Listen to the muzungus and you’ll hear windowsill anhedonias. That doggedness that does not aid the weak or the needy. This disease is legion. This contagion a russian roulette of overloud artifacts. Full of dissipation and castings aside. Benevolence greater in its absence than its the abundance.
I hear the starlings in their murmurations — the sibilance in their wings.
The moisture of fear unwicked in the strongman’s pancake makeup. The splutters of concupiscence denied. He cannot get through the inhumanity and gloves the nation’s cheek. A duel to bury the dead faster than the last guy.
Rest in Peculiarity.
What I’m Reading:
Colonial logic gaslights us to believe that it is our shortcomings, not colonialism itself, that stand between us and liberation.
— Mohammed El-Kurd / Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal
The miserable mizzle speckled his glints to the point that he took them off, wiped them, and replaced them with blinders. Daft mischief his. He tramped the Spanish plantations by feelies.
Nowhere but here. Actually not here, but on the plains beyond the western ridge there. It rains there all the time. Mainly does. Manly he. A man moving drizzle by touch. Arms all zombie-like and such. What gives?
His lack of documentation. Lamentable. His will. Insurmountable. At the decanter of Franco — where he laid paternalistic hands on the sign prohibiting access to the tomb — hands like missed exhortations to national unity and sacrifice. Really, more like a soliloquy of the soft white underbelly pinned by a jackboot. He pined for the days of Conquistadors. The vapors of dichotomies. The nights of haves and have nots. The age of MEN.
Oh, the grand days of Tordesillas — halcyon ecstasy. One might say erotic. He thought so, anyway, stumbling and bumbling blind through the country. The days of take what you want ‘cause you can. Come back!
These are just a bunch of lollygaggers not using what was granted to the strong and audacious. So we take it by force and indenture — the hoi polloi can’t do a thing to change the outcome. This was goodly godlydeterminism.
He trudged, woebegone and misbegotten — a wanktankerous lech (you should have seen him) — waiting for the boat to a new world made by the strongman reprised. There he waited by the riotous poppies, still blinkered, for the clarion call to put his boot to use.
What I’m Reading:
There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.
crispr your genes to oblate perfection involve no one in your self abuse
life goes sideways as long as it’s going damburst dumb and long
open the flue and shut your mouth don’t get your super ego too eager
your id pilfers your farewell drugs a mad sacker to hack your genome
you want to want to be blue youre full of inertia and anonymities
youre a vervet of the monticules a slag to the molecules errant
youve been warned and now youre on notice to be sacked and attacked and occupied
malpractice petards all about the palace guards the bully pulpit molders and molts
we be the fib incarnate we scalpel your epaulets
you puppet them both you get the fist
and we gotta pay our taxes for this?
What I’m Reading:
The Monroe Doctrine’s ignoble history is well known today. Over the course of two centuries, the United States would cite the doctrine as a self-issued warrant to intervene against its southern neighbors, from the taking of Texas to more recent efforts at regime change in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americans, even before they had started to regularly use the word imperialismo, would in the early twentieth century coin the phrase Monroismo to describe the arrogance of a great power that claimed a writ to police the hemisphere.
— Greg Grandin / America, América: A New History of the New World
nestor pestles saffron bulbs indivisible ferries the legumes their twisted fate logic subsumed logic of verdigris
he macerates your dreams into molds shapes of innards and insoles pronates your victuals
into alien forms animals lifeformed as lifeless daddy long legs
he dont make your ears hurt he lickspittles the sacristy and hums the words in your dreams
a nightmare journal of crushed iguanas and taut intestines tined twine the plaits of your day
into psychic automatism or a fork deal creel meal your fish be fallin thru the gaps
image: p. remer
What I’m Reading:
Trump thrives on the ineffectiveness of his opponents. The military operation in Venezuela is a warning that Trump’s imperial ambitions are growing. He’s building himself a triumphal arch in Washington. He craves gaudy acts to justify his monument to himself. He announced his operation first on his own wacky social-media platform, then on a phone call to Fox—as if his fan base were the only part of the nation to whom the president owed an explanation for his actions. Trump’s ego poses clear and present dangers to American democracy and American world leadership. An ineffective anti-Trump movement is an indulgence American democracy cannot afford or accept.
