My four moods.
Lost some followers after not posting for two years.
thenotes reblogged
Anonymous asked:
it is extremely disappointing to see that you support clinton. i'm sorry, but it is. how can you write whole essays and shit about institutional racism and not see how hypocritical you're being by supporting her. you're too smart to pretend people are somehow being disingenuous or whatever about her and what she's doing. and you're too smart to pretend i'm just some pro-trump loony or that pro-trump people are the only ones who feel this way. deflect if you want but you know it's true.
Ok, ok.
I said this:
and then you said what you said. And inasmuch as a tweet means anything, now I’m saying this:
Hillary is guilty of being,
- a white woman who, like all white people, was born blind and raised deaf to her complicity in America’s titanic system of domestic racism;
- an ambitious person who, like all ambitious people, is fundamentally indifferent to those who have not chosen to enter the arena of combat with her;
- a politician who, like all of them, says whatever is momentarily popular and maintains the most perfect silence on what everyone knows to be true;
- and a Clinton who, like all Clintons, believes in nothing and is therefore capable of saying and doing whatever the moment requires.
Now, I would argue this makes her barely more than a human person to begin with but, in addition to these qualities, she is also running for president. And a president is,
- a three-dimensional hologram projected by bond traders, the military-industrial complex, the Constitution, the collective fears of white people older than 45, and, to the smallest possible degree, the idealism of the Declaration of Independence;
- a golem summoned from the silt of international trade and this trade’s requirement that violence be restricted to economically unimportant branches of the human family;
- a ghost who patrols the planet Earth, who maintains its status quo with prophecies of material wealth or else by spooky threats of ejection from the global order & exposure to the wolves that wait beyond its firelight.
This is what anybody who wants to become president is going to be. This fact is the ultimate tragedy of power, ambition, and civic virtue in America. No matter how idealistic you are, and Barack Obama was pretty idealistic as far as politicians go, if you become the President of the United States you’re gonna spend years being crushed in the most exacting mill of souls ever devised.
This is why ambitious people are pathetic and why presidents are pitiable above everyone else. It’s why power is a curse and how those who wield power are punished in exact proportion to their desire for it.
So it oughta be clear that I don’t have any great respect for Hillary in particular or for the presidency in general; but, because I’m a human being who needs the planet Earth in order to live, I have to pay a certain amount of attention to who wants the job.
And I also want revenge.
I want the evil cocklords in the Republican party to pay. I want every last one of them to feel the political norms they’ve betrayed return as glowing brands that burn both cheeks of their ass. I want Mitch McConnell to spend a long and pointless life screaming himself hoarse at a Supreme Court stacked nine deep with black, pussyhaving, pussyloving justices. I want Paul Ryan to realize that Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy’ was an endless rope of sand, and that his attempt to attain power by climbing it was one big, life-long jerk-off. I want Reince Priebus to feel the hook go through his cheek and then its line drag him down to the eternal abyss of shame, disgrace and oblivion as it follows the sinking corpse of Donald Trump. I want Roger Ailes to see a woman in the presidency.
But in the end, I hate Hillary for what she’s going to do as much as I hate myself for knowing she needs to do it. This is because, in the end, the concentration of carbon dioxide as measured in parts per million is more important than whether Hillary is woke, whether she gratifies my desire to punish, or whether she makes your skin crawl when she speaks. She is precisely the person who can successfully perform the revolting calculus of international power politics. And this is what has to be done if we’re going to hold the global temperature anomaly to one and a half degrees Celsius.
And make no mistake: she is going to kill people to do this. Whether this means protecting the Saudis as they wage their criminal war against Yemeni civilians so their insane royal family does not obstruct a post-petroleum world-order. Whether this means fomenting a bloody coup against Filipino psychopath-in-chief Rodrigo Duterte to keep him from becoming China’s boy in the South China Sea, hence preventing him from smashing the precarious balance of peace American hegemony has maintained on the Pacific rim. Or whether it’s any of the hundred thousand other horrible things the United States will have to do to orchestrate a relatively peaceful transition from fossil fuels to whatever follows them. Because, and you should be under no illusions as to this point, global peace is presently maintained by the imminent threat of death from above as delivered by the U.S. Air Force. And preventing the worst excesses of climate change from killing millions of people as it also wipes away much of human civilization will require a certain level of global peace. Because if you think the Syrian refugee crisis was bad remember that it is the result of a single, smallish country disintegrating because agriculture was no longer possible there. Now imagine that everything south of the Himalayas has become unfarmable. Imagine the instability, war and genocide that a billion refugees would trigger.
Humanity will be relying for its survival on the most delicate of all the threads by which global politics is suspended: the absence of war. We have a global order capable of producing this, and Hillary is the person capable of pouring a great deal of innocent blood on the altar of its maintenance. Our existence on this planet is too tenuous, and the requirements for fixing climate change much too stringent to wait around for a global order that better pleases our sensibilities.
Regretfully yours,
Today is the day Marty McFly goes to the future!
thenotes reblogged
dat boi is more iconic than the beatles
it’s… not that important
youdied
i like this meme now
B-side on one of the bonus 45s that came with the excellent new Flowers LP (Everybody’s Dying to Meet You) and it’s hard to take it off the turntable.
Me IRL.
There is a woman whose daughter is in possession of the most wonderful pair of tits known to man. We cannot look at it from the father’s perspective, for he is dead, and if he were not, he would have killed the daughter before her yielding and miraculous globes could ripen. The dowdiest sweaters the mother buys do nothing to dampen their bounty. Boys line up on the sidewalk at dawn for a view of them wrapped in a blue shower towel. Truthfully the mother is as proud of the tits as if she had sculpted them from living clay. At times they exude the gravity of small planets; at others they are playful and high-spirited, coquettish, droll.
