a list of hateful things

Yo. For one of my classes at the Nonfiction program in Iowa, I had to write a list of hateful things, in the style of 10th century Japanese ancient sensation Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book. She is counted as one of the first essayists, divulging all the courtly gossip on the ruling class, in a progressive form at the time, one we might want to associate as a strictly 21st century Internet phenomenon, the list.

One of my favorite items on Shonagon’s list of hateful things :: “Sometimes one greatly dislikes a person for no particular reason–and then that person goes and does something hateful.” Lol! Anyway, mine is below.

//// a list of hateful things ////

Lost keys

At dinner with a friend, she talks too loudly and interrupts your eavesdropping of a nearby table

On the night of a sportsball game that the entire city is all lit up and crazy over, in the din of black and gold hued excitement, you drop your cellphone into the Deadwood toilet, the screen blips vacant, you rush home to dry it in a bag of rice, noticing the depressed lull of living without technology for even an hour, and finding no rice, shove the phone into a box of quinoa, twelve hours later the screen is black, and you turn to subtitled Russian YouTube tutorials to aid in the DIY disassembly of the phone by twisting left-loosey with a kitchen knife on the little screws, but no cleansing waterfall pours out before you, the innards look oddly ship-shape and there is a spark of hope that the phone could turn back on, until you realize you cannot figure out how to put the parts and screws back together, thereby annulling any chance there might have been of it self-resurrecting with time

Namedroppers

The tail of a rat disappearing through a cracked wall

Supreme Court extending rights of personhood to corporations

The amount of hate speech Donald Trump is allowed to spew on the airwaves. And the many parties complicit with this—the advertisers, the sponsors, the hosts who have him on their shows, the viewers, every person who does not pull the plug out of the wall the moment he spits into a microphone

Going on a weeklong trip and forgetting to take out the garbage, fruitflies proliferating their species atop rotting bananas, the apartment vibrating with the pungent odor of entropy, feeling as if you are competing against the fruitflies as you spread jam on toast, assailed by diving wings

Deniers of climate change

The War on Drugs

The War on Fun

The War on Christmas

The War on Terrorism

The War on TV

A hateful thing we all share— the complete, gaping unknowing about what happens after we die

 

how should a person be

An excerpt from my favorite novel that I read this year, the wonderful Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? >>>>>

“She told me about her favorite painting: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. As we walked through the fine, slightly damp Paris air, she explained why she liked it. ‘From my own point of view, when I am struggling, I always imagine I am struggling with a devil. But when I saw that painting I realized–no, it’s an angel. Now I always try to remember, when I am struggling, that I am struggling with an angel.'”

[photos: If You Leave Showcase]

 

to have seen

Maggie Nelson on her obsession with the color blue, in the book Bluets:

“The half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene. That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it. To have seen such beautiful things. To find oneself placed in their midst.”

>>> pastoral <<<

I copy out mountains, rivers, clouds.
I take my pen from pocket. I note down
a bird in its rising
or a spider in its little silkworks.
Nothing else crosses my mind. I am air,
clear air, where the wheat is waving,
where a bird’s flight moves me, the uncertain
fall of a leaf, the globular
eye of a fish unmoving in the lake,
the statues sailing in the clouds,
the intricate variations of the rain.

Nothing else crosses my mind except
the transparency of summer. I sing only of the wind,
and history passes in its carriage,
collecting its shrouds and medals,
and passes, and all I feel is rivers.

-Pastoral, Pablo Neruda 1962

grandcanyonbaby

I went on a 21-day river trip through the Grand Canyon in August with some of my best friends, rowing 272 miles. Truly one of the best experiences of my life and I’m currently at work on an essay about the adventure. Here are some things I saw, taken via Kodak Funsaver:

summer of rivers and buses

More snaps from summer of whitewater raft guiding & bus dwelling in Buena Vista, CO  >>>>

notes from river life

i spent my fifth summer as a whitewater raft guide in buena vista, co. i lived in a school bus with two of my girlfriends. here’s a glimpse into river life, taken with a trusty Kodak Funsaver disposable camera >>>

the poet’s obligation

“To whoever is not listening to the sea

this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up

in house or office, factory or street or mine or dry prison cell,

to him I come, and without speaking or looking

I arrive and open the door of his prison,

and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,

a long rumble of thunder adds itself

to the weight of the planet and the foam,

the groaning rivers of the ocean rise…

I ceaselessly must listen to and keep

the sea’s lamenting in my consciousness,

I must feel the crash of the hard water

and gather it up in a perpetual cup

so that wherever those in prison may be,

wherever they suffer the sentence of autumn,

I may be present with an errant wave,

I may move in and out of windows,

and hearing me, eyes may lift themselves,

asking “How can I reach the sea?”

-Pablo Neruda // the poet’s obligation

>>> summer fever >>>

one more time

Bach lost his vision toward the end of his life and spent years in the darkness of the blind. The night before he died, Bach’s vision miraculously returned. His sons led him outside. He clutched their shirtsleeves. They tipped their faces back to look up at the stars. This is how Charles Baxter described it: “To his servant Bach, God granted a final glimpse of the heavens.” Our Baroque virtuoso passed into the next dimension before sunrise.

-a retelling from a story in Charles Baxter’s hella excellent story collection “There’s Something I Want You to Do”