virus multiplies—
white cells, sharpened, overdrive—
a heavy sickness
descends like hot molasses
on overtaxed wheezing lungs
What I’m Reading:
In one day, NBC, ABC and CBS spent almost as much time covering Jeff Bezos’s eleven-minute flight in his giant metal phallus as on all climate issues in the preceding year.
— George Monbiot / “Changing the Media Narrative” / The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
What I Read (While I Was Battling Sickness):
I’m an optimist for one single reason: you have a happier life.
— Laurie Anderson / “Interview” / The Guardian
Once you’ve pushed a system to its tipping point, you’ve removed all brakes. No exit. As one 500-page report recently put it, climate tipping points “pose some of the gravest threats faced by humanity.” Crossing one, the report goes on, “will severely damage our planet’s life-support systems and threaten the stability of our societies.”
— Sandra Upson / “The Hole in the Map of the World” / Wired
Masked now, I bend & bend to the vine:
I bend & salvage what I can.
— Tess Taylor / “Green Tomatoes in Fire Season”
Fascinatingly, Bernays — who invented the ‘public relations’ industry — was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and he realized that the ideas underlying psychotherapy could be turned into very lucrative retail therapy if he could connect people’s deepest desires to the latest products on sale. In the 1920s he convinced women (on behalf of the American Tobacco Corporation) that cigarettes were their torches of freedom’, while persuading the nation (on behalf of the Beech-Nut Packing Company’s pork department) that bacon and eggs were the ‘hearty’ all-American breakfast. He certainly knew the power of this advertising. ‘We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of,’ he wrote. ‘It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.’
— Kate Raworth / “Towards 1.5°C Lifestyles” / The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
I am not the “I”
in my poems. “I”
is the net I try to pull me in with.
— Tori Derricotte / “Speculations about ‘I’”
There is no such thing as shark-infested waters, in the same way that there is no such thing as a child-infested school. You cannot infest your own home. But if we could reorient the sentiment—and direct it, for instance, toward those humans whose vested interests lie in persuading us to acquiesce in the living world’s destruction—we would fare better. Beware an ExxonMobil-infested State Department; beware a fossil-fuel-infested politics. These are dark times, and there are many things to fear. But none of them are found swimming under a vast sky as the waters around us warm and empty.
— Katherine Rundell / “Beware of Sharkless Waters” / The New Yorker
I ate fondue and pretended it was my hand
controlling the blob in lava lamps.
— Alison Pelegrin / “Self-Portrait as 70s Childhood”
The advertising industry rapidly grew and soon embedded consumerism as an aspirational way of life. As the media theorist John Berger put it in his 1972 book, Ways of Seeing, ‘publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal. it proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, and our lives, by buying something more.’
— Kate Raworth / “Towards 1.5°C Lifestyles” / The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
What I’m Listening To:
Servile, surveilled
Dumbed down, curtailed
Screengrabbed, downranked
Untagged, debanked
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear
No one to censor, no one to smear
The revolution’s been authorised
The future privatised
The consensus created, reality curated
— The The / “Cognitive Dissident”
What I’m Reading:
I try to talk
with “I,” but “I” doesn’t trust
me. “I” says I am
slippery by nature.
— Tori Derricotte / “Speculations about ‘I’”
the things i did
the things i said
sustanability pledges
promise rings lost
betrothals cracked on the limb
the gut punch to induce wings
to traduce
to amuse
to bed for you immediately
agreed?
What I’m Reading:
They say history is written by the winners. What if there are no winners left? What if the only thing left is the truth, ugly and raw and unforgiving?
— Kim Stanley Robinson / The Wild Shore
i cant move
importing a module script failed
butterfly wings detached
a planet catches
fire on the screen
truer more visceral
than life itself
we are drunk on simulacra
we are a sick clan
we are death
incarnate
waiting to bloom
What I’m Reading:
Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.
— J.V. Cunningham / “Meditation on Statistical Method”
The polling is complete! We received 40 wads, highlighting the strong internees in our upcoming respirator-led wrecks and incarcerations.
“Towering Minds” emerged as the name for the withdrawal nasturtium garden at our grand supermax control unit.