— David Frum / “Trumps Critics are Falling into an Obvious Trap” / The Atlantic
Because the Trump movement is a cult of personality, with no consistent principles and no concern for truth, many of its boosters don’t care whether the success is real or phony. They don’t care whether the advertised “success” actually happened the way Trump says it did. They don’t care whether the so-called success achieves anything important or lasting. They don’t care if there later turns out to be a corrupt underside. They celebrate peace plans that don’t bring peace, trade deals that don’t enhance trade. The Trump movement exists to glorify Trump, in all his erratic mania. Results in the real world don’t matter.
— David Frum / “Trumps Critics are Falling into an Obvious Trap” / The Atlantic
People talk and talk more about black holes.
I believe the blackest hole is the one we inhabit . . .
— Eugenio Montale / “People talk and talk more . . .”
Nobody wants to be where they are, I think. So would it really matter so much if the earth swallows us all?
— Emma Pattee / Tilt
Why does Trump hate solar and wind energy so passionately? It’s because they’re somewhat outside his or anyone else’s control. A nation that builds its prosperity on oil makes itself a target; a nation that depends on imported oil to survive makes itself a vassal. A nation (say, China) that rapidly builds out its own supply of energy from the sun—energy that can’t be embargoed or effectively attacked, energy that is by its nature decentralized, energy so spread out that no particular bit of it is all that valuable—is a nation that can go its own way.
America is, by any definition, a rogue nation this morning.
— Bill McKibben / “Just possibly it’s the oil?” / The Crucial Years, on Substack
Our enemy always possesses probable cause.
— Mohammed El-Kurd / Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal
Ambition in fiction is merely the willingness to make mistakes. Mistakes are essential.
— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction
Military action in Venezuela today without allies may prefigure action tomorrow against allies—for example, to invade and annex Greenland. The big strategic idea of the second Trump administration is that major powers are entitled to dominate their neighbors: Russia to dominate Ukraine, China to dominate its neighborhood, and the U.S. to rule over Venezuela, Greenland, Panama, and ultimately Canada—Trump’s desired “51 st state.”
— David Frum / “Trumps Critics are Falling into an Obvious Trap” / The Atlantic
What I’m Listening To:
Take a look at these hands The hand speaks The hand of a government man Well, I’m a tumbler Born under punches
— Talking Heads / “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On”
if you are at the wrist with this sickness and often find yourself asking: wtf are we doing? who do we think we are? who died and made us lord-king-god boofoo?
we are sick and infecting everyone us we, the jacked-up jack-boot landlord out to dispatch “offensive” neighbors in the dark of night who says we be bully boys no more?
this obscenity we’re saddled with breeds a pestilence bone deep this burden sinks us this is done in our names this is our handiwork this is what we chose this is us
this abomination is our abomination maybe someone will return the favor one day and set us free
from ourselves
What I’m Reading:
Violence is woven too deeply in the history and practice of American culture to be ignored.
— Joe Jackson / Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire
/ the malice of introspection charts • the grainy horizon haunting • the constant flux • from the kills • the claustrophobe • immortalities & materializations • kill the lobe to save the head • cast a haunting memo into the great rift • that vast despatch of freak visual distortion • we gain a certain vantage • a certain grace • a certain ratio • a golden mean which means nothing much to see here • see here • be here now • embody your dysphoric self • clean up your act and fritter your knickers • the kippers are at the door • they want their clean ocean back • troubled progeny will trouble themselves now more with the trivia of freedom • they’ll storyboard their delusions in VistaVision and CinemaScope • tawdry silicate tales of eggshell showdowns and philistine psychological duels requiring telekinesis • oh, stop this loss • oh, please increase it • plunge us into a world of varying delights of the oysters and paradigm of the clams • speak to me in cracking electric locutions • speak your truth • bare your soulless doubloon heart in wheatgrass stereo • lead us not into a quill tipped-blood nibbed slab of tempeh in the curvature age • deliver us from out-of-house productions • ramen /
What I’m Reading:
TERRIBLE THINGS NEED NOT HAPPEN TO YOU, IN order to be a writer.
Terrible things will happen to you, if you are a human. You needn’t write about these things on purpose. You will probably write about them eventually, one way or the other.
— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction
A nine year old boy who has recently dispensed with god and love because they dispensed with him. His father beats his mother on occasion — preferably in the bathroom, because “blood comes out easier from tile.”
