then a loopy face behind a glass enclosure

My two standard desperate last ditch attempts to end a reading slump are Ishiguro and Murnane for novels and C.D. Wright and Ashbery for poetry and I am now 0 for 4, and as I put down *A Million Windows,* my very favorite Murnane novel, yesterday afternoon it dawned on me than not only can't I read novels and poetry any longer, I no longer want to read novels and poetry any longer, at least for now

I can't blame my eyes (my left eye above): true, they ache after ten minutes of reading, and, true, my left eye literally cannot read anything and won't be able to until its cataract is yoinked out later this summer, but I spend hours online for work and pleasure every day and my eyes ache then too. Need to get right eye's (below) cataract yoinked out too but not until Fall, but they are not why I not only can't read but actively don't want to read, and to be honest it doesn't bother me that it's not bothering me and *that* doesn't bother me at all either

Bots - American, Chinese, Singaporian, Japanese, South Korean - still pinging me by the tens of thousands of hits a day. I don't think it's surveillance directed at me, I said to a digibud relieved but slightly jealous he/she/they not getting the relentless scrubbing, I think it's AI filling its silos, and he/she/they said, it's you for if/when for giggles you're swooped up and shipped to El S.......r because of your grids. I said, grids what I do when I can't and don't want to read but for the first time, and not from fear of a concentration camp, I've wondered if I could stop making these grids if I wanted to (save my peace of mind) and if maybe not wanting to read is an issue that it isn't more an issue that goes beyond documenting the clusterfuck and my motherfucking painting. Music still works

NO FOOD HAS ENTERED GAZA IN FORTY-FOUR DAYS
⬆	"The word is “starvation”. Starvation. You media weasels"						⬆
⬆	Arab Complicity and the Normalization of Evil in Gaza						⬆
"Again, if the idea is that when someone in custody leaves the nation’s airspace there’s no way for a court to compel the state to return them—or exert any jurisdiction at all—then you’re simply saying whoever’s in power can fly people 100 miles offshore and push them out of helicopters into the sea"
"This Is How Democracies Die: One Man, One Cell, No Charges"
⬇	The Rise of End Times Fascism						⬇
“exit” – the principle that those with means have the right to walk away from the obligations of citizenship, especially taxes and burdensome regulation. Retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires, they dream of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies"
How Corporations Weaponize Hope to Sell Extinction
Seven Truths About Trump’s Tariffs
Trump’s in-the-know plan to demolish the US economy
"This. America, as I've said many times, has already lost. Once again for the back benches: China has the tech lead in 80% of areas, more industry than the US/Japan/SK combined, and as Alon notes, regularly completes mega-projects"
"The bedrock premise of American political culture is that the US can go anywhere on earth and kill as many people as we want and it's fundamentally illegitimate for anyone to fight back"
"America is exceptional in how it provides an endless supply of media amplification and status rewards for the people who ruined the entire world"
"We've seen this show twice before. It always ends the same way. He drops out, endorses an oligarch he claimed to oppose, and then supports their wars"
⬆	"some anti-genocide people unfurled a Free Palestine flag behind Bernie Sanders at his rally just now and police thugs arrested them as Bernie Sanders looked on and let it happen without saying a word. A minute earlier Sanders said "Israel has the right to defend itself" and repeated his lie about "not one more nickel to Netanyahu" when he opposes sanctions and an actual arms embargo and to this day refuses to recognize the genocide"						⬆
So, you want to be a dissident?
"Imagine the kind of sociopath that would help build an incendiary device, knowing full well it would be used to set fire to someone’s house"
Trump as the American Gorbachev
"hey remember when bush used the patriot act to expand executive power to dangerous fashy levels and then obama expanded those powers and then trump expanded those powers and then biden expanded those powers? probably nothing to worry about!"
The attack on international students
NIHILISITIC VIOLENT EXTREMISTS
"Kyle Langford, a 20-something Nick Fuentes acolyte, is running for governor of California on a platform of deporting all male undocumented immigrants and then giving all the females one year to marry a "Californian incel" to avoid deportation"
The Life and Death of the Modern University
"As someone who took a lot of hits (career hits, but also campaigns of death threats and SWATtings) over the years warning about rising fascism... It is both exhausting and infuriating to see all these pundits all of a sudden at the eleventh hour going "oopsie yeah he's a fascist lol my bad"
The case for letting the world burn
"A useful reaction for political elites who “didn’t see this coming” would be to reconsider how smart it was to be a condescending, dismissive prick to everyone who tried to tell you it was coming"
The time is ripe for member-driven organizations
Will the same Leonard Leo (who gave us 5 or 9 on SCOTUS) and his army of judges working diligently to dismantle every New Deal and Great Society achievement take down Trump over tariffs?
"Totally silent about every one of Tr*mp's depredations until the stock market and Harvard are affected. That's our Obama"
This mthrfckr signed American bombs given to Israel to drop on Gazan citizens
"I've said this a couple of times, but until news coverage of the trump administration makes clear "the doj and fbi will not prosecute republican crimes, or crimes by people they favor," journalists are lying to you"
Ethically Energised				Deterrence Theory
Becoming Ungovernable
"Nothing says “small government and free speech” like electrocuting dissent in a public forum"
Maggie		Ghosting		Motherfucking painting (with an alternative interpretation of the two above with a bonus third explaining)
Sandy Spring Friends School closing
⬆	I've friends who went to SSFS and my daughter's bestfriend went to SSFS				{ feuilleton }
The man who invented ultralight backpacking
I had no spasms of anger at this list until I saw Richard Powers at number five, the fuck, ahead of Pynchon and DeLillo?
Stray thoughts on the announcement of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Shadow Ticket
Pioneers of Computer Music

