cycads and ferns > Recent Status Updates

…they ask me whether I've heard about Joana's death…and then I go and accept their invitation. I momentarily gave way to the most shameful sentimentality, I thought, and the Auersbergers immediately took advantage of it; they took advantage of the suicide of our mutual friend Joana, I thought, to issue their invitation, which I at once accepted, though it would have been wiser to turn it down.

Depending on the copy in question, Schattenfroh can smell and taste like various different things. Earthy Ike wild boar, spicy-sweet like Teltow turnips, putric Ike overripe Jacktruit. Not a single page of the copies is printed. They are the raw material for hours of solemn palate ceremonies.
So, what is it I am to eat? I eat Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. Both take a long time to chew through.

“I take my students into garbage dumps and make them understand the civilization they live in. Consume or die. That's the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump….”

1954
Dearest M.: Here I am in Boston, on Marlborough Street, number 239. I am looking out on a snowstorm. It fell like a great armistice, bringing all simple struggles to an end.

Ms. Kennison yelled at us for talking, so we shut up. A seed sown. There was still the question of if they let girls in the Arson Club. I could imagine some bullshit misogynist nonsense governing this also. My aunt was always telling me-never accept any privileges that are for girls, because it is only half the coin.

…Mr. Beekman…was unhappy…I said, but why are you unhappy about me not being in school. He said because I need to get an education. I said that the whole thing was a farce. Did he believe that the American public was educated…That he is helping to educate the population of a democracy…so I can do a good job voting some years from now…At this point, he gave me a detention and made me sit down.

But if I know nothing, then I know only the blank paper…Father dictated Jesus, the Holy Spirit caused him to become script, the virgin parchment upon which the dictate is written came through the open window, where it fell onto fertile ground. To beget means to write and script takes place only by dictation....
I say it here and now and thus shall the woman read it in the book that is called Schattenfroh.

"You're very severe," said the chairman…Only a total stranger could ask such a question. Are there control agencies? There are only control agencies. Of course they aren't meant to find errors, in the vulgar sense of that term, since no errors occur, and even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error."

The voice asks me to come nearer so that it might leaf through me. I come closer to the throne and my father flips through me…As I have eaten the book, says my father's voice…thus should I open my mouth, then it shall sound out. I open my mouth and I become a pillar and my father writes his name upon me and places a seal upon my brow….

…how outsized the nation's financial folly was in the years leading up to the collapse, debt piling up till it ran to tens of billions, incredible figures for a small island economy…the voices of men…as they settled instead for fault-finding…our prophets deranged…seer and sinner at once while speaking some language from the edge of reason whose message would translate into plain words as
we're fucked

That's an escape plan, I say. In order to master all the papers, my father plans to escape from the alphabet. The individual lines are corridors, with which he undermines letters….I mean, these must be seismographic lines, recordings from a seismograph, they give my father the bullet points outlining a possible uprising against him. Lines give points? Mateo asks. Of course, I say.

…when they have guns...loaded and ready, when they have guns, stuck in their mouths...what, then, are the guns pointing towards?...what is their orientation?..toward what center, what figure, what concentration?..this is important to know... this is essential to know: what the guns shoved in their mouths are pointing towards...

"...the eleventh secretary put the pudding into his mouth with great pleasure... this was written on his paper: 'And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up....'"

Revelation 10:10,11
And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey….And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.

“And these words…shall be in thine heart…thou shalt teach them diligently…And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house…so that thy days and the days of thy children might be numerous within....”

Deuteronomy 11:19-21
And ye shall teach them your children...And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house…That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children....

“You know how there are some people out there, people who..."
Her mother didn't like where this was going.
Yeva tried again. "People who like both men and women."
Her mother closed her eyes. She was trying…to expand her mind to fit such people.
"I'm the opposite," Yeva said. "I like neither."
Her mother's eyes snapped open. "Neither what?"
"Men nor women."
Her mother threw her head back and laughed…

…the main Castle…a monotonous round building…and ending in a kind of terrace, whose battlements, uncertain, irregular, brittle, as if drawn by the anxious or careless hand of a child, zigzagged into the blue sky. It was as if some melancholy resident, who by rights ought to have kept himself locked up in the most out-of-the-way room in the house, had broken through….

