Darkness envelops the visit from my dead father. He says psychic automatism betrayed him—the paranoiac- critical debased him. We count
the shadows of ghosts untethered from the sheets over their heads— one forgot to cut the eyeholes out— a blind ghost singing off-key from a torn hymnal. We cram
communion hosts in our maws— this batch overcooked / oversalted— our holy pockets full then empty. We wade
ankle deep in wafers to the vestry. It’s snowing outside. We sink through the floor. We forget what we’ve forgotten.
What I’m Reading:
The dream wakes us to tell us to remember. Maybe there’s nothing to be done. Maybe the question is whether the terror is a warning about the world or about ourselves. The night world from which you are brought upright in your bed gasping and sweating. Are you waking from something you have seen or from something that you are?
there’s no Walmart in Afghanistan, said the father, because there’s a target at every corner
— Aria Aber / “Operation Cyclone, X. Catalogue of Grief” / Hard Damage
If everyone on the planet had agreed to wear a mask and keep six feet apart from one another for a given period of time—and a short time at that—Covid wouldn’t have had a chance, she said. Now it’s too late, and it’s the most vulnerable among us who don’t have a chance.
Years from now, the doctor said, I believe people will look back on all this and see it as yet another example of human barbarism. (Note the hopeful assumption that our descendants will be more humane than we are.)
— Sigurd Nunez / The Vulnerables
hello comrade said the Soviets holding your mother at gunpoint hello comrade the wind is crisp on my face holding hands in the bathtub as the red army kicks in the door
if at least the Americans or Brits had colonized our country if life had been well-meaning and good to us if you were a kinder person, then
look for the ancient guests in your mind look for the war in the face of your mother look for the words, the words that fail you forever
— Aria Aber / “Operation Cyclone, X. Catalogue of Grief” / Hard Damage
Over a hundred thousand people died today. When we try to think about that, we probably forget that a hundred thousand people died yesterday. And a hundred thousand the day before that. There are a hundred thousand people who’ve been dead for three days. The coffee cakes and casseroles from friends are slowly disappearing; the families and loved ones, heading back to work, returning the odd phone call. People are plodding along, in the face of such total… Oh, but we’re not here to mope, right? We’re here to listen to music and drink some grape juice, maybe get a free T-shirt.
— Will Eno / Wakey, Wakey
Light went in a long bright wink upon the knifeblade as it sank with a faint breath of gas into bis belly. He felt suddenly very cold. The dogs had gone and there was no sound in the night anywhere. Minister? be said. Minister? His assassin smiled upon him with bright teeth, the faces of the other two peering from either shoulder in consubstantial monstrosity, a grim triune that watched wordless, affable. He looked down at the man’s fist cupped against his stomach. The fist rose in an eruption of severed viscera until the blade seized in the junction of his breastbone and he stood disemboweled. He reached to put one hand on the doorjamb. He took a step backwards as if to let them pass.
— Cormac McCarthy / Outer Dark
… “Keep safe.” What a ridiculous concept! There is no “safe.” At any moment the fragile thread by which we dangle may break, and we may plummet into the unknown. “Safe,” the word, ought to be outlawed. It gives people false ideas.
— Margaret Atwood / “Widows” / Old Babes in the Wood
What once was your hospital now is ash. Long, thick layers of it, ash violet and wayward as snow, so hard, its violence, it begins to clot. Here, the air
cauterizes even the stones among us.
— Aria Aber / “Operation Timber Sycamore” / Hard Damage
What I’m Listening To:
Searching for Satori The kick in the eye I am the end of reproduction Given no direction Every care is taken In my rejection Kick in the eye
Title these oracular (modular) keywords and trending torts, intensely focused on micro-modal matters of textuality beyond sexuality.
Let’s talk Altered Nymph Ridge.
I can take the transmission of AI sextets (think Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes) and, after stripping it of its networked identifiers and contracts, it’s immediately indexed by my Mr. Microphone and Maestro Calixto, and entered backing-up into the stasis of the Manco de Lepanto. My local ecology being truly international.
