Friday Links: Eat the Rich Edition
"However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism." - Claudia Rankine, 'Don't Let Me Be Lonely'
Some pretty bleak shit caught my eye this week, not gonna lie. Let’s use the healing power of art to cope, huh? Maybe a little piracy, too. Sack a city and sake some bloodlust this weekend, y’all:
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
I’m still working through John Barth’s The Last Voyage of Somebody The Sailor, because I am a slow reader. Because I am a easily distracted reader, I am also reading this:
Aimee Bender is my favorite author, which makes it criminal that I’m only just now getting to The Butterfly Lampshade. Chalk it up to parenting. 100-ish pages in, and it rules. One of the blurbs calls it a “Proustian reverie,” but I’ve never read Proust, so I’ll compare it favorably to Virginia Woolf if she’d been hanging out with Günter Grass. Long, flowing paragraphs of memory and meaning-infused objects and occurrences—with Bender’s usual skill at finding magic in quirky details. It’s thoughtful, it’s a delight, it’s Aimee Bender. It rules.
LINKS!
I do not understand how Tesla is allowed to just upload self-driving functionality to cars when it clearly does not work. Here’s Ken Klippenstein in The Intercept (
here on Substack) with the story of the eight-car pileup on the Bay Bridge. Multiple stories of injured toddlers, I’ve seen at least one story about someone using self-drive to get themselves home while drunk, we’ve clearly seen that nothing coming from an Elon Musk venture can be trusted in the slightest. The thing about streets is they connect us and everyone is always around them, and the thing about cars is that they’re two-ton death machines. If you own a Tesla, set it on fire somewhere.Guantánamo Bay can legally drink now. I do not understand how that place is still open. Maybe my first Obama disappointment was him not closing it in his first term. God, even the name alone is enough to make me furious at the entire Bush administration, the hawkish war cheerleaders with “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers, the insane anti-Muslim bigotry that simply became what being a good Patriot meant. Please read survivor Mansoor Adayfi’s piece in The Guardian.
It’s easy to see how climate change affects places like Miami or Indonesia. Unfortunately for a lot of people who want to pretend otherwise, climate change is here for us all. This piece from Siri Chilukuri, originally published in Borderless Magazine but I found it in Block Club Chicago, shows how heavier rains have led to increased flooding in Chicago.
Speaking of all the horrors George W. Bush and his evil friends unleashed on the world, my favorite protest song from that era is Kevin Devine’s “No Time Flat,” which explicitly compares the war in Iraq to having erectile dysfunction.
Awesome horror/speculative flash from Lincoln Michel,
here on Substack. You can almost call the twist, but it frankly doesn’t matter, one of the great joys of (some) flash fiction is going “ohshitohshitohshit hahahaha no WAY” after every third sentence and then cackling at the end. Which is what I did.Wanna learn how the pirate Cheng I Sao hilariously bullied the Pearl River Delta in the 1800s? Of course you do. Enjoy:
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
