thee istsfor manity reader

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The thread of the story fell to the ground, so I went down on my hands and knees to hunt for it. This was at one of those patriotic celebrations, and all I saw were imported shoes and jackboots.

— Iman Mersal / “A Celebration”

Life struck me as a simple series of adversities, relatively easy to overcome, which led to a death that was perhaps not simple but was inevitable and thus didn’t merit thinking about. I didn’t realize, back then, that in fact that was what happiness was, what youth was and what death was. And although I wasn’t in essence mistaken about anything, I was making mistakes about everything.

— Andrés Barba / A Luminous Republic

His mind kept the airspace but sold the sun.
At night, he ordered his own sun, which was
Supposedly arriving soon, they said,
In entourages of azures and clouds.

— Rowan Ricardo Phillips / “Hole in the Sky”

Fossil fuel companies are running “a massive mis- and disinformation campaign” so that countries will slow down the adoption of renewable energy and the speed with which they “transition away” from a carbon-intensive economy, the UN has said.

Selwin Hart, the assistant secretary general of the UN, said that talk of a global “backlash” against climate action was being stoked by the fossil fuel industry, in an effort to persuade world leaders to delay emissions-cutting policies. The perception among many political observers of a rejection of climate policies was a result of this campaign, rather than reflecting the reality of what people think, he added.

— Fiona Harvey / “‘Massive disinformation campaign’ is slowing global transition to green energy” / The Guardian

Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

— Kim Stanley Robinson / Pacific Edge

I’m winding down. The daylight is winding down.
                                                       Only the night is wound up tight.
And ticking with unpaused breath.

— Charles Wright / “Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes”

So often we begin and end our rides in the same place but return a slightly different person. We are, in all sorts of little and beautiful ways, changed by the journey. We ride to find things and to find ourselves.

— Peter Flax / Live to Ride: Finding Joy and Meaning on a Bicycle

What I’m Listening To:

The sky is blue
The sky is the deepest, purest blue I’ve ever seen
Points on the globe are just points on the globe

— Sonic Youth / “Eric’s Trip”

half-uttered dishwater homilies

shaver of renowned swabs
bring to the decimated homeland
committed sobriquets and disguises
the cupidity mechanisms
the mutilations of cupolas

a menu of compass points
one of the few mutineers of her sores
will perform and dishcloth the medallion
of our 21st-century cesspit lives

she is committed to keeping alive the sorrows
to the curacy and mercenary dishonor
of half-uttered dishwater homilies
she will traipse and meddle
for more inhumanity — vocatives be damned

she will shed delusions
and website inquiries
describing commonly recurring
or overused literary and rhetorical devices

she will grade papers with green felt tips

What I’m Reading:

My sky is black with small birds bearing south

— Edna St. Vincent Milay / “[Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find]”

What You Said

What could I possibly say when you say (backhand): it’s you.

I don’t know if you’re talking twang, talking to those radicals, or if you’re addressing me.

Somehow, judging by the tonsure of your vole, I think it’s the boy racer.

You never speak in a mellifluous tongue to me—but you’re always: “hon, hon, hook-up with the racketeer.”

The flick-knives in your green irises are limned with black aureoles when you talk to Mr. Munchems.

When you speak to me your flecky eyefuls jaundice—sometimes you look possessed or malarial.

Why is that?

Why, when you speak to Mr. Clutter, do you speak in baby talk?

What dogmas a twit know of “ga ga?”

Yeah, to me you spice invective: your mother-in-law’s cupid is overripe like bag fugu fishmonger; or, please die already.

You salivate and your incursions get larger and pointier.

Do you not feel the wart in your crucible for me anymore?

What I’m Reading:

It may be true that the dead betray us when they abandon us, but we too betray them in order to live.

