my extended family, some of whom, like my books, remain under the rubble since October 2023.
— Mosab Abu Toha / “The Annotated Nightstand: What Mosab Abu Toha Is Reading Now, and Next” / Lit Hub
Come with us, Muse of exile, Mother of the road.
— Kathleen Norris / “A Prayer to Eve”
This policy of military and economic supremacy is openly stated everywhere from the 1940s planning documents to the National Security Strategies put out by the George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Implementing it has not just involved ignoring democracy and human rights, but often actively opposing them with tremendous ferocity.
— Noam Chomsky, Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism
Current climate policies will result in global warming of more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, according to a United Nations report on Thursday, more than twice the rise agreed to nearly a decade ago . . . “We’re teetering on a planetary tight rope,” U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a speech on Thursday. “Either leaders bridge the emissions gap, or we plunge headlong into climate disaster”.
— Gloria Dickie / “Climate set to warm by 3.1 C without greater action, UN report warns” / Reuters
What I’m Listening To:
Everything I learned, it’s been burned Everything I know has been blown
one of our elevators is missing / a deep dark well in its stead / due to the flourish of inequality / she sends a telegram to the fishmonger’s wife
it’s a nuthouse of embarrassments / it reads / it was temporarily taken out and of set up in the sewer / tomorrow’s moss is spreading in the flowerbed of inevitability
a sex telephonist onsite spreads mulch / before the first threat is hurled
she says / hymn 629 into a dead line / abolish abolish abolish / ball lightning in her brain / animal clamps dangling from her waist
buried in mouthwash / paddling like a tardigrade / she sings / life is a nightmare worth dreaming
What I’m Reading:
The apocalypse was offstage, so distant at that point as to be the stuff of sci-fi, drones, mother ships, hyperspace, catastrophically bad weather, but it wasn’t offstage any longer. The heat was real. The glaciers were going fast, the drought was bottomless, the seas rising.
her peppercorn objectives engorged / animating her dreams and warmed over sentiments / a cryptically streamlined mantra workstation churning passels of pap and paranoia / her senses lacquered into a veneer of personhood / her soul adhering to her make up towel
the strum / the dredges / the subterfuge of menace / more enticing than ever / more recondite despite its allure
he dreams of sarcophagi and cataclysmic showers / papyrus scrolls in surreal colors / dayglo patinas pulsating / ululating mystic vowels / sours on his testicular absence / bitter and dissociative / obsessive and abscessive
the hand is ambiguous / a figurine cut out / a stylus animosity / pinned down on maroon felt
hark / they paint by numbers
look / they fail to see
they soundtrack asynchronous duets in three-quarter time / they semiquaver sigh all the readymade cruelties of life
you warden through the forested nightmare surrounded by the monstrosity of life unspooling / rewinding synthesizing the day the raw manifold: unfiltered
disquiets / immersions / odors await you with dis-ease a volcanic erosion a turnabout: eruption
bedpans of seem schemers festooned in funks an ornate pallet: fistfuls
u spring a leak shaken: fitful
u
What I’m Reading:
We are all, in the end, swarms of mysterious, irreconcilable cells that randomly select and bruise each other’s insides through both accident and choice.
my four uncles speak of biblical rains: ¡lo que viene por ahí!
i’m conducting my cornu and sistrum band we make a heavenly racket there is dispatch in our notes alacrity in our fingers smell of ozone and electricity fill the air
water breaches the open windows
la alondra canta en maltusiano: los peregrinos estan perdidos sálvese quien pueda
a call from paducah transits through tallahassee threw little havana thru el cayo matahambre to a mamey stand in cienfuegos reduced to trecefuegos in thee apocalyptic downpour
where is the dignity in that, cock robin? why are you still in caracas? what is the sense in that, mr platt? it’s overstuffed in hell these days
i’m outta’ space & i sistrum one last clang
there is no joy in transgression anymore! it’s our new default setting
one uncle spits & pogos rises in declension: if they ain’t no one left after the storm better for us
u know about us
What I’m Reading:
You can doomscroll your way to your doom. The democratic theorists of old longed for an activated citizenry; somehow they failed to recognize how easily citizens could be activated to oppose deliberative democracy.
— Adam Gopnik / “How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?” / The New Yorker
thee istsfor manity reader 