Lenny accepted a “sizeable" advance in 2016…and began the work of repackaging her various columns into a single cohesive volume…an impassioned polemic detailing the imminent threat of "woke culture and anti-white sentiment."
"Problem is" Lenny reflects, "the book just didn't sell!" Apparently, the people who weren't embarrassed to place No Mo' Woke on their shelves didn't, by and large, actually have bookcases.

…it was for the sake of foreign objects, exceedingly ancient, that persons in the West coveted and might wish to buy. And when I asked why these objects were coveted, my father replied It is for the vanity of the coveters, and my mother said It is because they are hollow and have no histories of their own.

“The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breastfeeding and parental affection—obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse.”

The Wilkinsons, indignant and fearful, took her away to weep alone in her childhood bedroom; her inchoate cries of guilt, and her unthinkable pleas for divorce, however confused and piti-ful, had become too alarmingly public. They enrolled her for a time, she told me, in a well-appointed nursing home, to assure her calm, and to conceal their embarrassment, until the wayward husband should return.

"You need the leaders of both sides to keep the cold war going…when the tension and rivalry come to an end, that's when your worst nightmares begin…You will no longer be the main-what do I want to say?"
"I'm not sure."
"Point of reference. Because other forces will come rushing in…You need it to stay on top.”
"On top of what?"
"You don't know…the whole thing is geared to your dominance in the world?”

The bigot believes in details…So let me get to the teachings of my father…They were America, damn it, and Americans should come first…what had been offered them, what was their birthright…why, all that one had…scraped from the present, as if all one had been…something left uneaten on a soiled plate, and was thus swept into that pit that holds the forgetfulness and ingratitude of their country….

OUTSIDE, IN THE CORRIDORS and elevator lobbies, scores of people were standing about…These informal meetings…forums at which the residents could air their problems and prejudices. Most of their grievances…were now directed at the other tenants…The failure of the elevators was blamed on people from the upper and lower floors, not on the architects or the inefficient services designed into the block.

My work, said the second smoker, was much more reminiscent of another poet, whose name I'd never heard, who fled Franco and died in exile, a poet whose capacity to dwell among contradictions without any violent will to resolution formally modeled utopian possibility.

Floating in the centre of the pool was the drowned body of an Afghan hound…He was sure that he had drowned the Afghan, not because he disliked the dog…but to revenge himself on the upper storeys of the building…As he held its…thrashing body under the surface, in a strange way he had been struggling with the building itself.

At first I heard only so many Spanish words…after all, there was nothing particularly original about my original poems, comprised as they were of mistranslations intermixed with repurposed fragments from deleted e-mails. But as the poem went on I slowly began to recognize something like my voice…a ghostly presence behind the Spanish, and that presence was my own, or maybe it was my absence….

In Washington today, an announcement came from the Centers for Disease Control
….advertising, when consumed at levels of over eighty-thousand suggestion-units per day...a quantity that falls well within exposure rates common to most industrialized nations...has been found to be highly carcinogenic...

Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought…We said, What kind of garbage will that make? Safe, clean, neat, easily disposed of? Can the package be recycled…How does it measure up as waste, we asked. We asked whether it is responsible to eat a certain item if the package the item comes in will live a million years.

Douglas MacArthur requests twenty-six atomic bombs…The plan would be to bomb Manchuria so savagely that neither the Soviets nor the Chinese could send in troops to help North Korea…The request is denied…
Douglas MacArthur hates President Truman even more than he hated FDR during World War II. Truman fires him in April 1951.

Thus, on January 26, 1944…Himmler told 260 high-ranking army and navy officers of the "all but" completion of the Final Solution…we shall understand Himmer's project as another application of the Roman-solution-to-the-Carthage-question. Since the Nazis intended to occupy Jewish property, they didn't salt the soil.
I understand my students are opposed to the napalming of babies. What délicatesse!