The theme of this party's the industrial age
And you came in dressed like a trainwreck

She saw the film right before it came out,
And at first she thought Judas might go for the mouth

You can’t eat from spinning plates
Can’t lick clean the mess it makes

I don’t want to sound trite but you were perfect
The way you look could seriously make nature dysmorphic

She could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her feet. Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations? How much of it was owing to the spell of the perfect afternoon, the scent of the fading woods, the thought of the dullness she had fled from?

You wrote a letter to god, "just in case," you said, "I'm nothing if not a pragmatist."
"You needn't worry about us, we can look after ourselves, we have learned not to rely on you or anyone else."

Our addiction to social media is, at its core, a compulsion to write. Through our comments, updates, DMs, and searches, we are volunteers in a great "collective writing experiment." Those of us who don't peck out status updates on our keyboards are not exempt. We participate too, "behind our backs as it were" creating hidden (written) records of where we clicked, where we hovered, how far we scrolled, so that even reading, within the framework of the Twittering Machine, becomes a kind of writing.

In the years of watching everything I love dying, I told myself that after a while you stop loving men and learn to love your own loneliness. I have told myself this so long that it has become its own kind of unquestioned truth.

But life is too long to not ask questions.

Although history should not become a straitjacket, which overwhelms and binds, neither should it be forgotten. One must critique it, test it, confront it, and understand it in order to achieve a freedom that is more than license, to achieve true, adult agency.

Love stories influence our lives, the way we see the world, and putting emancipation, rather than possession or living together forever or a tragic end, at the center of a philosophy of love I think offers a positive dynamic. I’m very interested in depicting other representations of love.

There is no other food! If Wile E. will satisfy his desperate hunger, he must eat; to eat, he must catch the Road Runner; and he cannot catch the Road Runner. Just as the very armature of the world—biology, ecology, physics, logic, his own goddamn personality, everything—will warp and bend to ensure the failure of his next scheme, that same armature was bent from the very beginning to ensure that there will always, always be a next one.

The game was rigged from the start. Quitting it is just as impossible as winning. The stark, absolute order of Wile E. Coyote’s universe doesn’t have to do with preserving the Road Runner’s safety or punishing Wile E.’s effort, but actively and forcibly producing his humiliation. Not Wile E. Coyote cannot succeed, but Wile E. Coyote must fail.

You may have won a Pulitzer, but it sure as fuck wasn’t for scrambled eggs.

As time went on, I realized that the guiding principle I used in most of the interviews was the same: It was my conviction then, as it is now, that we all keep most of the same secrets.

The green future has to be a welcoming one, even a thrilling one. If people cannot see themselves in it, they will fight to stop it. If the cost of caring about climate is to forgo having a family, that cost will be too high. A climate movement that embraces sacrifice as its answer or even as its temperament might do more harm than good.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The trouble is that, despite decades of field trials, the machines just aren’t that good. States, of all varieties, keep feeding in people, but the results remain inconsistent at best. Sometimes it works, and model citizens are manufactured. Other times, the people who emerge are just traumatized versions of those who entered. In the very worst cases, the machines spew out embittered individuals who keep suspiciously glancing at critical national infrastructure.

I maintain that redemption is a lonely, internal process of “getting right with God,” of wrestling in the dark with the worst parts of oneself. It is suspect if performed, and the intimacy of the struggle makes it among the most fertile and timeless subjects for literature.

Happiness is stupid, and so is love. But here we are in it again anyway, at the end of the month that sucks the most, in the heart of Fool’s Spring, in the miracle that makes himbos of us all, when everything blooms green.

In this best of all possible worlds, everything is in a hell of a mess. Everything is topsy-turvy, upside-down. The hedonists are the most joyless people, the haters are full of life.

you are really as you are I become as I
really am alive and knowing vaguely what is
and what is important to me above the intrusions
of incident and accidental relationships
which have nothing to do with my life

The most effective way to remove a broadhead arrow embedded in a human body is to push it through. Attempting to pull it out will only further devastate the surrounding tissue. To begin healing, then, the violent act must be completed. This is the function of sacrifice. When the ritual victim is killed, the spread of violence stops because there is no one left to visit vengeance upon. You cannot spite a god, after all. The arrow, once removed, is stripped of its power. But we do not often shoot each other with arrows anymore, do we?

Isaiah had loved God and now his love was turned to pain.
Isaiah wanted a name for the pain, he called it sin.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lay down no one will die.