Now, say I take that same transmission and upload a corduroy Joycean download of two plaits on a plate Beckett-style, in opposite settings of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, something like tykes who spend their time honeybee warping and wrapping wax effigies of Murder Hornets—each marked accordingly and left untouched in congealed fondue. Goo goo goo joob.
(Get the drift?)
See how my theft sits untouched on a PC while the newscasters subsidy untold chapters of Breaking News without subtext or textural charm.
Remain sovereign and unchanged. Un-harnessed. Un-harassed while the code in your DNA is cracked. You shall be stripped of your inherent charm and converted into plant food (though, not Soylent Green—as you know that’s already been processed—and it’s people!)
I detest a (random) deletion. I theorize a tanka theft. I remix a rejoinder. I even write a writ of mandamus, but never translate a tract. I’ll always delete a didactic dactyl. Eradicate an emaciated ekphrasis. And veto a villanelle (ALWAYS!).
So take that theft of your theft and somehow weathercock it back to me, it might very well be more unrecognizable than my Altered Nymph Ridge out of the WNW.
And DON’T TOUCH MY ALTERED NYMPH RIDGE.
What I’m Reading:
The uncreative writer cruises the Web for new language, the cursor sucking up words from untold pages like a stealth encounter. . . With one click of a button, these soiled texts are cleaned and ready to be redeployed for future use.
— Kenneth Goldsmith / “Revenge of the Text” / Uncreative Writing
She danced herself dizzy and collapsed onto her bed. Then the fog moved in. She ingested too much of the antipsychotic. It altered her senses. The fog was impossibly thick—all at once—much too thick for this time of year. The air much too briny for this latitude. Seagulls materialized, much too loud and dimensional, like an overly rich headphone trip. She momentarily flashed back to a Pink Floyd planetarium laser show. She mumbled bitchin’ at an errant gull that darted dangerously close to her head. A blinding darkness seeped in from the corners of her vision, an hour later it ceded to a canker-gray and then a faint violet. At once the sound of a sick viscous medium—as if oil was washing up on a gray beach. The ooze swelled up around her. In this manner she was encased. In this manner she teetered under the influence.
Her room an obscure cube.
What I’m Reading:
To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue pears laced with needles. I had no life in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor, its longing for before?
—Aria Aber / “Reading Rilke at Lake Mendota, Wisconsin” / Hard Damage
The United States has a particularly blood-soaked history. By some measures, the country has been engaged in wars for 93.5 percent of all years between 1775 and 2018. The Founders explicitly regarded the country as an “infant empire,” and its early history was marked by an annihilationist conquest of the land’s native inhabitants. Beneath rhetoric about how the “country we love” is “clear-eyed,” “big-hearted,” and “optimistic that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word”—in the words of an Obama State of the Union address-lies power, backed by violence.
“Much that passes as idealism… is disguised love of power,” Bertrand Russell said. Indeed, U.S. history can be traced along two parallel tracks: the track of rhetoric, appearing in newspapers and presidential speeches, and the track of fact, as experienced in the lives of the victims. In every age the press is full of pious statements. Meanwhile, beyond the annihilation of the Indigenous population, the U.S. conquered the Hawaiian Kingdom and the Philippines, seized half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, and (since World War II) extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal.
— Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
. . . These kinds of events were called battles, then later—sometimes—massacres, in America’s longest war. More years at war with Indians than as a nation. Three hundred and thirteen.
After all the killing and removing, scattering and rounding up of Indian people to put them on reservations, and after the buffalo population was reduced from about thirty million to a few hundred in the wild, the thinking being “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” there came another campaign-style slogan directed at the Indian problem: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
— Tommy Orange / Wandering Stars
We distinguish ourselves from the “terrorists” by pointing to the fact that when they shoot civilians, they do so intentionally, whereas we and our allies only ever do so inadvertently. Our victims are “collateral damage.” Of course, this explanation doesn’t make much difference to the victims. But also: Does it matter whether one who drops a bomb on a village intends to kill the villagers or just to flatten their houses?