LIKE THE CIRCLES UNDER YOUR EYES

C.D. Wright

clouds jammed into the foreground     big toe in the suckhole

with all our know-how     all our equipment     you would think

we would be on guard     be smarter than water     less indifferent

than the critter at the corner     or the machine     that rolled over its head

so early in the season     so many dead things to build on

a broom goes before me     the dog refuses to budge

leaves winging down onto leaves     under such conditions

on american soil     longtime dealers in old things unemployed

shrink     teachers     pastry chefs     horn player with a monster sound

the stuff of legends     married cousins     then a loopy face

behind a glass enclosure     being driven away     sliding from sight

a man smokes listlessly on a bed     next to a mound

of swollen books     written in french     his shoes set out to dry

scent of last tenant     unwashed socks shut up in a box     crept out

onto the landing     of the photographer’s house     searched

9/11 by the authorities     sprayed that hateful date on the front

windows tall enough for a mast to pass under     my friend

didn’t lose much     by comparison     but still     the top floor

on top of which     mother murdered     husband deserted

who kept hens in the heart of town     where I used to hear birds

when I phoned     now bullhorn now chopper     someone

puts a plate in her hands     hours later     someone takes the plate

from her lap     and says damn if it isn’t overcast again     it’s time to get out

the candlesticks

time, rejection, discouragement, and the inevitable practicalities and detours (some of them fortuitous), as well as wasted energy, the slow seepage or sudden shift of interest, premature death, burdensome debt or better offers, usually cure the problem of overpopulation

Trump crowned himself king yesterday and everybody yawned



Another clusterfuck spew of duh: getting harder and harder coming up with any insight on the clusterfuck that's even a smidgen different than previous grievous insights on the clusterfuck, on the shitlords running the world who can conceive of no greater goal than complete and ultimate wealth extraction and your absolute adoration have decided that the maximum wealth achievable only by making everything shittier 

All shitlord psyop narratives are ordained, designed, and implemented with primary goal of increasing fear and crippling anxiety in the herd for its subordination and exploitation. Yesterday RFK Jr announced a war on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs, no hiding behind a medical veil from your misery and fear, you peasant and pagan. You must feel the weight and power of your gods and worship in fear of their awesome and vengeful omnipotence. This motherfucker, for instance, this one too





