Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.
— Luigi Pirandello / Six Characters in Search of an Author
To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.
— Jill Lepore / These Truths: A History of the United States
Nonconformity, when you’re married to it, ends up looking more and more like inertia.
— Eric Puchner / Dream State
. . . I long for the ill-definition of my youth, when I lay on warm park lawn beneath a eucalyptus tree and failed to read far in a great book. Time was so slow and so thick my word-sprung yearning rode its drifts until, overpowered by hunger, I fell asleep in the sun. I did not know that I was happy.
— Jennifer Moxley / “After Turning the Clocks Back”
THIS IS A BOOK THAT DISPENSES ADVICE, COMPOSED by a writer of fiction. As with any such book or craft talk or social media rant or workshop critique, a lot of it is hogwash. I’m talking to myself. That’s all writers really do.
— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction
Having your heart broken is like finding out you have bedbugs—not in an emotional sense, but practically. Both broken hearts and bedbugs require extreme treatment. You can’t just wash your sheets and think that’s enough: Not only is it not enough, you’ve likely made the problem worse by carting your dirty laundry all over the place.
— Suzy Krause / I Think We’ve Been Here Before
All the time I had spent justifying myself. Wouldn’t it have been easier to have been gentle?
— Amie Barrodale / Trip
What I’m Listening To:
The sun has gone out We sign their papers We line their pockets You should leave now You should leave now You should leave now
— Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke / “The Men Who Dance in Stag’s Heads”
A dream. A nightmare furls in twilight. And plunges the night into stabbing. Stabbing. A post-modern city in twilight. A shambles of yesterday. Stabbing. A slick ruination. Dark pincers of light. Stabbing. Gangs of insanity run through the night. Stabbing. All through the streets. A series of stabbings. Stabbing. Close-ups of plunging. Knives in the night. Stabbing. Stabbing and running. Running and stabbing. Plunging of knives. Seamless. Shuttles of knives. Plunging. The sleep of reason produces monsters. Stabbing. Cascades of knives. Thoughtless. Lunging with blades. Thrusting. Imposssible knives. Imponderable blades. Improbable plunging. Stabbing. Stabbing and sinking. This dream of stabbing. Stabbings and running. A city gone mad with stabbing and running. Like a dream of a matador plunging. A picador stabs the city of dreams. Stabbing. This is a dream. This is a nightmare. A nightmare of stabbings. This stabbing the nighttime. Stop stabbing. A night so polluted.
Then waking.
What does it mean? This city of dreams. This city of nightmares and stabbing. Thoughts are occluded. Mood is diluted. Energy suited to sleeping. Afraid to go back. Afraid to go back to the stabbing.
What I’m Reading:
“We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day…”
A remarkable, if sadly overlooked, fellow (himself a Hustle Job) planking his own thoroughfares to eternity. An equally troubled magpie (beautifully played by the ghost of Mrs. Noir) flops into seclusion for a jest muzzle — a nuzzle of paranoia and pap.
Anarchy leads-off in the pipe room and castor oil repository. Who said what about: What price bananas? This price, this price, man! Get a hold of yourself and temporize, and in due course do nothing. Get yourself a room and a swagger-stick — only to discover that this place is as miserable a place as any other.
Take a plane to Greenland, check the weather forecast in Nigeria, take the slow boat to Caracas. Cock-robin has scrammed!
What the hell are we doing?! Get yourself some chicken soup for the proles! Our collective souls are the life-blood of stall dwellers ensconced in the fibers of the Glory Hole Wall.
The carpenter and cooper are out on call — feasting on maggots and soiled finery. Even Noam ain’t pure anymore!
Pass me the purgative. I’m dyspeptic and sore.
Get me Niz – nil – imbo on the horn!
What I’m Reading:
… Summer is in bones. Cock-robin’s at Caracas. Make o, make o, make o, Oto – otu – bre.
And the rude leaves fall. The rain falls. The sky Falls and lies with worms. The street lamps
Are those that have been hanged. Dangling in an illogical To and to and fro Fro Niz – nil – imbo.
image: vintage christmas card / unknown artist / c. 1900, in public domain
A Grand Idea (redux)
Well, it didn’t snow on Christmas, and certainly not in Maria’s home town by the sea.
Oh, the places she could roam!
