thee istsfor manity reader

Skronk Tectonics (redux)

Plactivist—a disembodied word. Decontextualized. One word in bas-relief, that I heard her say, in a slurry of words not directed at me.

Plactivist—decoupled and set adrift from its word cloud. It blazed like a meteorite across the my cerebral cortex and burned up somewhere in my temporal lobe.

Plactivist—I pictured a curved sickle scaler. A shadow with giant scalers for hands floating at my dim peripheries. Only the glint of the oversized probes resolved at the edges of sight.

My head in a vise as “Ode to Joy” — Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor (opus something or other) the fourth movement (you know)—blared. The chorale full-throated. Exultant.

(And in a split screen I saw myself and Alex, the Droog—all “vised-up” too, his eyes splayed open by pincers and locked—hey, wait how did I end up in a Kubrick film? No. No matter.)

Jump cut: The plactivist filled my line of vision. Surely, a shadow, most opaque—a maw of darkness behind … is that a head mirror? What serious doctor wears a head mirror?

No. This was a plactivist. It wore a plague mask filled with cardamom, cinnamon, and durian fruit, which slid about the beak-end of the mask in counterpoint to the faraway calls to: Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.

The plactivist scaled the depth of its shadow center—darkening, deepening, its own anti-matter. It’s own anti-being—black ice incarnate.

How does one weigh one’s soul? How does one quantify one’s shadow—or the intentions of our shadows as they try to flee the pin of our feet?

And then the space lightened. Not limbo—not a clockwork—or an inner circle of hell.

I heard her say plactivist — as in “play and activist, dummy!” But no solace settled, by now my soul was in need of repair.

Then I spied my soul—occupied—as it throttled its own shadow

What I’m Reading:

The typical Cuban machismo has attained alarming proportions in Miami. I did not want to stay too long in that place, which was like a caricature of Cuba, the worst of Cuba: the eternal gossip, the chicanery, the envy.

— Reinaldo Arenas / Before Night Falls

Anything But That (redux)

1.
Wild dogs, squirrels, feral hogs, and bear were constant staples of our cook pots. We used them to supplement our two pounds allotment of rice each month.

2.
“I brought everything but that. I deny the existence of that. I would bring anything but that thing,” she said.

3.
So if you’ve got a family of four you’re spending $1000, just on entrance fees.

4.
“Maquis– Resistance groups. Maquis ( World War II), predominantly rural French guerrilla groups… The network of rural bases operated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea prior to the Cambodian Civil War…”

5.
Luna moths were another treat I learned to eat, with its wings removed and roasted over an open fire it made for the perfect bite.

6.
I imagine all this through the mind of a sick, desocialized, and dissociative woman, who lost her family. Her children taken by the state. Her husband accidentally decapitated at work. Her only remaining family burned to death in a wildfire.

7.
When we came upon the carcass of a moose we thought it a godsend. And we all ate the better pieces that had not been scavenged or turned to rot. It was after that day that we eventually all became sick and most of our party perished.

8.
Just as he was dying, I set a mangy dog to disemboweling him, so the last thing he felt and saw were the teeth of a ravenous cur at his intestines.

9.
We staggered along, one wet day after another, we learned to control our hunger. We had to keep moving to make our monthly rice pick-ups. We barely had time for concerted hunting. If we came upon something we quickly killed it and slogged along.

10.
She, in time, became untethered and violent. She fantasized of fixing his larynx in some way so he couldn’t scream any more. Perhaps tie him up and deprive him of food and water until he wasted away, sharp and angular, into a bony effigy.

11.
We made a desperate attempt to make the food cache before it was removed by the enemy. We succumbed slowly, one or two of us a day. At the end of two weeks only Cruz and I were left alive, but we were in a very bad way and then you found us near death at the banks of the river.

12.
The newly moved-in family next door with an over abundance of everything doesn’t sit right with her. The neighbor child was overly loud, had ADHD, and couldn’t control himself.

13.
The tall man, dressed in black, sitting in the first row, removed his mask and said, “So this is how a loving god looks over his children?”

What I’m Reading:

It’s so early, I am still in last night.
All of life honks.
The streets steam.
Gin changes to coffee
and I think of you less…

— Alex Dimitriov / “Everything Always” / The New Yorker

Structural Logic

New people born daily: $5.99 / lb.