That's my right eye as an avenging killer drone, I daydream of photon-torpedoing shitlords on their yacht decks. Almost 18 hours after Trump crowned himself king there is still no mention of it on the front webpage of the Washington Post and New York Times, and my Shitter and BluePlace timelines have precious few posts bitching about Trump's announcement of our new feudal authoritarianism. We are so fucked

Michael Gira is 71 today. I'm stupid for Swans, stupid, one of only a few bands in permanent orbit for the three rotating spots in my abandoned Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game. Play it loud, fellowmofo peasant pagan

The Purge of the Deep State and the Road to Dictatorship
"But we need to lose the theory that these Dems are “spineless” and just don’t understand how to wage political war. We know they can be vicious because we’ve seen them execute that kind of operation against the left since Ralph Nader caught them sleeping in 2000. We have seen them do it maliciously during Senator Bernie Sanders’s two primary runs. We saw Black and brown women stamped as “Bernie Bros” with enough, yes, ruthless, repetition to make it stick. We’ve seen President Barack Obama with all his rhetorical powers hector young Black men, but not aim his electric cadence at Musk and his Palo Alto brownshirts. It’s not that they cannot—they will not. When it was Sanders or an individual who demanded even a modest change in policy on Gaza, they brought out the knives. When it’s Musk and his apartheid army of incels, they wield sporks. Yet, as we keep seeing, spork fighting is demoralizing"
➥	Psst, they work hand in glove with the GOP for their mutual shitlord bosses, and Democrats' *Job One* is to protect the shitlords' left flank, sorry for the duh, I'm just seeing people suggesting Democrats aren't doing their job. They are						⇧
Wokeness Is Not to Blame for Trump
➥	"This rare cross-ideological alignment has created an opening for the Trump-Musk-Vance team, which, thanks to the Democratic pullback from “woke-ism,” faces scant opposition as it busily dynamites a civil-rights infrastructure built painstakingly over generations"						⇧
➥	"Democrats scheduled social media posts are so funny, always completely random, unrelated to what else is going on. Makes it seem like they are truly unaware of what's happening. It's 2025 and they're waiting to get the morning paper from a newsie on the corner on their way into the office"						⇧
Not 13 flags, not 15 flags, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children" 14 flags
H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, and the Perils of Forgetting
"In this extreme version of disaster capitalism, horror creates opportunity not only for the expansion of the United States but for the ruling family’s property development business"
The top criminal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office in Washington quit today, citing pressure by the Trump administration to open what she viewed as an improper criminal probe of a federal contract
"Israeli forces strapped explosives around the neck of an elderly Palestinian who used a walking stick and forced him to inspect areas used by Hamas before killing him and his wife"
⇧	"Soldiers put an explosive cord around the man's neck and forced him to scout buildings for eight hours. After his release, another division shot him dead						⇧
Forever War for Profit: The United States, Israel/Palestine, and the Global Corporate Security Economy
The Dangerous Game US Jewry is Playing with America's White Supremacists
"Zionist Shots Zionists - Both Blame Arabs"
America is a full blown kleptocracy
There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
"i feel like this is evidence for my view that people experience trump through a strong form of ironic detachment. they literally do not perceive him as real"
⇧	Forgive me, I need to screaminly reiterate that these shitord-released crackers and christers ARE DOING EXACTLY WHAT THEY SAID THEY WERE GOING TO DO AND HAVE BEEN SAYING THEY ARE GOING TO DO SINCE ALWAYS						⇩
➥	Yes, shitlords implement disaster capitalism and disaster nationalism to extract max profit BFFS many of them genuinely believe this is true and see themselves as noble warriors fighting a holy war, BELIEVE THEM WHEN THEY TELL YOU WHO THEY ARE!						⇩