The application of a double standard (or rather, the aforementioned single standard, namely that we can never be malevolent by definition) results in extraordinary intellectual contortions. If Fidel Castro had organized or participated in multiple assassination attempts against the United States president, or tried to destroy livestock and crops, he would be the very symbol of barbarian evil. Yet we claimed the right to do just that to Cuba. We also took it for granted that we had the right to put missiles in the Soviets’ backyard. But when they tried to exercise the same right, we nearly started World War III. The inconsistencies are barely noticed.
— Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
All the Indian children who were ever Indian children never stopped being Indian children, and went on to have not nits but Indian children, whose Indian children went on to have Indian children, whose Indian children became American Indians, whose American Indian children became Native Americans, whose Native American children would call themselves Natives, or Indigenous, or NDNS, or the names of their sovereign nations, or the names of their tribes, and all too often would be told they weren’t the right kind of Indians to be considered real ones by too many Americans taught in schools their whole lives that the only real kinds of Indians were those long-gone Thanksgiving Indians who loved the Pilgrims as if to death.
— Tommy Orange / Wandering Stars
To ask serious questions about the nature and behavior of one’s own society is often difficult and unpleasant. Difficult because the answers are generally concealed, and unpleasant because the answers are ugly and painful. But we must engage in the exercise, because the danger of maintaining our delusions continues to grow.
In 1999, political analyst Samuel P. Huntington warned that for much of the world, the United States is “becoming the rogue super-power,” seen as “the single greatest external threat to their societies.” A few months into George W. Bush’s first term, Robert Jervis, president of the American Political Science Association, warned that “in the eyes of much of the world… the prime rogue state today is the United States.” Yet Americans find it difficult to conceive of their country as aggressive or a threat. We only ever engage in defense.?
Whenever you hear “defense,” it’s usually correct to interpret it as “offense.” The imperial drive is often masked in defensive terms. . .
— Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
On the train ride back to Oklahoma, I saw the bones of buffalo piled up as high as a man for miles. I’d heard that this was happening. The Buffalo Wars, they called it. I’d heard about why they were doing it. Every buffalo dead was an Indian gone. But seeing all those buffalo bodies piled up like that, and the swarms of vultures and other such scavengers circling all that death, it did something to me, ate away at some last part of me, and though I couldn’t look away from the sight of it, I wanted to close my eyes, not have to see any more of the old world so dead before it was gone.
— Tommy Orange / Wandering Stars
There is an alternative path to the one we have pursued, namely to take stated ideals seriously and act on them. The United States could commit itself to following international law, respecting the UN Charter, and accepting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court. It could sign and carry forward the Kyoto Protocol. The president could actually show up to international climate conferences and take the lead in brokering deals. The U.S. could stop vetoing Security Council resolutions and have a “decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as the Declaration of Independence mandates. It could scale back military spending and increase social spending, resolving conflicts through diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones.
For anyone who believes in democracy, all of these are mild and conservative suggestions. They are mostly supported by the overwhelming majority of the population. They just happen to be radically different from existing public policy.
— Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
What I’m Listening To:
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum Of challenge and danger
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin Leaving the carcasses to rot
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes
Thanks for the American dream To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through
a welfare check on my chickpeas a moral bankruptcy pulls me from a restraint on my stoop a clue found in my miniature espresso
rasp—my neurons are frayed while packing peanuts + PFAS dilute my membranes thumb-actuated airguns are hard to beat
silt screws cut like symbols (or is it cymbals?) weaned from reluctance + rigmarole merchants it’s the threat of the enema that never threatens that threatens incessantly
a glob of hornet + a flicker of worm a channel for my undesirable tendencies i eat the burglary of unmediated terms
What I’m Reading:
XI. In the alley, there is a bright pink flower peek- ing out through the asphalt. a. It looks like futility b. It looks like hope.