Self-replicating cosmic forces, yeasts, molds.
The sky is a terminal blue.
Ontology, espistemology, phenomenology, Teletubbies.
Getting naked in front of another person for the first time.
Coral reefs bleaching.
Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Francis Bacon, Samuel Alito.
A stopgap gesture to appease.

People die everyday: $ .39 / each.

What I’m Reading:

I know we are in a post-racial society, but I suspect there are still a few impediments. We are also now in the feminist utopia. So fifty-nine cents on the dollar should go just as far as a dollar on the dollar, right?

— Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone / Consequences of Capitalism

That Wasn’t a Microdose (Fissure Kitty, Faun, & I)

No, I tuned arpeggios at 6 and 16.
Fissure Kitty at a neighbor’s glance—under the shake-up of a manic-depressive trend—laden with oppressive fudge, in August heavyweight. I initiated it.
My fissure sunbather fuzz, with fanfare drums—from Miami to Kankakee—to backfire applause and Janus-faced adulation.
Faun joined us then on an anachronism-fueled jag. We didn’t make a record until we tarred 48 Housefeathers in Idioteque, Arizona.
I witnessed Faun’s beauty—an undergarment so severe—it was a triumph. A homily to downy wool.
A “hello” at Arrowhead—followed by another record. Produced by the very weightlifter convicted for ordering 40 Chomp Bards about in a wanton manner.
I took Fissure Kitty and Faun for an early morning jaunt in search of Beatles-subcontract-hairstyles. The barbers motored with clippers called Mr. Potpourri, Ms. Headlamp, and Mrs. Dingleberry.
Another jaunt. The peace broken. I didn’t understand why Faun and Fissure Kitty fought so intensely and frequently to the syncopation of the weightlifter’s discharges.
We broke up the band.
We separately formed the BeetleGees, The Third Dinghy, and Neil Dichotomy.
None of us separately ever as artful or popular as we had been together on The Budgie Enema of His Benefactress LP.
Some call for a reunion. Some are nonplussed. Most never knew or ever cared.

What I’m Reading:

Suppose the stars are just our grief reflected back to us,
proof that grief sometimes forgets its source, that it can
find dead things no matter how distant. Everyone arrives
one day and asks, is this it? And the stars answer back with
more stars.

— Victoria Chang / “Starlight, 1962”

Lay Hands (redux)

She woke up desirous of having acute control of mise en scène. She wanted to become a film director / cinematographer, and to live a future of more linearity and clarity. That night she explained her new found vision to her parents at the dinner table (glazed ham and haricots verts with herb butter).

Her mother said no, her fate was already sealed, and it was fatal. Her father added that she would come to her senses, and that it would rain intermittently tomorrow.

She arose, hovered over her parents, and said: call me Ozymandius . . . behold, and look upon me . . . She let out a little roar and poured the gravy over the table. She waved her hands, then laid hands on her parent’s heads and screamed: voila! Her parent’s heads disappeared, but their bodies quivered in an apoplectic dance. 

She joined them, and they danced through the night.

What I’m Reading:

The total heat-trapping potential of the atmosphere is now 51.5 percent higher than in 1990, when United Nations scientists first warned the world was on track for catastrophic climate change.

— World Meteorological Organization / “Greenhouse gas concentrations surge again to new record in 2023” / Press Release

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Which book do you recommend most?

I think it’s a good idea to know what the Bible actually says because—while yes, it may be inspiring to you—it’s also the book Americans often misuse to help usher in fascism. Better knowing the book could help resistance efforts. It’s also full of mythology and poetry and archetype, all of which writers use to strengthen our work.

— Jericho Brown / “Writing Advice, Book Recommendations, and More from the Newest Literary MacArthur Fellows” / lithub.com

I want a poem that is a warning,
a poem that makes me check to see
if I left the shotgun by the door,
a poem that’s a runny nose, a sneeze, a poem
that’s the moment the sky turns green.

— Kenyatta Rogers / “Ars Poetica”

In the search for a communal metanarrative-innumerable think pieces, roundtables, and interviews on the condition of the written word in America—we risk suffocating the possibilities of the poetic form and idiosyncratic writing generally.

So a time of normative discourse must give way to a time of radical action.