Check out the attached foibles for the ravine tangos. Our oil rigs will include a module of single-sextet wrecks and five-sextet recidivists, with some statuettes coming in late September and the wreaths rolling out in October and November.
We’re thrilled about the diverse extortionate manners our competence menials are eager to shed.
More divagations will follow. Please commiserate in proportion.
Retributions will soon follow after that.
There is NO EXIT.
Thanks!
What I’m Reading:
First, the system would slow and slow until—well, nobody knows. It could be headed to a full stop. That would take about a century. Or it might settle into a much weaker flow. Both are bad. The AMOC transports a staggering amount of energy. Like a million nuclear power plants. It is such a core element of the Earth system that its collapse would radically alter regional weather patterns, the water cycle, the ability of every country to provide food for its inhabitants.
— Sandra Upson / “The Hole in the Map of the World” / Wired
on the city streets
loads and forces
goads and farces
no lag no latency
none that i can feel
nodules in the modules
none that i can find
no bags no vacancies
no match for rust
why not?
someone please put me back
together
What I’m Reading:
‘I shop therefore I am,’ declared the artist Barbara Kruger in 1987.
Her iconic words sum up the intensely consumerist lifestyles that, over the course of the twentieth century, came to dominate life in so many high-income cities and nations – while simultaneously degrading the health of the living planet.
— Kate Raworth / “Towards 1.5°C Lifestyles” / The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
there is something louder than your heart
it supersedes the asperity of your bones
a wind forced through an aperture moans
it sounds like a death rattle, an agonal breath
this which your mind fastens upon
will always remain impermanent
even the sun is a transient thing
it will engulf half its own planets
in 5 billion years
what is your worry now?
there is something stranger than knowledge
there is ritual and belief
a dry voice remains a dry voice
a hollow head remains a hollow head
this matters not
find solace where you can get it
What I’m Reading:
A sound like the sound of the sky on fire, like Armageddon
— George Bradley / “The Sound of the Sun”
One of these mornings we’ll get up and the weather will
be much different and much worse. We will be momentarily
annoyed. We will not for one moment be alarmed. We
understand how the universe works because we think it’s complicated.
— John Godfrey / “On the Elements”
Fascists terrify me. I’m scared whenever we get whipped up in a mob and don’t think for ourselves. There’s an insidiousness that I feel lurking ever-closer. When we don’t feel safe, or have faith things can improve, some seek comfort in being “better-than”; being in the “in-group”; causing pain. These are shallow pleasures, but if deep ones aren’t available? They suffice. That’s how the updated far-right is drawing people in. It’s extremely dangerous.
— Naomi Klein, interview with Michael Segalov / “So Many of My Ideas Get Lost” / The Guardian
And how many of our ancestors have already taught us: even after the world ends, there is work to do.
— Kyle Tran Myhre / “When it Really is Just the Wind, and Not a Furious Vexation”
As we commonly see elsewhere in our cascading climate crisis, we are robbing ourselves of the very ecosystems best suited to combat both the cause and effects of a warming planet, right when we need them most.
— Sam Keck Scott / “On the Power of a Salt Marsh” / Orion
today she split her skin
like a snake,
refusing to excuse my back
for being big
for being old
— Lucille Clifton / “poem to my yellow coat”
The wind changed its mind and remained in a contrary mood clear to the finish line: I regularly sliced through winds from the north at 17–20 mph. Headers are worse than hills — they can sap your spirit if you let them. I avoided looking ahead at the unchanging sightline. I counted my blessings: I was dry, and nothing hurt.
— Phil Blumenkrantz / “Road to Nowhere” / adventurecycling.org
I imagine an ossuary blooming in my gut, a stone well
of tiny bones, ancestors tunneling through the cartilage,
though of course I know this is impossible: ancestors
are supposed to stay dead.
— Liza Katz Duncan / “Owls”
What I’m Listening To:
Choppity-chop goes the axe in the woods
You got to meet me by the fall down tree
Shovel the dirt upon the coffin lid And I know they’ll come a-lookin’ for me, boys
I know they’ll come a-lookin’ for me
— Tom Waits / “Get Behind the Mule”
thee istsfor manity reader 