- Olive never takes a bad photo. I fuck up the composition more often than not, but once I get the composition right she never takes a bad photo.
- Here, on that angry melancholia and bitter nostalgia you've been feeling: It is useless to berate the insufficiently woke. We are all sleep-walking, and all half-dreaming, even if we dream of being awake. We are all hastening toward the last syllable of recorded time. And the point of melancholic subjectivity is that we are already berating ourselves. Our experience of powerlessness in the face of loss, and isolation before gigantic, tectonic forces, has already become our mantra of self-hate. Adding reproach in the name of the future would only accentuate our resentment of future generations, and our desire to punish them.
- Tribalism: refresher essay.
- Basic Income and the Left.
- This is going to hurt.
- 335654344 / 455344334 / 355554443 yesterday at Seneca, pins the same. Once I lose my release point all's fucked, it only gets worse. Where the fuck are my eyes when I throw, what's the significance? I DON'T KNOW! that level of mechanical self-affectation when the more I concentrate on correct thoughts the worse the correlated actions become. Fine metaphors abound.
- Meeting Dr Z today at eleven for more. Seneca is in bloom, boom.
- UPDATE! 333533344 / 334344334 / 344435344, so 14 better than yesterday.
- UPDATE! since the 27 pins will never again be in this exact configuration I need AAACAAABA / ACCAACAAC / ACCCABABA
- Every idea I have is nostalgia.
- UPDATE! { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
- Reminder: Simic reviewed Tate's last book.
- I'm sensing a complete dose of pollard oncoming....
LETTER TO SOMEONE LIVING FIFTY YEARS FROM NOW
Matthew Olzmann
Most likely, you think we hated the elephant,
the golden toad, the thylacine and all variations
of whale harpooned or hacked into extinction.
It must seem like we sought to leave you nothing
but benzene, mercury, the stomachs
of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic.
You probably doubt that we were capable of joy,
but I assure you we were.
We still had the night sky back then,
and like our ancestors, we admired
its illuminated doodles
of scorpion outlines and upside-down ladles.
Absolutely, there were some forests left!
Absolutely, we still had some lakes!
I’m saying, it wasn’t all lead paint and sulfur dioxide.
There were bees back then, and they pollinated
a euphoria of flowers so we might
contemplate the great mysteries and finally ask,
“Hey guys, what’s transcendence?”
And then all the bees were dead.