Now, the only thing Maria wanted for Christmas was a plague doctor’s mask—with a bonafide beak protuberance for aromatics—and an ankle length black leather cloak, and the wide flat hat.
She looked under the tree and found a small box tagged with her name. She ripped the wrapping off and saw N-95 printed on the box.
Maybe next year, she said.
If there is a next year, said Mr. Munchems.
Mr. Munchems, you can be such a bore, she said to her rabbit.
Listen, Maria, you can’t always get what you want, Mr. Munchems said between nibbles of dandelion greens, but you take what you need, and pass the love along.
But Mr. Munchems, she said, in this world that seems so bereft of love and good will, what is there to take but bad vibes?
What year do you think this is kid, 1969? Bad vibes? Mr. Munchems said. You do what you can. You get ‘bad vibes’ and you turn them into … uh … uh, lemonade … yeah, lemonade!
Mr. Munchems, I think you’re nuts, Maria said. You’ve been eating too many mushrooms.
Listen, kid. Just try and make the world a little bit better place than you found it. Start here at home. Then your neighborhood. Then your hometown. Concentric circles, kid. Just circle out in ever-widening ‘good-vibe-osity!’
Maria was struck with a grand idea …
That night the family enjoyed a most good-humored meal—Rabbit Terrine.
A very merry to all, and to all a good bite!
image: “nights with uncle remus” / milo winter / 1917, in public domain
What I’m Reading:
A true holiday is the day you befriend the void.
— Haleh Liza Gafori / “Holiday cheer or holiday void”
I’m curious. How did you get here? According to my records you have a Pontiac station wagon with exterior wood panels on the doors, and yet you say God is in your kitchen filching the gas and feeding the mice. That’s not a very Pontiac sort of attitude. You seem more like a Plymouth Duster dude to me. What gives?
Um, how can I say this… I eat junk mail for second breakfast after feasting on broken communion wafers for first.
First?
First breakfast, that is, you should try it—fortified with savior nuggets at the processing plant. Intrinsic. Expensive. Totally formulated with cosmo dust!
A flash and a gash and the trash is ours …
Have you listened to Able Noise, circa 2024, and felt like eviscerating yourself?
Why no? Is it tasty and chock full of aleatoric detritus? Are there tempo changes? Dizzying repetitions rendering one nauseated?
You nauseous?
I mean nautical?
Another flash. The smell of tar presses down on them. They’re unable to take full breaths. They spasm.
A disembodied voice thunders:
Ok, cut! That’s a wrap.
What I’m Reading:
December 9, 2025
America woke up today with a new global label — one normally slapped on countries with collapsing institutions, criminalized dissent, and governments that treat journalists like contagions.
The United States has officially been downgraded from “narrowed” civic space to “obstructed.”
Let that sink in.
Obstructed.
That’s the category where democracies go to die.
And here’s the part that should terrify everyone — this isn’t just an academic downgrade or a bunch of international policy nerds wagging their fingers. These civic ratings are the same tools used by governments, investors, international courts, and security alliances to figure out which countries are stable… and which ones are sliding into authoritarian rot.
For the first time in modern history, the United States is being treated as a country in structural democratic decline.
— Dean Blundell / “America Just Got Downgraded: ‘The United States Is No Longer a Functional Democracy’ — And Trump’s America Deserves Every Inch of It” / Substack
What if what I wanted to write what didn’t need to be written?
What is this strange atmosphere that has settled over me?
One of my holy ghosts has scrammed for a patch of stratocumulus, and I feel a tenth of a degree colder.
I’ve patched my pants and holes appear on my socks. I darn my socks and my amygdala grates itself and hides in the parmesan container in the cheese drawer. The cheese drawer wishes to paint vibrant watercolors depicting scenes from Alice In Wonderland, as Salvador Dalí did—it claims to have always aspired to high surrealism, and to have read André Breton’s oeuvre. Breton’s ghost invites one of my holy ghosts over to his cloud perch, and the ouroboros renews itself.
And I’ve yet to write what didn’t need to be read.
And a strange atmosphere is just descending.
And one of my holy ghosts remains still.
And I’m still warm.
What I’m Reading:
ORDINARILY, I DON’T THINK OF A PARTICULAR audience when I write. Posterity, perhaps. But not the reader or a reader or any real-world friend, no matter how close.
— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction
This is what I see as I screech this joyride. I take a photo because I prefer Icelandic volcanic fissures to insurrectionist presidents or atmospheric rivers with their attendant storm water floods.
I’ve copy and pasted manifold eons there and here to improve the deadbeat dad memories that flood back at inopportune moments.
Once I migrate the last 14 moonlights I remember, the visitations will commence—mostly in Spanish. I’ll hit the “return” key multiple times and achieve cursory appreciation from vignette to mutation. Then hit “archive.”
That’s it!
Jingle for sedatives at your own risk.
Fill every winter solstice with short affirmations about the shortest day of the year.
Mark the shortest day with long monologues full of lengthy obloquies and interminable microfictions.
In this way mark the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning, and the middle of the muddle.
(This meaningless and meandering short point of meretriciousness … meh!)
What I’m Reading:
I try not to dispense imperatives. All my advice contradicts itself.
— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction
Why do I care so much if time and space disappear when the world has come undone? Will there be borders and countries again in the future? Today, here, right now, the days don’t matter. Or the months. They disappear like sand between my fingers, without a trace.
— Agustina Bazterrica / The Unworthy
There is no such thing as new pain, only the same pain recycled a hundred ways.
— Mai Der Vang / “Beast You Are Who Calls to the Beast I Am” / Primordial
Mocking a woman for doing her job isn’t honesty. It isn’t candor. It isn’t toughness. It’s smallness.
It’s the behavior of a man who cannot face a question without trying to diminish the person asking it. And when grown adults laugh at that, it says less about her and far more about what we as a country are becoming . . . Democracy depends on people willing to ask uncomfortable questions. But calling a woman “piggy” isn’t holding the press accountable. It’s the oldest trick in the autocrat’s handbook: Humiliate the critic so you don’t have to answer the criticism.
What troubles me most isn’t just the insult itself. It’s the applause for it – the way some cheer cruelty if it comes wrapped in their team’s colors. The way grown men laugh at a woman being demeaned.
The way people confuse bullying with strength.
Leadership requires restraint. It requires self-discipline, respect and the ability to face scrutiny without collapsing into name-calling . . . When the president of the United States talks like this, it gives the country permission to talk like this. It corrodes our civic life. It teaches our kids that mockery is a substitute for argument. It encourages the belief that the way to win is to shame someone into silence.
— Ray Watford / “The worst part of Trump’s ‘piggy’ comment wasn’t the insult” / USA Today
The nostalgia that permeates so much of today’s right and no small part of today’s left is no accident. We have lost the faith in the future that once powered our optimism. We fight instead over what we have, or what we had.
— Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson / Abundance
In the 1930s, the best of the Americas converged. Now, the worst, despite efforts by good people on both sides of the border to hold off the eclipse. If the Conquest inaugurated the “slow creation of humanity,” we, America, América, seem to be living through its dismantling.
— Greg Grandin / America, América: A New History of the New World
“Our whole generation is crazy . . . “
— Maureen F. McHugh / “Special Economics” / After the Apocalypse
What I’m Listening To:
Yes, I can tell That you can’t be what you pretend The caterpillar hood won’t cover the head of you Know you should be home in bed
Gustatory. Gestation. Genuflection. Generative. Gainsay. Can you guess, which, if any, of the terms above doubles as a po’ boy, a grinder, and a nuclear submarine? If you answered: “Birds on ice,” you win nothing but my heart. I’ve come to the point where points are pointless. Where well-thought out thesis statements are too hegemonic, where writing the well-constructed story is too formulaic, and where proper pacing, narrative arc, and “stakes”—stakes! for goodness sakes—stakes! Who talks that way about art? What are the stakes? What’s at stake for this character? When did art become a parimutuel endeavor? This has all become painting by numbers. Who is best at coloring inside the lines. Why is this ok? Why does this make sense? Why the rush to the normative-homogeneous? Why does everything a human do become subsumed to the capital imperative? Where’s the profit to be made? How do we monetize this? How do we get the most eyes on our ads? Let’s use this work of art as a conduit for our festooning advertising around it. Please. Stop.
What I’m Reading:
Yes, I want free shit too, but see, my feet hurt too bad for looting.
thee istsfor manity reader 