A period of studied subcultural formation must transition into a period of frenetic individualism that drives us toward unpredictable expressions and collaborations.

— Seth Abramson & Jesse Damiani / “Series Editors’ Introduction” / BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing

… I know I am bound to the ritual
world—in my dreams I teach myself
how to swallow a sword and I stack
the stones until they make a cairn.

— Lara Mimosa Montes / “The Cairn”

You wake from a nightmare with a certain relief. But that doesnt erase it. It’s always there. Even after it’s forgotten. The haunting sense that there is something you have not understood will remain long after.

— Cormac McCarthy / Stella Maris

All right. Try this,
Then. Every body
I know and care for,
And every body
Else is going
To die in a loneliness
I can’t imagine and a pain
I don’t know. We had
To go on living.

— James Wright / “Northern Pike”

I want to confirm that the system, on its own, is *not* good enough. You are not wrong, it is not your fault, and the fact that you struggle is not because you are not good enough, or that you haven’t hustled hard enough. Corporations are running the show, and democracy is turning into oligarchy.

But I still want to say, Keep writing anyway. Keep making art. Keep creating music. Not as a direct act of political resistance, necessarily. But as a way of prioritizing yourself, your inner life. As a way of accessing realities beyond this society controlled by unimaginative powers. I still think it matters.

— Ling Ma / “Writing Advice, Book Recommendations, and More from the Newest Literary MacArthur Fellows” / lithub.com

What I’m Listening To:

Police get taller
A shanty town
Soldier get longer
A shanty town
Rudeboy a weep and a wail
A shanty town

— Desmond Dekker & The Aces / “007 (Shanty Town)”

ai generated jesus

thee ai generated jesus
splits the firestorm
boy you wish you could be there
or not
the sides of his head shaved
looking oh so 2024
why are your eyebrows so long
a yappy dog barks somewhere outside
wait for the storm surge
it’s bound to set a new record
hope that wound doesnt scar too bad
like peppermint bark ice cream
on a freezing winter day

What I’m Reading:

It’s an inversion of Warhol: no longer can we say only that anything, properly framed, is art, but rather that art can manifest instantaneously in any frame. Art is, in effect, anyone it wants to be, anywhere and at any time.

— Seth Abramson & Jesse Damiani / “Series Editors’ Introduction” / BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing

Writerly Canker Sore

It starts out with a static preambulation—if there is such a thing. Somehow you’ve got to get started and this is as good a way sans a definite destination. Just a vagueness, something enveloped in the low cloud cover below, or fog if you’re at ground level—or terrestrially bound—not cruising at 33,000 feet as I’m doing now, and listening to St. Vincent. Because why not. Why not this and why not now, here over the Atlantic Ocean, that is, a sliver of South Carolina’s piece of it, on the precipice of Georgia’s Atlantic—and Florida bound eventually, specifically SoFla, and then pinned to Miami by the bay—Biscayne Bay, on Brickell Bay Drive somewhere. That’s where I’ll be. But thou shall not—the endless knot / endless not. Something like.

These are some words to later shape, remix, smooth out into a writerly canker sore. Yes, that’s it — a writerly canker sore.

Thee old hometown.

What I’m Reading:

GUY: You know what else is great, by the way? Solid food. A Saltine. A sardine. We probably take almost everything in existence for granted. A million miracles at work in this room, right now, easily. You can almost hear them. Wowee. Your body produced 5 million red blood cells in the time since I said “Wowee.” You will produce two swimming pools’ worth of saliva in your life. (Very brief pause.) Use it wisely.

— Will Eno / Wakey, Wakey

Loudmouth (redux)

What can I offer?
A warring world where life is bereft of meaning.
Father on an amphetamine-fueled jag.
Mother, a dark figure, a smoke-like wraith moving through the house.
I stare and move my crayon to the din of caffeinated voices, a garbled television, a tinkling piano.
The house is old and made out of coquina painted pale green.
I’m shoehorned in between them, and perched on the edge of my seat.
A whippoorwill spits an urgent call.
She will come in and check for irritation at 9:10.
Overnight the snow will turn to slush, then a sheath of ice.

What I’m Reading:

Times is hard.

Hard people makes hard times. I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away.

— Cormac McCarthy / Outer Dark