A post about a poster posting. At the end, they discover they are...

A. a bot
B. a Stepstool & Necktie advertisement
C. not a writer
D. all of the above

Night Moves, by the wildly creative Stephanie Barber, repurposes comments from a Youtube page for Bob Seger's song "Night Moves," and I read the book fascinated. Of course there is basic survival truth to the Internet commonplace "don't ever read the comments" — I closed the comment option at Creekbed's beginning some fifteen years ago because I knew you weirdos, saboteurs, and bots. However, Barber's deeply strange text allows quieted consideration of the ubiquitous but practically invisible internet thicket: nostalgia, sentimentality, earnestness, pettiness, idiocy, privilege, illiteracies, and mental illness.

Night Moves is available here from the good folks at Publishing Genius who have many, many great books. And finally and forever, for all this goddamned and glorious media, you can't beat the book for active reflection.  

Several years back I scratched a little riff on Seger/Night Moves.

in the morning we were
under water—
cool, puffy, floating

". . . a curriculum that isn't designed to liberate you but to occupy you . . ."

—Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary

"...for Commerce without Slavery is unthinkable, whilst Slavery must ever include, as an essential Term, the Gallows,— Slavery without the Gallows being as hollow and Waste a Proceeding, as a Crusade without the Cross."

—Mason & Dixon

Remember that day the MYS Unreflective got sunk and we lost every last grinning maven in the Chillax Bros 12th Detach? Well, thanks—I was one. This is a ghost story. This is a war story.

What a bunch of shitty shitty shitty fucking assholes. It is difficult to figure out where one ends and the others begin, but these seemingly sudden advances in what are foundational wars on women, black and brown people, the poor, and nature itself are all deeply interconnected with the long, silent, successfully prosecuted war on education, which is the war on democratic agency. What a corporation of shitty shitty shitty fucking assholes.

We need to let these allied oligarchs and theocrats know we are not their empty vessels, their carriers, their help, their workforce, their consumers, their customers, their audience, their sub-humans.

Of course many folks are long in this fight out of fire, spirit, and mortal necessity, and the rest of us should follow by example because we—myself included—passively and silently, if not actively and shit-grinningly, reproduce the power the structures.

I read a new novel that I can not stop thinking about: The City of Folding Faces, written by Jayinee Basu, published by Lanternfish Press, is a wondrous, strange, and necessarily disturbing exploration of areas like consciousness, technology, advertising, communication, drugs, yearning, and love. Speculative and immediate, intellectual and achingly visceral, herein core human questions thrum. Mirroring the narrative's content and form I felt often like I was beyond my body, sensing vividly the constructedness and limitations of the phenomena we call self, what marketers and other power brokers covet as tastes and hopes and desires and fears. Basu's lyrical text both haunts and enthralls. This one is for poetic fiction travelers.

You may consider and order Jayinee Basu's The City of Folding Faces from the good folks at Lanternfish Press here.

You want to hold this one. What a wonderful book design:

please do not
tell me how
this thing ends

The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which one ought always to compose,—that, we fear, can seldom be ours. Dollars damn us...

—Melville [pronouns changed to get at something big]

"It may be they call her raggedy because power loathes the poor. And where loathing lives exploitation follows easily. Who cannot see the pain etched beneath her eyes? Only monsters. But even more we see in her a wisdom: hard, angular, idiosyncratic, and deeply funny. Not only knowledgeable and prepared but capable, spherical. It is these qualities power fears. Raggedy? Can you imagine? I prefer radical—Radical Ann. Although of course there's nothing radical about equity, human dignity."

—the baby, unable to sleep

One of my short stories was a finalist for Ruminate Magazine's 2019 William Van Dyke Short Story Prize. Many tantalizing near landings these late years. Here's to the ground. You.