➥	"The West is obviously superior. We had a pagan religion infiltrate our universities and our society, and that religion basically said that everything good about America and everything that has actually worked… is bad.”						⇩
"Here's my prediction from 2008: "The days of a rational American empire are drawing to a close. We'll be forced to discard either the empire part, or the rational part. And based on 10,000 years of human history, I'm guessing it's the rational part that will go."
Trump's stab at Napoleonicity
"Billionaire finds it strange that people can't afford kids in a world where artificial scarcity intentionally withholds food, water, housing, healthcare, and everything else in a ploy to extract indentured servitude out of us all"
We might have to "shut down the country"
"Trump’s tariffs will escalate exploitation and desperation of US workers. That’s the point"
Conservatism and the Decline of the West
This is not a test				Which of course puts this song in my head and on repeat
"I’m deriving a certain grim amusement from the unnatural intellectual acts that right wing law professors with an eye to the main chance are currently performing, in the face of the most corrupt and most public quid pro quo in the history of the American presidency"
"I would read an intellectual history about how a body of thought that provided the ideological foundations for regicide got reduced to the means by which opinion columnists tut-tut activists for shutting down events"
The making of emergencies					Unhinged
"JD Vance Called Me a 'Dummy' for Pointing Out His Administration's Hypocrisy on Free Speech. I Guess the Truth Hurts"			We Are All Porn Actors
States and the Coming Scam-Apocalypse
Wrestling, cannabis, bitcoin and stocks
Inside Project 2025				"The usual dance of “moderate” Republicans complaining about everything they just voted for when it affects them. Rinse, repeat"
If You Only Watch One Thing Today, Please Watch This
"In the span of a day, Trump's "immigration czar" called for a criminal investigation of a member of Congress for informing immigrants of their rights, while Trump's co-president called for the imprisonment of journalists for basic video editing"
Libertarianism is a form of white supremacy
"Liberals hate socialists for the same reason socialists hate liberals: because socialists are the thing liberals pretend to be. Socialists stand for truth, justice, peace and equality while liberals only pretend to stand for these things, and they both know it. Liberals know their favorite political party supports war, militarism, oligarchy and inequality and is rife with power-serving corruption, and socialists know it too, so they can critique these dynamics in ways that have the unpleasant sting of truth"
How Biden set the stage for GOP budget cuts
"I want to thank Nancy Pelosi for her devoted work in keeping Henry Cuellar in office. If the Democratic Party did not support him, you might end up with a guy who always votes with Donald Trump, and that would be awful'
Today in I Hate Motherfucking Democrats	☞	"You passionately supported the premiere murderer of the overwhelming majority of these journalists: Israel. It’s astonishing you would have the audacity to tweet this given your personal role in facilitating Israel’s killing spree unleashed again our colleagues"
Two 66 year old Democratic senators announce they will not run for reelection in the 2026 midterms and it's not because the Democratic Party is renouncing its gerontocracy
Delaware Decides Delaware Law Has No Value
➥	Today's monologue: you do realize, yes? that smart shitlords recognize total catastrophic social breakdown hours, not minutes, ahead, and are working their three private jets and four luxury yachts and six Micronesian islands and two luxury bomb shelters to boom NOW!						⇩
I agree that the size of Juan Soto's contract is morally wicked but I don't think that's what these dopes meant in this headline
Reminder: xymphora			Profiles in polroonery
Maggie's		Avedon Carol's occasional links
The Eternal Mysteries of Red
Loose leash		Song and sadness			{ feuilleton }
Where did all the fiction in fiction go?
The Biggest Little Press in the World
Richard Dawson, his music as important to me at this moment in my life as any musician at any point of my life