And in turn his mother beats him and throttles him by the neck on occasion when the mood overtakes her. In return the boy acts out, he behaves oddly, if you will. One day he eats 30 chocolate bars from the school candy sale while hiding under his bed; another day, he scrapes all the popcorn off his bedroom ceiling in a pique; and on a number of other days, he chunters in his parents’s dialect and overfeeds his goldfish until it floats inert, belly up.
These actions in turn earn the boy a hot rain of metal: belt buckles, from his father, who cannot stand the mess. And in turn the boy — too old, really, to shit or pee his pants — shits and pees his pants. This calls for a hail of slaps, broomsticks, and ashtrays from his frazzled mother.
Eventually the mother has enough and leaves the father, and drags the boy with her to live with her mother; but her heart isn’t in it — her heart is spleen shaped — it was beaten into that shape by her mother — the boy’s grandmother for those losing track.
Let’s not lose sight of the father: he turns into a ghost and hovers about speaking in tongues.
But the boy’s head is on fire. Remember? Because he does not comprehend much of what is happening around him.
Today on the school bus he is so full of the abnegation of god and the abnegation of love that he is compelled to repeatedly nod his head “NO!” This self-abnegation pleases him so, and he begins to pick up the speed of his nods until his head is a blur: back and forth. “NO NO!” And faster and faster, and it seems his head will fly off his neck. “NO NO NO!”
Then an older boy sitting behind him says: “Look at that shit head. He looks like a blender. Hey, blender!” Another boy yells: “Blenderhead!Blenderhead!” They sing in unison.
And the dizziness is the most joyful thing our boy has experienced: the world flying off this way and that. The colors a swirl. The boys and girls staring at him are a whirl… and in a whorling moment of ecstasy our boy crashes his head into the the metal plate that frames the bus seat in front of him. He grabs the top of the seat, and again: bang; again, bang; again, bang, bang, bang.
Some say his eyes rolled white, a girl says he was priapic. But our boy doesn’t care, his head is on fire. This is just where he wants to be.
Coda:
Doctor:As you’ll see here… a cross section diagram of brain tissue appears suberose…
… and here …
This is the way your brain appears after you’ve beat your head into the metal backing of a school bus seat frame. Your head, more specifically, your brain is on fire. You see microscopic shapes floating about your field of vision; they appear as cavorting beasties flagellating about in search of the dendrites they were unmoored from, you’ll never get those brain cells back. The world is vignetting at the edges and objects leave melting traces in their wake. People appear as slugs and leave sebaceous trails as they pass. Voices sound tinny and distant and the grind of the bus is a warm industrial hum.
The beatings, the “throttlings,” the vitriol all slough away.
This dull floating through space — untethered, yet pleasant, despite your throbbing swollen brain — is where you belong. It’s where you want to reside, and now you’ve found your ritual, your daily ablution.
You are happy. And YOU (yes you, dear reader) must imagine the boy happy — as you imagine Sisyphus happy — living and creating in the midst of the desert…
For $20 someone phones me and spits insults, in Cuban-inflected Spanish, through my earpiece. I also invest in seed packs for vanity, narcissus, and temerity. My fingers are refracted in the water backing up in the sink. A clog formed at the center of my soul. I’m unable to plunge it or dissolve it with caustics. The acoustics of these apartments are poor, the walls porous and sound travels easily through the heat ducts and vents. This is abrasion by the light of the full moon on the television downstairs; the Ligeti anti-aria from Le Grand Macabre tamping down from the stereo upstairs; and the constant woohooing by the spectrum kid next door; the neighbor across the hall has the scents of camphor and chicken soup, and Dave Brubeck wafting down the hall; and the elevator squalls Floor 16 too loud. The clog in my soul is not dispatched with celerity. It’s not dispatched at all. The hole in my head is a constant cavil. I speak in acrostics when I deign to speak at all. I missed the alignment of the planets last night. So I pay to have someone call me a comemierda. I eagerly and promptly answer the phone each night at 8:31.
What I’m Reading:
I’m angry that we’ve known that greenhouse gases cause global warming for more than a century and have done very little to stop emitting them. And then I remember where these emissions come from and feel appropriately guilty. I’m sad, desperately so, when I think about all the things we’ll lose. I’m afraid of the disasters I know are coming.
— Kate Marvel / Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
thee istsfor manity reader 