I would
attract every bullet
like a goddamned
black hole right now
if I knew they’d
be okay forever but
that’s not how it
works, not everyone
gets to be Jesus
even if you
want to.

Little her, who was her patron saint? Anger and hurt and gravy on toast notwithstanding. She wasn’t doing a good enough job. She thinks you’re selling out for fifteen an hour. She thinks you’re cursing your mother, and your mother’s mother, and your whole life before twenty-two. She’s ashamed you aren’t battle bled and chainmailed, no knightly deeds, only an unpaid lunch half hour.

This is something I have often thought about: the fact of knowing and not knowing, the sense of the body as self and as something altogether different; as you but also as something liable to attack you, to harbour things that mean you harm. It is frightening, to be in one sense wholly inextricable from your body and yet not know what’s happening inside it.

It’ll heal ugly, but most things do.
You can have it all, just not all at once.

This is just who I am now, a person who looks exactly like her late mother, despite far more exercise and a far healthier diet. Besides, I loved my mother, and I love seeing her again in every store window I pass.

The End Times have a way of turning out to have been golden ages all along.

An ideology is the most brutal on its deathbed. And conservative groups understand that in order to survive they have to control the future.

The faceless capital that rules all this wants to see things get bigger and watch numbers go up; the people that support it, on the other hand, mostly just want to go on using the things they enjoy. That fundamental disconnect only becomes an existential threat—that is, only gets to the point we're at now—when capital decides, out of spite or impatience or greed, that it is sick of it all and tries to see whether there isn't some way to do this without having to deal with all those people and their bullshit.

What makes art different from non-art under neoliberalism, then, is not just the elevation of this or that practice as art, but its pursuit of aesthetic excellence that builds the right kind of community of consumption.

He can’t tell the difference between himself and his character anymore. Maybe Augie’s gone, and it’s all just him. The lines have blurred too much, it’s too close to home. He’s surrounded by metaphors for his own suffering, craters, grim reaper aliens, a burned hand, a crashed car. Walls that are paper-thin, or non-existent.

Imagine you’re in love with a playwright, and he writes a play — before he even meets you — about how you’ll be unable to grieve or process his death, which hasn’t happened yet. And he asks you to star in it, and then he dies, and you still have to play that role.

“I feel like my heart is getting broken,” Jones says, “my own personal heart, every night.”

His is the kind of irreducible androgyny that upends gender without the use of any jargon—it’s God-driven wish-fulfillment. And quite literally. Prince loved God enough to fashion himself divine. While scrolling the endless scroll and considering this, I encounter a blunt and desanctified take—Jesus was the first pinup. I gasp. What possesses us to stare so hard at greatness we cannot replicate or contain, that we destroy it, violently? What gives us the right?

Photographs represented occasions once. You dressed for them as you might for church; they cost money; they recorded important moments; you faced front; you seldom smiled, or the film was exposed at that hour of the day when even a city's wooden sidewalks and dirt streets seem as empty and endless as a wilderness; or a woman in her best black would be stood against a white clapboard wall, the lines behind her already folding into one another at infinity, to make so negative a space you'd think she was the entrance of a cave; and though the younger men's faces seem beautifully stupid and naive sometimes, the sunken mouths and eyes of the older women wear their suffering the way clothes and furni ture show theirs, the skull behind the skin burning like a dim bulb.

But the cowboy, having instigated settlement, now blames everyone else. This makes him something of a masochist of history, forever reminded of how the West was really lost: by being won.

Goofus explains to Goofus that disobedience and misbehavior, so central to their identity, only have meaning in opposition to a contrasting ideology, and that all their actions feel hollow because there exists no counterexample, no opposite, no antithesis, whatever or whoever that would be. Goofus tells Goofus to shut up.

What is not to love about these new forms, so sleek and attractive on the outside, with the promise of aiding us in the fulfillment of the last remaining human right in our society: the right to be an entrepreneur?

Commodity fetishism describes the objective fact that in capitalism we don't generally relate to each other as humans asking each other to do things, but rather indirectly command each other through commodities. If I go to a restaurant, I don't beg the cook to make me a meal and the waiter to deliver it, nor do I imperiously threaten them with violence, nor do I cajole them into it. I just buy the meal. The meal itself then appears to command them to move, like a little god! And I in turn must similarly follow the commands of commodities in order to acquire the money to purchase such meals.