A PLAGUE OF POETS

C.D. Wright

A question posed to Flannery O'Connor, as to whether writing programs stifled writers, drew the famous, tart rejoinder that in her opinion they didn't stifle nearly enough.

Even if, as it is often said, there are too many of us—poets, that is—that the field is too crowded (as opposed to too many hedge-fund managers or too many pharmaceutical lobbyists or too many fundamentalists), time, rejection, discouragement, and the inevitable practicalities and detours (some of them fortuitous), as well as wasted energy, the slow seepage or sudden shift of interest, premature death, burdensome debt or better offers, usually cure the problem of overpopulation. In other words, there are plenty of natural predators.

time, rejection, discouragement, and the inevitable practicalities and detours (some of them fortuitous), as well as wasted energy, the slow seepage or sudden shift of interest, premature death, burdensome debt or better offers, usually cure the problem of overpopulation

Saw a youtube of a CNN screamfest last night, a four-on-one shitlib beatdown of a crackerbarker, when crackerbarker said Harris need be on live microphone more if Harris wants to win the crackerbarker was not wrong regardless the heckling shitlib cawing. I completely and comprehensively understand why people despise motherfucking professional shitlibs

Here's the guy many motherfucking professional zionist shitlibs are still angry motherfucking zionist Kamala Harris didn't name vpotus signing American bombs about to be shipped to Israel to be dropped indiscriminately on Palestinian and Lebanese women and children

If I was offered the next twenty-five years of my life in good if gently declining physical and mental health, disc golfing, hiking, finally taking up gardening then peaceful death in sleep at ninety, in a community of like-minded, isolated but not hermitage, cut-off from anything and everything clusterfuck, an undiscovered Micronesian island a three hour tour away, would I?





Today in Rhetorical Questions, that old gag. Above's two months old and now two months drier so not the breathing, seething Aoxomoxoa it was when wet, aren't we all, everything I make starts dying the second it's born, relentlessly, drip-by-drippingly, inevitably. Yes, we were stupid not to be hopeless from the start, denial no longer an option. Fleabus be almost done now too, months if not weeks, fine metaphors abound

 

The accumulation of unsolvable problems
Overlapping crises: "solutions" are now mutually reinforcing problems
The Decline of the U.S. Empire: What Will Happen Next?
The Pain of Travelling While Palestinian
"This video demonstrates the physical manifestation of the difference between Jews and Zionists. If you’re conflating the two, you’re parroting Zionist propaganda"
A plan to liquidate northern Gaza is gaining steam
Israel Launches Massive Bombing Campaign in Lebanon as 'US Weapons Continue to Flow'
The War About Palestine Has Reached Its Next Stage
Lebanon on the Brink of War: Imperialism is to Blame
Consequences of the Israeli Pager Explosions Attack
"What the attorney general of Michigan says below never happened. It’s entirely intended to mislead and confuse people. A lot of reporters and Democrats I speak to don’t appreciate the consequences of mainstream Democrats flagrantly lying. A profound threat to a just society"
Your death will serve as its own justification
Where are these headlines in Western media?
Is culture dying?				➡	"Deculturation is what happens when Culture, which is bigger than you, is replaced with a system of revisable cultural codes
Ohio Is Funding the Construction of Private Religious Schools
What the New Right Wants
Power lines			➡	"The chief irony is this: the same bourgeois virtues that have helped Democrats to dominate the technology sector and the education system, and to make new inroads into the security state, have become liabilities in mass political combat"
The single most repugnant political figure of my lifetime
The Everyday Resistance of Slacking Off at Work
Genocide Gentry				➡	"Behind closed doors, these same universities are hosting executives and board members of the companies manufacturing the weapons used in these attacks as board members, trustees, and fellows.”
Staten Island’s politics of resentment
The Great Driving Right Show
Supreme Court Lawyers Will Say Anything to Keep the Justices Happy
Maggie's		Avedon Carol's occasional links
Rest in Power, Fredric Jameson
What do Metaphors do: Gamoneda vs Tranströmer
Bronk, for those of you who do					{ feuilleton }
New Cure album?			Olga Tokarczuk interview

A PLAGUE OF POETS

C.D. Wright

A question posed to Flannery O'Connor, as to whether writing programs stifled writers, drew the famous, tart rejoinder that in her opinion they didn't stifle nearly enough.

Even if, as it is often said, there are too many of us—poets, that is—that the field is too crowded (as opposed to too many hedge-fund managers or too many pharmaceutical lobbyists or too many fundamentalists), time, rejection, discouragement, and the inevitable practicalities and detours (some of them fortuitous), as well as wasted energy, the slow seepage or sudden shift of interest, premature death, burdensome debt or better offers, usually cure the problem of overpopulation. In other words, there are plenty of natural predators.