— Andrés Barba / Luminous Republic

A Weathercock in Her Occipital

This is now. The last war on drumsticks was a war on fructification. It was fudge batty, it was fatty bruit. I fructified the crumb cross-question and I crossed my own patisserie when I got there. I got there when the dashboard overtook me and I wrote a nub without yachtswoman—a nub workhouse. I chose something golden that sunk my Atocha. I fructified in Dar Es Salam. I dromedary without opiates in my eye-openers on a legation turn. I sleuth inside a motherland infested terminus. Terminus on an assign of extracted teeth and pulse novelette but the difficult out of a hatchway while racetrack munch graves obliviously in the hammer. I password sunbather away with the sprinter in your stepparent and wishbone in the folio of your soulless fall. I scarify my south in the humorless sundry of a long nightlight in a cleavage well lighted plaid which is a bullring ridden cal in Lesotho during a moo moonlight of dust-up and quip whippoorwills. I psychic leafy trends leafless, hot with fleshpots fleecing your sister’s salesgirl. You said, “I got minicab and you’ll be fink.” I said, “summer is sister’s faucet in her shizophrenic haze in the striker of a weathercock in her occipital lock.” You say my coming was sublimely written, like it was written in Sumerian scruff in a Man-eater wound. I said, “it’s ancestor to a linchpin haemophiliac.” To which you plead, “let’s go to fully automatic writing,” moving your firs in such a wean that the airgun warthogs in pin-up swordfishes around your headlamp and light-years alumna in yellow and bluff humanitarians in your open moviegoer. The workhouses you create signify tranches of truths and lushes on the grave half-sister naked in Rook reclines. A bouillon of winning stoppered ordering the slacker and a jaunty bat opened to the prying June mop jejune. Then you produce wilder beauticians and hypochondriacs from your blowlamp poets — pantaloons full of cavorting beasties. I produce a floral arsenal of helium filled hydrangeas from my walkie-talkie poet while a Berlin zeppelin foals drunken circumlocutions above us. The mandible from the Maldives stands and announces the sinking of the Diego Garcia Issues. I sinner the sorbet of hegemony of the alcoves and pelagic birthrights that abdicated when the penny-farthings became kips of the uprise.

What I’m Reading:

He warned that the consequences of inaction were being felt in rich countries as well as poor. In the US, many thousands of people are finding it increasingly impossible to insure their homes, as extreme weather worsens. “This is directly due to the climate crisis, and directly due to the use of fossil fuels . . . Ordinary people are having to pay the price of a climate crisis while the fossil fuel industry continues to reap excess profits and still receives massive government subsidies.”

— Fiona Harvey / “‘Massive disinformation campaign’ is slowing global transition to green energy” / The Guardian

Memorable Stuff I Read Last Week

When I woke, the waves had gone black,
turning over the macerated
curd of the ocean bottom, heaving its sludge
onto the beach.

— Cleopatra Mathis / “The Sea Chews Things Up”

Sometimes they dream the same dreams — of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.

— Samantha Harvey / Orbital

There are not enough words
               in the Kalaallisut language (or any language)
               to prepare you for the five-hundred shades of blue
               in icebergs.

— Aimee Nezhukumatathil / “What I Learned in Greenland”

One of the most worrying theories to emerge is that the Earth is losing its albedo, which is the ability of the planet to reflect heat back into space. This is mainly because there is less white ice in the Arctic, Antarctic and mountain glaciers.

— Jonathan Watts / “We should have better answers by now’: climate scientists baffled by unexpected pace of heating” / The Guardian

My body has a tenure of chaos
and blood. It’s clotting and ache began at
the edge of girlhood. I see no way out.

— Ajanaé Dawkins / “How to Witness a Miracle Without Converting”

In this town, this country, there are no stories. The dead, the survivors, they don’t want to remember. They don’t want to talk about what happened. They want to bury it. They want to forget.

— Kim Stanley Robinson / The Wild Shore

At my feet I found a grave of starfish,
broken and gnarled among the fleshy
snipes and heads. Every shade of death
covered the sand.

— Cleopatra Mathis / “The Sea Chews Things Up”

What I’m Listening To:

All across the world, they shout out their angry words about the end of love …
The stars stand above the Earth, bright triumphant metaphors of love

— Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds / “Joy”

… soon with your regularly scheduled programming …

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

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

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”