It is with considerable ambivalence that we hereby announce the reopening of Muir Woods National Monument to the public this coming spring. Once again, this marvelous, ancient range of coastal redwoods and giant sequoias will welcome arboreal enthusiasts from around the globe. However, these visitors will now enjoy significant enhancements to the area, developed specifically according to the suggestions of previous guests.
The most immediate of these costly renovations is a second, larger gift shop situated just beyond the perimeter of the site. Tourists in a hurry or disinclined to part with seven dollars on the matter of admission can now enjoy the convenience of purchasing a souvenir on the very edge of our parking lot. It may go without saying that this new facility is sure to alleviate some of the congestion within the inner, original gift shop.
Despite the strident legal efforts of the Bureau for the Protection of Conspicuous Consumption, we have been granted the right to disable all mobile devices upon park entry with a harmless electromagnetic pulse. This is not an attempt to preserve an atmosphere of tech-less tranquillity, for the record: If you cannot resist the urge to “selfie,” use one of our designated tinted kiosks, where mirrors, lip gloss, and blowouts are provided for an additional fee.
Madeline and I wrote this eco-horror for you. Read the rest at McSweeney’s.
Anonymous asked:
Just saw that you posted James Levy on your blog. Have you heard the album that he made with Allison Pierce (from The Pierces)? It is probably one of my favorite albums ever.
I haven’t! Will check it out.
thenotes reblogged
dirtandleather-deactivated20171
Anonymous asked:
Which of your brothers books would you recommend
Hahaha! What a cool message.Well there are only two (so far) that are published so I’d say either!! Ivyland is a novel and True False is a collection of short stories so it depends on what you’re going for.
Note to self: promote on sister’s blog more often.
Miles Klee, pantsless, lay sprawled on his bed, his dogs making little effort to distinguish his body from mattress, while his wife slaved over a hot meal of leftovers to the tune of what he described as “trashy hip-hop.” Some fifteen hundred miles away I sat, variously on the toilet, bed, office chair, and the backseat of a car that my next door neighbor left out on his curb some five years ago. Except for the toilet, I could say I was wearing pants the whole time.
It was probably around the time I reclaimed my neighbor’s trash as room décor that I started following Miles Klee’s blog “Hate The Future.” I was jealous. Still am. No one, including myself, would have blamed Klee if he had done what so many people get to do, and turned his blog into a book. Instead, in 2012, he published the novel Ivyland. A 2013 Tournament of Books selection, it depicted a slight future, or perhaps an alternate present of the eponymous and fantastical New Jersey suburb. His newest book True False visits similar dystopian territory, but is much more than that. The collection is not about a place or time, but the uncomfortable dichotomy of fact and fiction, intimacy and enmity, real and fake, true and false.
The opening of a really fun interview I did for Full Stop.
In a universe of overused adjectives, there’s one you rarely hear: 'spellbinding.' Perhaps that’s because very little holds our rapt attention as if by some cold magic. The best Steven Millhauser stories, as fans of his many collections know, do exactly this. They cast a spell from which there is no release. But the sorcery chooses certain victims. I was thrown when my brother confessed he found 2008’s Dangerous Laughter a puzzling antique, its narratives at once too fanciful and inscrutable. An explanation for this divisive quality derives from a fellow fan, who suggested to me that Millhauser writes about being overly sensitive to the world. I couldn’t agree with her more, especially as his latest collection, Voices in the Night, reinforces her theory. 'The Wife and the Thief' unfurls with a slow Gothic dread worthy of Edgar Allan Poe himself, generated by nothing more strange than suburban paranoia: a woman finds herself sleepless next to her peacefully slumbering husband in bed and imagining (or not imagining) a cat burglar prowling about their home. But which condition does she really desire – being correct and therefore threatened, or delusional and therefore mad? The chill of the story is how she tries to reconcile both outcomes into a single, ungraspable reality.
From “Unsaid, Unknown, Unreal,” a review of Steven Millhauser’s latest for Review 31.
So I found you because I follow your sister and then I saw your ask button and thought, "Um, yes please." Also, your ask makes me think of the mechanical giant. Not because of the acid part, just the zoo in the snow part.
The apartment listing, spare and direct, stood apart from the exclamation points that forested her vision. She knew not to say to the broker that she was new to the city, no matter how the facets of the woman’s necklace shone and tempted. One bedroom, terrible kitchen, renovated bath and sunken living, gorgeous compromise all in all. Here's climate control, the broker said, and here’s a walk-in closet. There’s your fire escape. That’s a man.
Follow the finger and yes: a man, beardedly complacent, reading a slim tatty novel in bed. She laughed; he winked. She remembered her guide was a tenant, not broker, and ditching the lease in its final months—the man incidental, a decoration. He may as well have been a cat. She signed the densely printed forms in an office that afternoon, having nearly read them but losing to boredom and deeming the rent the lone detail worth checking.
On the first of the month, four likewise balding men, arguing in Arabic and laughing, carried boxes and furniture out of storage across the river. A graffitied truck rumbled to her new address, where they admired the handsome building before starting to ferry stuff inside. She stayed on the sidewalk, returning emails, micro-duty of the job she’d vowed to ignore for the morning, having taken a personal day. The balding brothers came back downstairs, laughing harder than ever.
Your husband, one said when she gave a questioning look.
A very humorous man, said another.
She trooped upstairs and pushed the front door more ajar and saw him, his beard a bit fuller and redder. Shirtless, lying flat on her couch, eating a quart of mint ice cream with a rubber spatula. It wasn’t going well. His chest was the stickiest thing she’d seen.
What are you doing, she yelled.
What? he said. I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious.
From “What to Say and How to Say It,” another new story up at Hobart.
New story with Madeline Gobbo in Wigleaf today.