THE HOMELESSNESS DIARIES
Conversations with a Denver cab driver about the future of the U.S.
The sun moves into the blinds of my friends’ apartment’s windows, splitting into rays. It reminds me of my favorite cubist painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, by Marcel Duchamp.
The plants lean toward diffracted rays. A lime-green light seems to float into the room & linger as I zone out.
Everyone’s chasing a rush. That rush.
I imagine I have to be at a place for a thing to artificially inject urgency into my departure.
I stayed at a friend’s apartment; they won’t let me sleep in the streets. Sometimes I do. …
FROM THE RACE & HIGHER ED DESK
If whiteness is always piratical & appropriative, what would it look like to face the oblivion of itself?
Whiteness is a sibylline poetics of insatiability. Think fork-tongued. Think slithering serpent, from Eden to the Jungle Book.
It urges coaxes all alterity—marked by difference—into its orbit. It devours.
It envisions & commits unthinkable acts knowingly &, with moralizing naivety, manipulates the former acts or inactions as narratives of historical &/ contemporary oppression, framing their overcoming of such personal trials & tribulations as the true site of violence.
Expect a register marked by overblown pathos or, alternatively, a solo of maximalist excess.
Cheerily, this is followed by torturous attempts to reckon with, absolve, or beg for some kind of mercy…
FROM THE OPINION PAGES
Why are we writing about how to write & not writing what utterly & wholly compels us?
There are days like yesterday, when “I found”— greenhorn that am I ever—a professor sharing elaborate resources and coursework about Wallace Stevens’ (the greatest American poet of the twentieth century) later work & its relationship (intellectual and philosophical, though I’m down for a queer reading of any text) to George Santayana, a philosopher and prominent intellectual of Stevens’ generation.
Professor G. we’ll call him posted a schedule of virtual meetings/readings—it’s basically a free course offered on Medium.com by an expert. These are the days I get carried away: Medium is a singularity amongst the crowd of aging platforms. Medium is…
FROM THE PAINTING DEPARTMENT
What happens when we de-value valuation? What happens when we abandon language itself & are left only with the materials of painting?
From the alley situated messily behind my brother’s house a dog barks & the sun sets, lighting the clouds. It’s cool, 75 degrees Fahrenheit.
The absence of cicadas strikes me as an audiophonic poverty. The state’s polymorphous in a personality disorder kind of way: it shifts various shapes & identities in order to affect, or manipulate outcomes. Colorado’s experiencing its late-capitalist gold rush. It’s like a Hollywood remake: this time, it will demonstrate a greater historical fidelity, an adjusted lens that incriminates systemic forces, that lets go of the hero. …
The Homelessness Diaries
What happens when we feel constructed out of loss & no desire to fill the voids of us?
Note: This essay draws explicitly from Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations & Simulacra (1984) & Symbolic Exchange & Death (1979).
If you’re reading this now, you know: you & I have entered into a contract whose expiration date is between now & four minutes from now.
In the next thirty seconds, the formal & organizational logic of this piece must turn into light source & pane of glass both. With thirty or so letters strewn into sequences that will compel you to continue on reading or, understandably, will fail to do so, & you’ll vanish without much thought or effort.
Titles are…
FROM THE DESK OF RACE, CULTURE, & POLITICS
What do we make of “multiracial” whiteness, of non-white participants in, & advocates for, Neo-fascist white supremacy?
An NYU professor, Christina Beltrán, published an essay in the Washington Post’s Opinion column. The essay is insightful & cuts a new edge, theoretically & practically, when attempting to understand the people who supported Trump & who actively participated in the 6 January 2021 capitol raid, which Beltrán refers to as “a politics of aggression, exclusion & domination.”
This essay responds to Steve QJ’s piece. In his essay he conflates Beltran’s cogent examination of the insurrection & proposal for a theoretical & discursive lens — “multi-racial whiteness” — through which one may understand that which seems to evade meaning.
FROM THE POETRY DEPARTMENT
A long poem with formal elements.
From the bowels of it—the pyramid—
Nothing. Of course, something, some ones,
But no specters forced to a gold pose hold,
No plaque by guard-rail frames rust’d;
crustacean forms hadn’t split spindle
Of chrysalis’s silk. Hadn’t bent bough down
To crack’d stalks fallow on ochre ground.
Without such designatory forms time holds
Ellipse, swings sounds in unrecord’d shapes;
Chokecherries marble blue rivulets
In snow with a forming crackle glaze.
It’s no closer to gesture a hydrologic card
Shaping yard, or what was called a garden.
Cubless, cubical segments levitate into state-
Hood. Robes wave, sway ruler’s taste
For subjecthood & its inverse, subjects
Of kingdom…
FROM THE POETRY DEPARTMENT
Carts. Hundreds of sleeves
inside of which lie
negatives, red clover honey, molasses—
Oscillate, like a saucy distal chem-
ical whose early shapes & slope lead
eyes to ions’ change over eons, a Beryl-
lium-plated alloy stability let loose—
inverse versions sugar subject No. 1,
remember the one It's all for sale.
response to calls whose out-
Word in-waves make, impossible, that in
Locked in & then a way out. Music molts
steel cable cinch’d in a chrysalis.
Across the street
The limousine mechanic deep in a rebuilt
trani—short-hand for transmis-
sion. A zine on coffin building
& Manganese blue bristling
khazin, cities lite up then…