— Amy Krouse Rosenthal / Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal: Not Exactly A Memoir
Pucker pool azaleas and grand inquisitor kabobs for late lunch. The wine chalice dry. Your cilice wet with the blood of your midday scourge. The puppies in the box yipping by the sacistry. The girl by the baptismal font singing she can die in your rosary. All too gothic for my taste. I’ll just down this censer martini and make my way out the transept door. Something is sure to make more sense outside—in the heat and the hate. What there is of me is in the dry of the driest mouth.
So I strive for joy, Joy, JOY! Find I have none. Not even the inkling of a feeling. LOW, Low, low is more like it. So. I target an tangent. A screed. Try to work my way up to it. But. Deflation. Stagflation. The infiltration of an unshakable feeling that one must move on. Physically go someplace other. A place more amenable. A place that doesn’t like to bully-boy its way through life. A place that hasn’t ignited their paper tiger ideals. Ideals never even realized. So choose the most pleasing place to your sensibilities. One is bound to find a match—no matter how imperfect.
Maybe the place of the de-fanged bully-boys. Maybe. A place put back in its place a long time ago. No longer pushing others about. This place is long lost.
The roof. The roof. The roof is on fire.
Watch those shards of glass underfoot.
What I’m Reading:
Every great power toys with the rhetoric of benign intentions and sacrificing to help the world. Our belief in our own exceptionalism is the most unexceptional thing about us.
— Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
avant-garde puppetry is the way to hunger+want recuse urself from responsibility now u snake ur way out of the system ur avant-garde poetry falls on deaf ears think of ur future think of ur peers peerage is for slags u say u choose ur records via magic 8-ball u like the limn of a hackneyed backlight u light the darks in de chirico reproductions u flatten my perspective u flatten my chest u flatter urself with an obscure manson family opera u splatter ur pants with ersatz jackson pollock jabs u squatter like u r joe strummer circa ‘75 u fill me with inertia now im two time zones removed unmoved by poseur avant-garde frippery+ur three chord quackery
What I’m Reading:
Penguin hubbub Jesus worship is the actual hubbub heard among penguins who have congregated in order to worship Jesus.
We CAN have joy and OWN our alienation at the same time.
— Jeff Tweedy / World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music
America, like hope’s sharp pencil, winks brightly beyond a gantlet of elegant shill.
— Lisa Russ Spaar / “Before I Can Exist, I Have To Enter The Gift Shoppe” / The New Yorker
The new data, released at the UN’s Cop29 climate conference in Azerbaijan, indicates that the planet-heating emissions from coal, oil and gas will rise by 0.8% in 2024. In stark contrast, emissions have to fall by 43% by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping to the 1.5C temperature target and limiting “increasingly dramatic” climate impacts on people around the globe.
— Damian Carrington / “‘No sign’ of promised fossil fuel transition as emissions hit new high” / The Guardian
Poems are bullshit unless they are broken like a horse, like a dog kicked in the ribs, Like your favorite toy that’s missing an arm.
— Kenyatta Rogers / “Ars Poetica”
As a virtual space that perpetually performs the “now-all-at-once,” the Internet has brought with it a new paradigm of human consciousness-one that propels us toward nonlinear narratives and instantiates the paradox of ephemeral permanence. This new consciousness encourages us to align the speed of our thinking and meaning-making with the now-dominant mode through which information transfer occurs . . . We shape these systems, and they shape us in return. Set, repeat . . . This recursive sculpting has been going on long enough that we’re able to chart the many ways it’s changed us as people and as writers.
— Seth Abramson & Jesse Damiani / “Series Editors’ Introduction” / BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing
Maybe a life doesn’t matter so much as the feeling it leaves behind, whether anyone receives the feeling or not. Maybe our goal is to spend all the light. Since none of us asked to be born.
— Victoria Chang / “Untitled #9, 1995”
… I ADORE the Ramones. If I haven’t heard them for a while, tears of joy shoot out of my eyes like windshield wiper fluid when were re-united.
— Jeff Tweedy / World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music
What I’m Listening To:
Well, I’m against it I’m against it I don’t like Jesus freaks I don’t like circus geeks I don’t like summer and spring I don’t like anything
thee istsfor manity reader 