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

when you begin
to cough I won’t cover my face,
and if you vomit this time I will hold you:
everything’s going to be fine
I will whisper.
It won’t always be like this.
I am going to buy you a sandwich.

My scholarship disgusted me because knowledge is empty.
My emptiness disgusted me because I wanted to be whole.
My wholeness would have disgusted me because to be whole
is to be smug. Still, I tried to understand wholeness
as the inclusiveness of all activities: I walked out into the yard,
trying to vomit and drink milk simultaneously. I tried to sleep
while smoking a cigar. I have enough regrets to crack all the plumbing.
I’m whole only in that I’ve built my person from every thought I’ve ever loved.

My name means hell, bitch. I am hell, bitch. All the cold
you have yet to feel. Chaos like a motherfucker.
...
I deserve all the sun
I can get, and all the blue-gold sky I want around me.
It is February 7th, 1979 and my skin is more
copper than any sky will ever be.

I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life

In time the gates will open.
In time his heart will open.
Then the shadows will bleed
and the locks will break.

If you aren't completely confused and horrified, you aren't paying attention. Slavoj Zizek says that instead of making infinite, impossible demands on a corrupt, capitalist state, like, for universal health care, an end to the war in Iraq, a reasonable response to global warming...since their reaction is predictably: "Ah, thank you for your suggestion, yes, that would be nice, too bad it just can't happen!" Instead, he says, we ought to make limited, finite demands that can't be met with the same answer. He says something about Hugo Chavez in this regard, but I don't think I entirely get his point, and then the article ends. So I might be wrong, but here's what I think he means: Someone should kidnap George Bush once he's out of office and his security detail is smaller and cut off one finger each week until the glaciers come back.

Q: How will we know when the end of the world is over?
A: The buzzer will go off and it will be time to go back to work.

Brief pause. I'm walking backward into my own myth. I was trying to walk out.
I was trying to walk out.

It was real. I'd seen it. I'd seen it in reality. The mask of humanity fall from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone -- everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed.

The most important principle of sport in the modern capitalist era is not victory, but in fact scarcity—of college scholarships, race winnings, sponsorship money.

(Can you see it yet? I’m beating you to respectability’s
punch-line: in the heart of the empire, I dared to want ] [ )

She suggested that we could talk about things such as “exile, memory, transmission, borders,” but, please, without mentioning Palestine. I wondered how I could talk about exile without mentioning the material cause of this exile, which is a history of occupation. I wondered what “memory” consisted of in this context, if not survival in spite of a concerted, century-long campaign to erase all our histories. I wondered, also, if she imagined that it was great fun for me to talk about depressing subjects. Believe me, I would rather talk about anything else if I could. But I cannot.

Colonialism does not relent. Colonialism will not step back of its own accord, not even if you ask nicely. Decolonialism is a noble cause, but the path to achieve it is often ugly and tainted by violence. In the absence of any realistic alternative to achieve liberation, people are forced into carrying out unjustifiable acts. It’s a fundamental reality of the disparity of power. To demand that the oppressed always act in the purest of ways is to demand they remain forever in servitude.

We have this idea of relationships as somehow being progressive, but in fact, relationships are often as confusing at the end as they are at the beginning. We know people less the longer we know them. And just because we know them doesn’t mean we can make them see us the way we wish to be seen.

We need to learn the novel's world because every novel takes place in its own discrete universe. Every novel, accordingly, requires "world building" for the reader to be able to make sense of this universe—even a roman a clef. In this sense, reading fiction goes beyond asking oneself that cliche of fiction—"What does this character care about?"—because one also needs to know, "What does this world value?"

Maybe it's liberating, the notion that everything might have a secret of its own, that truths are just under the surface, waiting to be unveiled behind a curtain or unearthed in a story. Revelation may also be dangerous. Just look at the film's final scenes, where we find our star waving a gun from a church pulpit in full leather: a symbol of death on the stage of salvation. In the end, Anger, like nearly everyone involved, fell prey to the same trap: the desire for immortality itself spawns vulnerability; the need to be seen lays us bare to the broader spectacle beyond our control. It's an inescapable paradox, a sort of death, that to be animated in film is to be frozen forever in the image.

It hurts when nobody you know sees you but art does. Art insensible. Art created by an artist who does not know you but knows your secrets, and what have they done? They've told everyone.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.